Getting Chummy With Carl Gottlieb

THE SUMMER MARKS the 50th anniversary of “Jaws,” the classic blockbuster partly inspired by the infamous 1916 Jersey Shore shark attacks. In recognition of the milestone, we sat down with Carl Gottlieb, the screenwriter who steered the script through a famously troubled production and helped deliver one of the most celebrated and iconic movies of all time.

Let’s begin with how you first came onboard, so to speak. In 1974, you were working as a story editor on “The Odd Couple” sitcom, and the novel “Jaws” had just been released. Once Steven Spielberg signed on to direct the film, how did you get involved?

Steven and I were friendly, and I had worked with him before, both as an actor and a writer. He sent me [an early draft of] the script and said, ‘Find a part in there for yourself’. I looked it over, and I thought Meadows was a decent part. I think I took one meeting at Universal casting, and they said, “yeah, sure”. So I got the part first, but by the time we got to the location [Martha’s Vineyard] and started filming, I had also begun work on a new draft.

Were you tempted to tell Spielberg you wanted to play Brody?

[Chuckles]. No, I knew my limitations. I never dreamt of asking for a bigger part.

When Spielberg first sent you the script, you told him that it was “almost there.” What exactly did you mean by that?

There was a script there, but it wasn’t great yet. I said, if we do our jobs right, audiences will feel about going in the ocean the same way they felt about taking a shower after ‘Psycho.’ And that turned out to be true. Even today, if somebody finds out that I had anything to do with ‘Jaws,’ the first thing they say is, ‘When I saw that movie, I didn’t go in the water for months!’ And I have to pretend that I’ve never heard that before.

The film’s three stars (Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss) weren’t cast until just a few weeks before production. You were the one who first approached Richard Dreyfuss, who originally hated the script. How did you convince an actor who hated the script to take a leading role in a production that was only three weeks away?

I basically had to say, ‘trust me.’ Ricky had been dismissive of the script because he said, ‘This is a movie I’d rather see than be in.’

I tracked him down in New York and I said, ‘Just come up to Boston and meet Steven and give him a fair shot.’ Once Dreyfuss actually sat down with Steven, they had a chemistry.

And when he walked into that first meeting, he was wearing pretty much the same thing he wore in the movie. He had the scruffy beard and the watch cap and the rimless glasses. Steven took one look at him and said, ‘Don’t change a thing!’

In your book “The Jaws Log,” you describe having big dinners at the end of production days, during which the entire cast and crew would have creative discussions while you were taking notes on a steno pad. Those conversations must have been incredible. Do you still have any of the notes from those dinners?

Yes. I anticipated that there would be an arbitration over the screen credit, so I saved my notes and every draft of the script. As it turned out, [producers] Zanuck and Brown gave me the credit anyway, and I shared the screenplay credit with [the original novelist] Peter Benchley, who had written the first draft.

It’s been reported that Benchley didn’t have much faith in Spielberg, at least in the beginning.

He had been dismissive of Steven at first; Steven was only about 27 at the time. But when [Benchley] came to the Vineyard and realized how hard we were working, and how we were only trying to do justice to the story, he came around. He eventually took a small part in the movie as a way to give it his blessing.

Let’s talk about the actual production. Many fans know the backstory by now; the shark was a mechanical nightmare that began malfunctioning as soon as it was immersed in saltwater. How much of that pressure fell on you to write around those production problems?

Well, essentially that was what I had signed up for. That was my job, to make it work somehow. It became a real exercise in practical filmmaking. And Spielberg had a preternatural ability to see things through a filmic eye, even back then. This was before ‘Close Encounters,’ before ‘Schindler’s List,’ long before the whole Spielberg oeuvre, but he already had that preternatural ability.

Can you recall the first time you heard the iconic John Williams score?

I heard it as it was being recorded and in post. I had been working closely with [editor] Verna Fields. She cut the movie in her garage and in her bedroom.

Can you describe the experience of seeing the film with an audience for the first time?

There was a paid preview, and Spielberg and the producers and I were kind of pacing and watching. And when the movie ended and the credits started, there was a beat of silence, and we wondered if [the audience] was going to applaud. But then of course, the applause was deafening. And then there was a rush for the bathrooms, because everybody had been holding it in for the last hour.

“Jaws” hit theaters in June 1975 and quickly broke box office records. How did the movie change your life?

Well, there’s a weird phenomenon in Hollywood. It’s almost like a superstition. Everybody connected with a hit acquires some of that patina of that movie’s success. And when you’re applying for a job on another show, whether you want to be a driver or a grip or a gaffer, and the production manager asks about your experience and you say ‘Well, I worked on Jaws,’ that production manager assumes that somehow you know something about making a blockbuster that nobody else knows. ‘Jaws’ was in every way an old-fashioned studio picture, but when it started breaking records, all of a sudden, I was seen as a better writer.

I imagine that you got recognized a lot. You were not only the screenwriter, but the sixth-billed actor in the film.

[Chuckles]. Not nearly as much as Roy Scheider.

Many people have called “Jaws” a perfect movie. But as you write in your book, “Once you know where the fluff is, it never fails to jump off the screen.” Do you still see the fluff in “Jaws?”

Oh sure. Every time they cut to the close-up of Brody typing the report. It was the prop man who printed up the stationary for that scene. It’s supposed to say ‘coroner’s’ office, but it actually says ‘corner’s office,’ and it always jumps off the screen at me.

Also, Ricky Dreyfuss could never pronounce “Carcharodon Carcharias” correctly, so he had to be looped (re-recorded) separately saying those two words, and Verna had to drop it in to make it sound normal. If you’re studying the film frame by frame, you can see that he’s not truly in sync.

Do you have a favorite moment, or a scene that you’re most proud of?

I particularly like the moment when Mrs. Kintner slaps Brody. I think the actress really pulls it off.

“Jaws 2” also has a lot of fans and was one of the biggest hits of 1978. How was that experience?

[The studio] originally offered me ‘Jaws 2’ at scale, which I thought was a little insulting, since I had been partly responsible for their biggest hit of all time. My agent said, ‘They’ll be back, and it will cost them.’

Sure enough, they started ‘Jaws 2’ without me. But once the dailies came in, they ended up canning the director and his wife who had written the script, because it was obvious that they were in over their heads. And the studio said, ‘Gottlieb, can you come on in and fix this?’ And my agent’s original prediction turned out to be correct. It cost them.

“Jaws” has become an annual tradition at the Jersey Shore, with screenings on the beach every summer. When’s the last time you saw the movie with a crowd?

Within the last year or so. I had a screening down in Jersey not long ago. At a lot of screenings, I tend to hang out in the lobby. But I usually sneak in the back door and stick around until Ben Gardner’s head appears. It’s a great movie to watch with an audience because the audience gets so fully invested. There’s no boredom, no coughing, no candy wrappers.

For a lot of us, it’s a movie that you can’t turn off—even if you’ve seen it a hundred times—if you happen to catch it while flipping channels. Does it have the same effect on you?

Oh sure. It’s the same as ‘The Godfather.’ If I come across ‘The Godfather,’ any hour, day or night, I say to myself, ‘I’ll just watch until Sonny gets shot on the Causeway.’ And an hour later...end credits. ‘Jaws’ is the same way; I think it still works.

Carl Gottlieb’s book “The Jaws Log” is available from Dey Street Books.

BY CHRISTOPHER BALDI