John Baxter - Steven Spielberg

In Schrader’s script for what would become Close Encounters , VanOwen bargains with the Air Force. He’ll keep quiet, providing they give him the money to keep investigating. They agree, and he spends his life searching, a counterpart of the protagonists in films which Schrader later directed or wrote: Yukio Mishima, Hank Williams, Patty Hearst, John Latour of Light Sleeper and, archetypally, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ , visionaries drawn to self-destruction as their only means of redemption. At the end of his life VanOwen finds the aliens and, as Schrader put it, is ‘taken off the planet, like Elijah. He had fought the good fight and he was transcended.’

But Spielberg wasn’t happy with this approach.

‘Steve took violent objection,’ Schrader says. ‘He wanted the lead character of this drama to be an ordinary guy, a Joe Blow.’

‘I refuse,’ Schrader said, ‘to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise.’

Spielberg said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’

After a series of increasingly recriminatory meetings, Schrader abandoned the project.

Throughout his discussions with Schrader, Spielberg had kept his options open on Jaws . He even came into the Zanuck/Brown office and handed out T-shirts printed with Doubleday’s inspired cover design of a phallic shark rising from an inky ocean towards a swimming girl. But in the long nights, he fretted that the narrative expired after the first hundred pages, and didn’t revive until the last hundred. Where was the drive for which he’d been praised in the reviews of Duel ?

‘I don’t want to make a film,’ he explained to his eventual star Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I want to make a movie .’

Increasingly he visualised Jaws in far simpler terms than Benchley, as ‘an experiment in terror… the behemoth against Everyman… There is nothing subtle about Jaws . There are underpinnings that are subtle, but what it’s about is pretty slam-bang.’ He told journalist Monte Stettin, ‘ Jaws isn’t a big movie. It’s a very small picture. It deals with one social issue [i.e.] There is no place in the world to stay unprotected. Which is what this film is all about.’

Benchley’s story had a journalistic simplicity. The town of Amity, an East Coast summer resort based on Martha’s Vineyard, is terrorised by a rogue Great White Shark which snaps up unwary bathers. The police chief, Brody, a newcomer from New York, bows to pressure from local businessmen to hush up the deaths, but when the shark begins taking children from the shallows and wrecking the boats sent out to hunt it, he finds his courage again and hunts down the fish. He’s helped by Hooper, a wealthy shark expert, and Quint, a local eccentric who shows them the brutal techniques necessary to kill the giant. In their final confrontation, Quint and Hooper are killed, but the shark spares Brody, sinking back into the depths with the body of Quint in its jaws.

Writing in the shadow of Watergate, Benchley drew the people of Amity as products of Nixonian moral blight. Quint is a ruthless environmental despoiler. (In case we miss this, he baits a hook with the body of an unborn baby dolphin.) The town’s Chief Selectman has sold out to the Mafia in a land deal. Brody frets about losing his job, while his wife Ellen itches for sex and attention, which Hooper, the conceited Ivy League ichthyologist, provides. Spielberg disliked them all. ‘The only likeable character was the shark,’ he said, ‘who was a garbage-eating machine and ate all the trashy characters.’ In particular, the Spielberg of the broken home, the one man in the house of women, found Hooper distasteful. He saw him as emasculating and cuckolding the sheriff, and making the sheriff as vainglorious as he was. Benchley, already writing the screenplay, didn’t agree.

Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.

The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent. Almost in passing, the trade papers of 21 June 1973 announced that Jaws had a director.

Spielberg was unaware that he had enlisted for the duration. The bane of Zanuck and Brown’s days at Fox had been Darryl Zanuck’s veto, exercised in its most extreme form when he fired them. Going into business on their own, they had agreed privately never to reverse a firm decision. As Bob Woodward put it, ‘Loyalty was their vice.’ They even refused to give interviews separately. If one spoke to the press, the other was always present, even if only on a telephone line. Like an old married couple, they often finished one another’s sentences.

Meanwhile, the board of an ailing Columbia, Hollywood’s most underfunded and troubled studio, had installed, at the urging of the town’s most reclusive and Machiavellian power broker, Ray Stark, a new president, David Begelman. The ex-agent, one of Hollywood’s great gamblers, took over in the summer of 1973. Within three years, he would have turned Columbia’s loss into a huge profit. Begelman’s first act was to sign a number of old friends and clients to lucrative production deals. Michael and Julia Phillips were given a contract for two pictures, both written by Schrader. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ‘Watch the Skies’. With Jaws still lacking a script, Spielberg signed that deal too.

All summer, editing on Sugarland had continued. Satisfied with finishing only five days over its fifty-five-day schedule and near enough to the $2.5 million budget, Spielberg initially spoke warmly of the film. ‘I guess if I had Sugarland to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything,’ he said at the time. But within a few years he all but disowned it as mechanistic and heartless, unconcerned with its characters.

Universal had promised that, if he had a release print before 10 September, the film could open on the November Thanksgiving weekend. Spielberg delivered, but from the moment the studio viewed the rough cut, they decided they had a loser. Richard Zanuck drove down to Palm Springs and showed it to his parents. Darryl didn’t think much of it either. Nor did Goldie Hawn, who found it ‘too serious, too unrelenting and too uptight’.

It contrasted starkly with their period comedy thriller The Sting , which had worked out far better than Zanuck and Brown had dared hope. After ousting scriptwriter David Ward as director, they replaced him with the bankable George Roy Hill, who had a deal at Universal but also, more important, inspired confidence in Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who starred as the two swindlers of gang boss Robert Shaw. Hill realised the film brilliantly. With its Depression setting, lovingly recreated on the Universal backlot, its ragtime score skimmed from Scott Joplin and the inspired joint performance of Redford and Newman, it exuded the heady perfume of a hit.

Rather than damage The Sting’s Christmas release, Zanuck persuaded Spielberg to withhold Sugarland Express until the following April. As their Universal deal guaranteed control of advertising, he argued that this would give them time for some intelligent promotion. Spielberg reluctantly agreed.