There was also the matter of the mechanical shark who essayed the title role, which was never ready in time and caused all manner of production delays (being a primary reason the critter is so little seen in the finished film).ĭwarfing those things, however, was the time spent filming at sea, which, as subsequent ocean-set productions have proven (WATERWORLD, anyone?) is always a dicey proposition. Zanuck and David Brown before it was even published, and the novel’s monster success on the marketplace, which occurred while the movie was being filmed, was a major reason Universal’s overseers refrained from pulling the plug on JAWS’S increasingly chaotic production.Īmong the problems faced by Spielberg and his collaborators were hostile Martha’s Vinyard locals, whose antics included extortion, stealing equipment and putting bullets through the front door of the house rented by JAWS’S late co-star Robert Shaw.

Here we learn that the film rights to Benchley’s text were snapped up by producers Richard D. Gottlieb warns upfront that his memory of the events described isn’t entirely accurate, but his claims generally mesh with those of most every other account I’ve uncovered about the making of JAWS. Gottlieb was also present for the calamitous Martha’s Vinyard shoot, and provides an unflinching first-hand account of the experience.

It’s a relic from an era when movie making-of books contained real-and not always flattering-information about the films they chronicled, unlike the studio-vetted puff pieces we get nowadays.Ĭarl Gottlieb was the screenwriter of JAWS, although, as he freely acknowledges in these pages, he got the job only after several attempts at adapting Peter Benchley’s novel had been made by Benchley himself and playwright Howard Sackler. By CARL GOTTLIEB (Newmarket Press 1975/2001/05)įirst things first: THE JAWS LOG is not, as the back cover of the 2005 edition wrongfully claims, “the only book on how twenty-six year old Steven Spielberg transformed Peter Benchley’s number-one bestselling novel into the classic film it became” (see also THE MAKING OF THE MOVIE JAWS by Edith Blake), but it is the best, being an admirably frank, succinct and compulsively readable account pulled off with a great deal of self-effacing humor.

Carl gottlieb the jaws log