Thirty-five years later, 'Jaws' still has bite

Everyone thought "Jaws" would sink like a fat dead fish. Filled with sickening certitude, cast, crew and a green, 27-year-old director named Steven Spielberg believed they had a fiasco on their hands. But they were so far along in the way-over-budget production that they couldn't turn back. Like a shark, they had to keep moving or the film, and a few careers, would die.

An impossible battery of problems plagued the making of "Jaws," which turns 35 this summer. This isn't news. In mid-1974, as the production choked and spluttered, the movie became a lightning rod for Hollywood gossip and finger-pointing schadenfreude, an example of a show out of control, with a 55-day shooting schedule distending to 159 days and the original $2.5 million budget mushrooming to a jaw(s)-dropping $10 million. It was the "Titanic" of its time, both in its sensationally publicized birthing pains and its global cultural triumph.

The mass of troubles, including, most excruciatingly, a cantankerous mechanical shark, elicits an amused wince in the neatly demystifying documentary "Jaws: The Inside Story," premiering at 8 p.m. Wednesday on cable's Bio. It goes in enough different directions and depth to make a solid companion piece to the excellent "Making of Jaws," a two-hour feature included on the 30th anniversary edition DVD of the film. Both are rewarding behind-the-scenes peeks for fans of the movie and to rank-and-file filmies.

From the start, "Jaws" was a dubious proposition. Based on Peter Benchley's best-selling phenom — the novel sold 20 million copies — independent producing team Richard Zanuck and David Brown, high off the success of 1973's "The Sting," hungered for another hit. Working with Universal, they bought the rights to the book with hopes of turning it around as a low-budget quickie before the book lost heat.

Spielberg was tapped to direct. He had a few movies to his credit — notably the made-for-TV thriller (and now-classic) "Duel" and the Texas-shot feature film "The Sugarland Express," with Goldie Hawn and Ben Johnson. He'd also directed episodes of television's "Night Gallery" and "Columbo."

Unimpressed by the idea, Spielberg recalls thinking "Jaws" would be "an exploitation movie, ‘Moby-Dick' without Melville, without the eloquence. I was just making a Roger Corman movie." He was finally persuaded by a trusted friend to direct "Jaws" instead of the Gene Hackman-Liza Minnelli comedy "Lucky Lady."

Casting was critical, and difficult. The studio wanted studly beach bum Jan-Michael Vincent to play marine biologist Matt Hooper, sticking to the image of the character described in Benchley's book. But Spielberg, after much coaxing, netted Richard Dreyfuss, a nerdier, more comic Hooper.

Roy Scheider, in the afterglow of "The French Connection," jumped at the role of beleaguered Amity Island police chief Martin Brody, whom he played with a panicked dignity not without levity. ("You're gonna need a bigger boat.")

And then there was obstreperous, hard-drinking Captain Quint, coarsened by life on the sea and as intractable as Ahab. Lee Marvin was approached, but he passed. Sterling Hayden, that surly roughneck, excused himself for tax reasons. The studio wanted — get this — Charlton Heston for Quint.

Spielberg groaned. Heston was a giant, Moses and Ben-Hur. "He was 12 cylinders, and I needed eight cylinders," Spielberg says in the documentary. "I thought it was not fair for the shark."

Zanuck and Brown finally chose Robert Shaw, a boozy British stage actor who had co-starred in "The Sting." Today, it's impossible to think of anyone else in the role; he has more bite than the shark.

Always the visionary, Spielberg demanded that they shoot on the open sea in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard, which doubled for the fictional Amity Island. No Hollywood production had ever filmed entirely in the middle of the ocean.

"I was hell-bent on shooting on the open sea, and if they insisted I shoot it in a tank, I was absolutely going to quit the movie," Spielberg says in Peter Biskind's chronicle of the New Hollywood, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls."