The Shark That Ate Hollywood: Jaws at 50
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Pushkin. It was a shark bigger than anything previously seen in these waters.

Far bigger. The great white is an apex predator, but this specimen was truly at the top of the food chain. Normally a shark reaching 14, 15 or 16 feet would be considered large. But snout to tail fin, this monster measured 25 feet, the length of a school bus.

Its body was thicker too, and its huge jaws were set with rows of jagged teeth, each one the size of a shot glass. Most great whites are content to feast on seals, small whales or other sharks, but this creature was billed as a true man-eater. This shark would swallow you whole. A little shaking, a little tenderising, and down you'd go.

Rumours of its existence had swirled around the island community of Martha's Vineyard since the early summer of 1974, but the creature only surfaced in the waters of Nantucket Sound as July gave way to August. When it breached, it did so in full view of several boatloads of horrified witnesses.

This bad fish was the stuff of nightmares, and many there that day had endured sleepless nights dreading this encounter. But the reality was so much worse than they'd feared. We were very scared, said one onlooker, Richard Zanuck. The shark came arching out of the water. Oh!

Only it rose tail first, as if mooning Zanuck and his crew. This animatronic prop would have been funny had so much money and so many reputations not been in serious jeopardy. Jesus Christ, said movie producer Zanuck. We're making a picture called Jaws and we don't have the fucking shark.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to another cautionary tale marking 50 years of Jaws. The fiasco of the flopping and flailing mechanical shark was many months in the future when Hollywood producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown sat down to a sumptuous lunch with the author of Jaws.

Peter Benchley, a jobbing journalist, had only recently completed his story of an Atlantic resort town terrorised by a giant shark devouring locals and vacationers alike. Being an unknown, Benchley's advance on the hardback had been modest. In fact, he'd been down to the last $600 in his checking account when a bidding war erupted over the paperback rights to his still unpublished novel,

This, in turn, excited the interest of the movie studios. At least one film company had sniffed at Jaws and concluded that it would be biting off more than it could chew. It seemed like an impossible tale to bring to the screen, requiring an absurd budget and pushing the bounds of any special effects then available. But Zanuck and Brown fell hook, line and sinker for Jaws.

They weren't any richer than the other movie execs bidding for the rights, but they were confident that they could woo Peter Benchley into signing with them. They'd just promised to make Jaws a better film than their rival suitors. But over lunch, things were off to a shaky start. The producers, aware that this would be a tricky film to handle, had hired a well-regarded, well-established director to take the helm.

This lunch was an opportunity to introduce him to Benchley. The director seemed enthusiastic enough and explained his big plans for filming The Whale. The Whale? Benchley winced. The director ploughed on, opining more about The Whale. It was on the third mention of a whale that Richard Zanuck exploded. For God's sake! This is a fucking shark! The director was duly fired.

For his replacement, Zanuck and Brown were excited about a precocious young talent they'd recently worked with. But did he have the maturity and authority to keep such a movie from careering off into disaster? The kid can bring visual excitement to it, said Zanuck, and will give him the support he needs. The Kid, with Steven Spielberg.

If we'd read Jaws twice, said Richard Zanuck, we might never have made the movie. To make a picture called Jaws, you definitely need a shark. The titular Great White is the heart of the story, and the power of the novel is in the realistic portrayal of its deadly attacks on humans. Reading the book, 27-year-old Steven Spielberg had been left terrified. I felt like I'd been attacked, he admitted,

In turn, he wanted audiences jumping out of their cinema seats as if they'd been hit with an electric cattle prod. And that wasn't going to happen with some scale model shark and actors on a soundstage in front of a blue screen. Jaws the movie would get laughed out of town. Spielberg insisted they film on the actual ocean and that the shark be as believably scary as possible.

He had no idea what he was demanding. An early suggestion from the producers was to use a real shark. Hollywood had a long history of hiring animal wranglers. They'd coaxed performances from Lassie the collie, Flipper the dolphin and Cheetah the chimpanzee.

The producers had innocently assumed they could get a shark trainer, said screenwriter Carl Gottlieb in his behind-the-scenes book The Jaws Log. With enough money, Gottlieb wrote, that trainer could get a great white to perform a few simple stunts on cue. No great white has ever been successfully held in captivity, and wild ones show scant interest in doing anything but swim,

and eat and make little sharks. And even had a wild fish been enticed into performing on cue, Steven Spielberg had no intention of getting into the water to film the creature. He was wise.

A second unit had been sent to Australia, where 15-foot great whites were common. They were to film underwater sequences with a diminutive actor standing in for one of the movie's principal stars. Less than five feet tall, this former jockey would make the real sharks look much bigger. The pint-sized stuntman was protected from harm by a steel cage. But as he prepared to enter it,

An excited Great White lunged for the boat and became tangled in the lines, lowering the cage into the water. The frenzied thrashing and rolling of the one-ton shark crushed the cage like a beer can. The actor then reportedly locked himself away in a cabin, refusing to come out until they were safely tied up at the dock.

The footage was great, but this was clearly no way to make a whole film. As Carl Gottlieb wryly observed, you couldn't work with a star who, when you shouted, action, instead heard, lunchtime. Guys, we can't shoot right now, hold on. Spielberg, a film buff since childhood, had the answer. Disney. Disney.

The giant squid in Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had been terrifyingly realistic. They'd just hire the guy who made that to create their giant mechanical shark. So 64-year-old Bob Matty was brought out of retirement and in a Californian shed he began work on three fake sharks.

$175,000 had been budgeted for each of these three automatons at a time when a luxury Cadillac Coupe de Ville could be yours for under $8,000. Jewels were slated for release in time for Christmas 1974, less than a year hence, so time was incredibly short.

The fake fish would need to be working and in the waters off Martha's Vineyard in May, so principal photography could wrap before pesky tourists flocked to the resort come July. As Spielberg began storyboarding his film, with a rearing, snapping shark in scene after scene, the mechanical creatures took shape.

Bob Matty was indeed a special effects wizard. His models could swim and flap their tails, their jaws would chomp and their eyes would roll. It was all quite magnificent. The film crew headed east to start work, confident that the shark team would follow close behind. Spielberg playfully nicknamed the sharks Bruce, after Bruce Raymer, one of his lawyers.

Each Bruce was a marvel and by far the most ambitious practical movie effects ever created. If only someone had tested them in seawater. Portionary Tales will return in a moment.

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Steven Spielberg and his exasperated crew soon had new nicknames for the malfunctioning model sharks. Jaws was replaced by Flaws. The special effects team were rechristened Special Defects. When things got really bad, Spielberg called his mechanical actors Great White Turds.

Each Bruce had performed well in freshwater tests, but on the rough ocean and in corrosive saltwater, everything began to fail. The lifelike neoprene shark skins soaked up water, adding vast weight to the model. This seawater also degraded the special paint coating, requiring new pigment to be flown out from California every day at great expense.

The sharks were bolted to intricate platforms attached to the seabed, which became gummed up with barnacles and kelp. The hydraulic hoses that made each Bruce waggle began to fray. And worst of all, the electric switches that controlled their complex movements shorted out. The first time a Bruce was towed out to sea and placed in the water, it sank immediately.

Bob Matty, like Victor Frankenstein, defended his monstrous creation from the angry film crew and promised things would soon improve. But it was clear Steven Spielberg's plans were in tatters. The script was filled with shark, he lamented. Shark here, shark there, shark everywhere.

The young director filmed what he could. Interior scenes, scenes on the docks, scenes on the beach, street scenes. All the time, hoping Bob Matty would perform a miracle. But deep down, fearing that his burgeoning directorial career was about to sink without trace.

The producers had budgeted for a tight 55-day location shoot, but when the last of those days rolled around, June 26th, not a single frame of mechanical shark footage had been captured. The opening scene of Jaws, both the book and film, is the savage death of lone swimmer Chrissie Watkins.

Chrissie, oblivious to the killer shark cruising nearby, takes a leisurely moonlight skinny dip. The awfulness of Chrissie's death, with the shark toying with her as she cries for help, sets the tenor for the rest of the story. Spielberg thought that having Bruce burst from the water, jaws agape, would have been a spectacular opening for the film. That just wasn't going to happen.

In Peter Benchley's novel, poor Chrissie never sees the beast that attacks her in the dark. And Spielberg followed suit. Using a specially designed waterproof box, he put his camera at water level to show Chrissie being tossed and mauled by an assailant just beneath the surface. The actor playing Chrissie was strapped into a harness with ropes leading to two teams of stagehands on the beach.

On cue, they'd whip her to and fro in the sea, though the instructions became confused and the woman was pulled both ways at once, dragging her under. It's this take, where the actor's terror is possibly real, that made the final film. But she wasn't the only person on set struggling to keep her head above water.

Spielberg's bosses back in Hollywood started to suggest that the film be shut down. The young director was losing confidence in the project too, fearing it would be a turkey. His demands for realism were coming back to haunt him. "'We were a bunch of upstarts who thought we could take on the ocean,' said Spielberg. "'And you can't take on the ocean.'

Filming one scene, again using cinematic sleight of hand to make up for the lack of a working Bruce, the boat was being tugged and towed to simulate an unseen shark that was ramming it. The motion proved too violent and the boat sprang a leak and began to list. She's going over, went up the cry as a rescue craft raced to save the actors.

This concern for the talent annoyed both the camera crew, who were about to lose a thousand feet of precious film to the sea, and the 70-year-old sound man, who held his $50,000 tape recorder over his head and bellowed, ''Fuck the actors, save the sound department.''

Such incidents didn't exactly endear Spielberg to his crew. They viewed him as a sort of Captain Bly, and mutiny was only ever a whisker away. They didn't have scurvy or anything, said Spielberg, explaining their anger, but I wouldn't let them go home. Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb thought the filmmakers were falling apart before his eyes.

Cold, bored, missing home and missing out on other work, he worried that mental exhaustion and alcoholism was on the horizon. Sensibly, a beer ban was introduced at sea. Shooting a movie on location is a laborious business, but on water, progress proved glacial.

Even without the misbehaving bruises, the tides dragged boats off their marks, unexpected storms brewed and actors fell overboard, causing more delay as dry costumes and fresh makeup were sent for. The script also called for a horizon clear of other craft, since when the film's hero set off to kill Jaws, they're supposed to be far from help of any kind.

But as the summer of 1974 progressed, Martha's Vineyard became its usual magnet for yachts and pleasure boaters. Each time a boat came into frame, the camera stopped and the crew moodily waited for it to pass. Every hour of filming at sea was costing $2,000 and back on land, the budget for food and accommodation was rocketing as the island's economy switched to summer pricing.

No one has ever taken a film a hundred days over schedule, fretted Spielberg. I'll never work again. Jaws should never have been made. It's a piece of shit. Actor Robert Shaw, himself an accomplished novelist, was no fan of Peter Benchley's story. The 48-year-old British star was a late addition to the cast, signing on just days before production started.

Despite his reservations about the source novel, the experienced Shakespearean reluctantly agreed to play Quint, a grizzled and fiery shark fisherman. Shaw was a masterful actor, but he had a flaw. I do tend to drink when totally bored, he admitted, and with the constant delays on set, Shaw got bored, totally bored.

A production assistant was charged with keeping the actor off the booze, but the second Spielberg's boat chugged out of the harbour, Shaw would nod his head towards the nearest bar. Let's go, kid. Another of Robert Shaw's predilections proved even more disruptive than his drunkenness.

Shaw developed a deep antipathy for one of his co-stars, and as they spent hour after hour at sea together, Shaw made his dislike for the man all too clear. He could be vicious, said Richard Dreyfuss, the young actor playing a cocky marine biologist to Shaw's weather-beaten seafarer. Shaw didn't appreciate Dreyfuss' approach to acting, nor his lack of stage credits.

He'd even whisper criticisms of his co-star's performance seconds before a scene, just as Spielberg was shouting, The older star began calling Dreyfus fat and sloppy and complained that Dreyfus never stopped talking. It got ugly, said Spielberg.

A particular low came when a scene required Dreyfus to be showered with sea spray. So Shaw, off camera, grabbed the fire hose supplying the water and directed it straight into his co-star's face. The cycle of humiliation was repeated day after day.

Shaw's frustration and boredom prompted him to drink, and the drink awakened in Shaw what Dreyfus described as an evil troll. Shaw's a perfect gentleman whenever he's sober, said an observer. All he needed was one drink, and then he turned into a son of a bitch.

Perhaps weary of attacking Dreyfus over his acting, Shaw began to set his co-star outlandish challenges, asking Dreyfus to perform press-ups and sit-ups to prove himself. Finally, Shaw proposed a wager. For $100, would Dreyfus climb to the top of a tall mast on their boat and jump off into the ocean? He had my number, said Dreyfus, who found himself unable to just ignore Shaw's bullying.

Jaws was now weeks behind schedule and millions over budget. The crew were rebelling, the locals were increasingly resentful of their presence, and Bruce, the mechanical shark, was still not working. Could things get any worse? Perhaps if one of the movie's lead actors took a high dive off a mast and into the brooding ocean, cautionary tales will be back.

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I don't care how much money he offers you, you're not jumping off the mast. Not in my movie. Steven Spielberg had finally intervened in the battle between his stars. Shaw's bet with Dreyfus was off. The director could stall the studio shutting him down over the malfunctioning sharks and the unreliable weather, but not if he let one of his stars drown on a dare.

This excitement over, the more normal rhythm of the location shoot resumed. Delay, delay, delay. And still no working roofs. Have that belt go out and pull the anchor up and reset it up there.

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this movie, sitting around for seven, eight hours, waiting for the sharp to work, said Spielberg. This all sounds infuriating. But maybe these delays made Jaws not worse, but better. Do you do your best work under a bit of time pressure, against a tight deadline, say?

If your answer is yes, then you're not alone. It's certainly not uncommon to hear people say that creativity is spurred on by a ticking clock. In April 1970, an explosion wrecked the oxygen tanks inside Apollo 13. Houston, we've had a problem.

The three astronauts inside were headed for the moon, but now had to hunker down in the small lunar module designed to hold just two. If the men were to survive the trip home, they'd need to improvise a system to remove deadly carbon dioxide from the air in their craft, using only the items available inside, from bits of cardboard to plastic bags.

Okay, that's two lithium hydroxide canisters and one roll of that special gray tape.

At mission control, engineers worked feverishly to bodge something together and compose a list of verbal instructions which would be clear enough for the cold, tired and oxygen-starved astronauts to follow. OK, remove the inner bag from the outer bag. Cut the inner bag along the heat seal along one side. The filter built in this way wasn't pretty, but it worked.

And the men were saved. A win then for creativity under pressure and evidence that deadlines focus the mind. Well, the Harvard Business Review wasn't convinced. A 2002 paper, Creativity Under the Gun, examined examples where indeed time pressure had produced impressive results, such as the Apollo 13 explosion. But the author's actual research findings were more surprising.

Teresa Amabile, Constance Noonan Hadley and Stephen Kramer collected 9,000 diary entries from 177 employees across seven US companies that asked those workers to note how time pressured they felt during the day, but also described something that stood out in their minds about each day.

In a sad indictment of the modern workplace, most of the diarists felt they were operating under time pressure nearly every day. While some workers felt burned out by this, others did relish it, writing that their teams were pulling together and making progress.

But when the Harvard Business Review team dug a little deeper, they found that far from being spurred on like NASA's Apollo 13 engineers, workers under the gun were usually less creative. Working in a hurry often means firefighting and multitasking, scheduling meetings, replying to emails, attending meetings, replying to more emails, leaving precious little time to focus on the primary work task at hand.

One comment that summed up most of the diaries was, the faster I run, the behinder I get. And the first thing to get jettisoned when time was tight seemed to be creativity. Just 5% of the thousands and thousands of diary entries written on busy days reported that any playful and creative work had been produced.

The Harvard Business Review authors argued that, of course, creativity was possible under a time crunch, but only in very specific circumstances. The Apollo 13 engineers were able to give the carbon dioxide problem their fullest attention. No multitasking for them. And the imminent deaths of the astronauts gave them more than enough motivation to see their task through.

But in most situations, the experts concluded that the cornerstones of creative work, exploration, idea generation and experimentation, just didn't happen when workers were scrambling against a deadline. Don't be fooled into thinking that time pressure will in itself spur creativity. The Harvard Business Review warned bosses, that's a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.

Jaws began as the ultimate tight-deadline movie. The producers wanted the film to wrap in just 55 days before high summer on Martha's Vineyard and ready for Christmas 1974, the traditional big release season, but also in time to benefit from the buzz around the novel. This was a mammoth task.

First, Spielberg had to turn Peter Benchley's sprawling book, with its endless side plots and incongruous sex scenes, into a workable script. Robert Shaw wasn't the only person to think that the novel was a piece of shit. Spielberg supposedly said the same, which got back to Peter Benchley. Spielberg knows flatly zero, retorted the novelist. He is B-movie literate.

The row blew over, but Spielberg then had to find someone other than Benchley to crank out a screenplay, storyboard the resulting script, cast the roles, set Bob Matty to work on his sharks, and establish a floating location shoot. All this in a matter of weeks. Talk about multitasking. ♪

Much as Peter Benchley was wrong to insult Spielberg's storytelling skills, the director himself admits that in all the hurry, he was in danger of making a fairly standard monster flick, one where the shark might be seen in the very first scene. But the constant delays gave him room to reconsider.

It was good fortune that the shark kept breaking, says Spielberg, because I had to be resourceful, figuring out how to create suspense and terror without seeing the shark itself. The script went through several iterations, but what made it to the screen was the version Spielberg hammered out at night in the house he shared with Carl Gottlieb on Martha's Vineyard.

This fits with another finding of the Harvard Business Review: Creativity comes with collaboration, but most especially when just two confederates work together. The paper argued that having a single focal point to bounce new ideas off might help people stay oriented toward the work. The other thing that Spielberg had spare time for, thanks to the delays, was working with his actors.

The director had found the characters in Benchley's novel too flat and unlikable, but he hit on a way to make them more appealing and relatable. He encouraged his cast to improvise. Shaw, Dreyfus and the rest would bellyache about sitting around waiting for the shark to work, but they also had time to really think about their performances.

One of the film's greatest lines, when Jaws surfaces right beside Robert Shaw's fishing vessel, the Orca, and he's told, You're going to need a bigger boat. was pure improvisation and never in the script. Likewise, a monologue delivered by Shaw...

In it, his character explains that his deep hatred for sharks stems from a grisly wartime experience being shipwrecked in waters infested with them. No distress signal had been sent. This speech had already passed through the hands of several script doctors, but Shaw edited the lines and took them to Spielberg and Gottlieb after dinner one evening. I think I have a version that will work, he told them.

It was a showstopper, said Richard Dreyfuss, whose character sits beside Shaw as he tells the grim tale of his shipmates getting eaten one by one. You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes like a doll's eye. When he comes at you, he doesn't seem to be living until he bites you. And those black eyes roll over white and then...

Ah, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screaming. The ocean turns red. In spite of all the pounding and hollering, they all come in and they rip you to pieces. Dreyfus and Shaw had been at loggerheads throughout production. Sitting together hour after hour in boredom had sparked a bitter conflict. But more canny observers saw some method to Shaw's mad baiting of his co-star.

I think it was absolutely planned, said one of the crew. Shaw knew the plot called for antagonism between his salty old mariner and the cocky upstart marine biologist. If Shaw could get Dreyfus to hate him in real life, then further acting wouldn't be required. The malfunctioning Bruce's just gave Shaw the time he needed for his plan to play out.

And, interestingly, Shaw's show-stopping monologue marks a pivot in the script. By showing his vulnerability and humanity, the fisherman wins over the marine biologist and a friendship blossoms in real life. Shaw's baiting of Dreyfus also stopped the second Spielberg called cut on the scene.

On August 18th, 1974, weeks and weeks behind schedule, Bob Mattis' Sharks began to work as planned. Filming wrapped on September 18th, though the director hadn't stuck around for the final shots. He'd caught wind of a crew plot to throw him in the water the second the camera stopped rolling. He wisely fled back to LA to avoid their disgruntlement.

The endless delays had taken their toll. Spielberg began having nightmares regularly for the next three months. There were still pick-ups to shoot, including a scene completed in the warm tranquility of an LA swimming pool, and editing. Jaws, now wildly over budget, would miss its lucrative Christmas release window. But the film was good. Excellent, even.

Test audiences loved it, and the critics were bowled over. "A problem-plagued film turned out beautifully," wrote Variety. The critics were especially impressed by Spielberg's restraint in not showing the shark for the first 82 minutes of the film, making the unseen beast all the more terrifying for its invisibility.

The lack of explicit carnage also had the added bonus of making Jaws a PG movie, meaning whole families could go see it and widening its box office potential. Summer was, until then, a dead zone for new releases, but Jaws upended that.

It turned a profit just two weeks after opening in June 1975, and by Labor Day it was the most successful motion picture in history. The age of the summer blockbuster had dawned, and Hollywood was transformed. And this runaway success of Jaws was in no small part down to the delays caused by Bob Matty and his mooning fish. MUSIC

The key sources for this episode were The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb and Joseph McBride's Steven Spielberg, A Biography. For a full list of sources, go to timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben-Madaf Hafri edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Munro, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Walsh.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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