Jaws at 30

Steven Spielberg and Roy Scheider Celebrate the Film at Guild Hall

By Dan Rattiner

Exactly thirty years ago, one of the greatest movies ever made had its world premiere here at the East Hampton Cinema. Today, movies have premieres here all the time. But JAWS was the first.

There was a lot of concern back then at Universal Studios about whether this town could handle such a premiere. The stars of the movie from around the world would come. Did we have a red carpet? And would, in life, this movie cause the same kind of panic that it did in the mythical summer resort tourist town that was featured in the film? People had died there. Arms and legs had washed ashore.

The reason the movie premiered here at that time was because it was based on a book that was about the Hamptons. Peter Benchley had visited here. In his book, JAWS, our towns were named. And all the action in the book took place in our towns.

Last Saturday, the evening consisted of a reception at the garden lawn alongside Guild Hall in East Hampton, a screening at the theatre in Guild Hall and then a question and answer session on stage in front of the blank screen, just a few hundred yards to the west of where it had premiered thirty years before. The Q and A featured two of the four main principals of this movie, both of whom had subsequently taken up residence here. Of the other two, one, Robert Shaw, had since died. The other, actor Richard Dreyfus, who had been here just three weeks ago as part of a documentary premiere, could have come but didn’t, apparently because he had other commitments.

That left actor Roy Scheider of Bridgehampton, and director Steven Spielberg of East Hampton. And after the movie, they sat onstage taking questions from interviewer David Koepp, a man who had been chosen by Spielberg and had worked with him as a screenwriter on many of his later films.

The film had originally been planned to follow the plot of the book and be set in the Hamptons, but upon investigation, it was found that the Hamptons were too busy a place, even then, to serve as a movie version of themselves. A lot had changed since the book had been written. And by 1975, the Hamptons was too connected up with the city. Having a killer shark twenty five feet long in your community and have it sustain its dining habits for an extended period while the local authorities keep a lid on this behavior to avoid having the tourists stay away would require a much more isolated location — an enclosed world. Martha’s Vineyard came to mind. So that’s where they shot it.

The premise, of course, was that killer sharks eat people. And they do. At the garden reception, I spoke for a while with Richard Garvey of Australia and his new American wife, Kim, who were at the reception through film studio connections.

“Yes, we’ve had a bit of a go with sharks in the past few years,” Garvey told me. “Four eaten in the last six years. But we get on with it. I know a woman who lost her son. And I have an uncle who dragged himself ashore with a ten-footer clamped around his ankle, flipping his tail on the sand. Some others beat him off. He survived.”

I spoke to Toni Ross of Nick and Toni’s at the reception. Andy Stein was there. I talked to Brenda and Roy Scheider. Steven Spielberg came alone. And everybody wanted to meet with him, including me. And so I took the opportunity to talk with him.

He said, most surprisingly, that he much preferred East Hampton to Los Angeles. And if it weren’t for his connection with Dreamworks, he wouldn’t even be there. He asked me if I knew about a huge new movie studio being built in Brooklyn, one that could allow him to do almost anything. I had nothing to offer him on that subject. But others told him it’s on the way.

Someone brought up the subject of the Holocaust and he talked about the camps he had visited, mostly in Poland. His Shoah Project is known worldwide. I had been at Buchenwald in the forest above the industrial town of Essen some years ago, one of the smaller camps in Germany, and I talked with him about that. Later, at the Q & A after they showed the movie, he was asked if he had one movie he has made that was his own personal favorite.

“They are all my babies,” he said, “but I think the one I am most pleased about is Schindler’s List. As for Jaws, I owe everything to it. It made my career. After Jaws I could make any movie I wanted.”

He was asked his favorite scene in Jaws. It was the same as practically everybody’s favorite scene. It’s when the three main characters, the police chief played by Scheider, the environmentalist played by Dreyfus, and the partly unhinged shark fisherman played by Shaw are sitting around a table on the fishing boat one night during one of the quiet times between terrifying shark encounters and they have had too much to drink. They are passing the time by comparing scars.

“Yeah?” says Dreyfus. “Well, what about this?” And he puts his leg on the table and shows a scar on his calf where a shark bit him ten years earlier. Shaw counters with a scar on his forehead. And so forth.

“There’s this one part of the scene,” Spielberg said, “which I love, where Scheider, standing off to one side, thinks to show them his appendix scar,” Spielberg said. “He pulls up his shirt to reveal it, but then thinks this wouldn’t count, thinks better of it and tucks his shirt back in his pants.”

The film, all on the stage agreed, was largely a horror film, but was even more largely a film about relationships — specifically the relationship between the three main characters.

“We had plenty of time to develop our relationships,” Scheider said, “because the damn mechanical shark kept breaking down. So we just sat around. We did that for months.”

“It was supposed to be a 45 day shoot,” Spielberg said, wistfully. “It turned out to take 156 days. So I guess we went over.”

This was very hard on Spielberg. He was only 26 years old when filming started, and it was his second film. The big shots in production in Hollywood kept pressing to replace him as director. He wouldn’t have blamed them what with all the delays. But the thought terrified him.

One of these days, someone told him during the shoot, they’re going to drop the other shoe.

“This was the first time I had heard that expression. I had to have it explained to me. But I still, today, sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with this nightmare. Post-dramatic stress. Big time.”

“I, on the other hand,” Scheider said, “hoped the making of the movie would go on forever. We had the beach, good food and wine, good friends, great times.” He turned to Spielberg. “Remember that buffet dinner at the hotel?” he grinned.

Spielberg and Scheider, going back and forth, gleefully described it as they remembered it.

The hotel was one of these huge wooden affairs with large dining rooms. They were on some long delay, caused by the shark crew’s inability to get some sort of part. They went in and there was this long buffet set out for them. A gift from the film studio. So they got the food and they sat down to eat.

“I’m sitting there at this long table,” Spielberg said, “and Shaw leans forward and puts his finger on a little tiny piece of food and just flicks it across the table at me. It goes splat, right on my shirt. So I flick a piece of food back at him.”

In a short time, food is being flicked all around the table. And then it escalates. They go from little specks to mashed potatoes. From mashed potatoes to chocolate mousse and from there to pieces of roast beef and asparagus. Finally there were chairs and pies involved, everybody covered in everything.

“And I remember the staff came into the dining room and they just stood there in a row by the swinging kitchen doors, grinning,” Scheider said.

“Remember all those debutantes?” Spielberg asked. Scheider didn’t. “In the next dining room there were all these debutantes in big white dresses about to have a coming out party, and this food fight started and this chaperone comes running over to them and starts screaming at the girls everybody out everybody out, like as if the place was on fire.”

“We finally ran out and all jumped into the pool,” Scheider said.

“All that food flotsam floating up and around,” Spielberg concluded.

One of the great miracles during all this waiting around was the development of the relationship between Shaw and Dreyfus.

“In the film, Shaw is always baiting Dreyfus,” Spielberg said. “And Dreyfus doesn’t back down. Shaw is this rough, tough Irishman fisherman. Dreyfus is this intellectual New York scientist half his age. And they were that way to each other in real life.”

“Shaw would say to nobody in particular, I don’t know why I am on this island. I should be in Sardi’s. He’d turn to Dreyfus. He’d say, You know what? You’re a coward. A COWARD? Dreyfus would ask. A coward. Let me see you climb that mast. And Dreyfus would take off his jacket and go over to it and the crew had to physically restrain him to keep him from trying to get up there.

“Another time, Dreyfus is walking along and he knows they are getting ready for a scene with Shaw, and he sees him sitting on a deck drinking. It’s 11 a.m. He says to Shaw — you in this scene? — and Shaw says yeah, and Dreyfus picks up his drink and throws it in the water. You don’t do that to a drinker. Again the crew had to run over to keep these two apart.”

Well, the movie got made. And it made everybody’s career. It is one of the greatest movies of all time, and often turns up on various people’s short list right behind Citizen Kane. It grossed, in today’s dollars, almost a billion dollars. And here it was, shown in East Hampton, having never been shown on the big screen between then and now except for one time at a film festival on the Vineyard.

And people who’d never seen it were scared half to death by it, just as the people were who saw it for the first time in 1976.

“How do you feel about seeing it again on the big screen?” somebody in the audience asked Spielberg. “Do you love it as much as we do?”

“Let me tell you,” Spielberg said, “I love this film, but also I’ve seen Jaws naked. And there are things in it I don’t want to share with you. So it’s entirely different for me than it is for you.”

The evening, which had begun with the garden reception at five thirty, ended now at ten thirty. And everybody stood up and gave both Scheider and Spielberg a standing ovation.

It was one of the greatest nights ever in the Hamptons, in my opinion.