"Would it be wrong to mention my sighting of Universal's Great White?" I asked. "I think it's unfair to reveal the illusion," Spielberg shot back. Real sharks had been used for 70% of the action footage, shot months before in Australia, just after Benchley's screen rights had been bought; a midget in a miniature cage had been lowered into the shark-infested Great Barrier Reef, thus proportionately doubling the size of the only available sharks. "But if people realize we're using a mechanical shark," worried Spielberg, "they may look at the live footage and think the real sharks are imitations." The jaws on the Great White's first victim, a young girl gone for a moonlight swim, will be mechanical ones.
Lorraine Gray, the wife of a Universal executive, is making her film debut playing the wife of the police chief Brody. "Who's got Jaws' starring roll?" I asked her. "The shark is the star," she sighed. Benchley's novel has been stripped of all its sex by the screenwriters, including Brody's wife's illicit affair with the young oceanographer Hooper. Her part now consists almost entirely of serving Brody his meals between shark hunts. "What can you tell me about the shark in the warehouse?" I asked. "Oh, I'm not supposed to talk about it," she laughed. And kept her promise.
Roy Scheider and I chatted across a picket fence in the sunshine. "No, the shark isn't the star," he objected. Scheider maintained that the film actually centered around two people who leave the city behind them (in the book, Brody's a native of tiny Amity, his wife a 15-year resident) looking for a new life not so fraught with tension and frustration, only to learn that they must still face-up to the town's finned terror and the townspeople's eagerness to save their own financial necks. "No," grinned Scheider, squinting in the sunshine, "the shark's not the star, he's just the antagonist. Brody's the protagonist. If the shark's the star of this film then we're in trouble."
"The shark is the real star of the film," Dick Zanuck, executive producer of Jaws, told me over lunch in Edgartown's Colonial Inn. A second-generation movie mogul (Darryl F. Zanuck's his father) Zanuck speaks in short, clipped cadences that impress you with their ring of finality. "Jaws is a monster movie," he explained. "But in the tradition of Frankenstein — a monster that meant no harm.
"A Great White Shark has a tiny brain; he's an eating machine, that's all. He doesn't set out to wreak terror, not consciously. And, like the villagers in Frankenstein, it's the Amity islanders who are truly evil — they're the real sharks. The audience should come away asking itself 'did the better man win?'" Zanuck compared the Great White Shark to an alien from outer space whose intrinsic nature would be different from ours, so that judgments of good and evil didn't apply.
What about the Theme From Jaws, I wondered? "Well, we haven't even thought about scoring it yet, but I've got the idea that whenever you're in the shark's habitat, underwater, the music should be serene. Even when he's eating."
Spielberg had told me that he was keeping open the possibility that the shark might not die from Quint's harpoons, as Benchley had written, but instead conveniently disappear. "Steve likes to fantasize," smiled Zanuck ruefully. "The shark will definitely die in the end."
