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They needed a lot more than just a bigger boat.They needed over double their initial production budget.They needed one of their trio of leading actors to not be so drunk all the time that he’d black out at work.And they needed their three robot sharks — “playing” the title character — to stop breaking down. The filming of “Jaws,” director Steven Spielberg’s horror classic that turns 50 on Friday, June 20, was plagued by issues on-set in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., during the spring and summer of 1974.Yes, the movie grossed $476 million globally and became one of the first blockbusters and a landmark in the horror genre.But it also very nearly didn’t work.“In many ways, launching ‘Jaws’ was a film production problem analogous to NASA trying to land men on the moon and bring them back,” wrote “Jaws” co-screenwriter and actor Carl Gottlieb in the book “The Jaws Log.” “It just had never been done.” When producers Richard D.
Zanuck and David Brown hired Spielberg to direct a film based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel “Jaws,” he was just 27 years old and professionally untested.His theatrical film debut, “The Sugarland Express,” hadn’t hit theaters yet. But not sold on the alternatives, they went with the young hotshot.
Zanuck and Brown budgeted the film at an estimated $3.5 million and wanted production to take 55 days.In the end, “Jaws” treaded water for over 150 days and cost $9 million.The biggest diva was the shark.The producers assumed, like with decades of Hollywood pictures, a real great white shark could be simply trained up to do what they needed, Gottlieb writes.
That, obviously, was not going to work — although a stuntman was harrowingly snapped at by the genuine article in the waters of Australia. So the team planned to build a 25-foot-long mechanical fish.And the only man they could enlist to do it was Bob Mattley, a designer of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Flash Gordon” and others wh...