Steven Spielberg: The Making Of Jaws

Background Steven Spielberg, who was at the beginning of his career, directed jaws. On June 20th, 1975, Steven Spielberg near the beginning of his career released the soon-to-be summer blockbuster. (Choi and “The Making of Jaws”). Steven Spielberg started his career on a television drama entitled “Eyes”. Though because of his young age and inexperience, actors would not listen and he had little respect from the cast. This led Spielberg to quit the show (Gottfried 34-36). Short after this in 1971, the producers approached the young director to create a television movie from a short story called Duel, a story about a truck driver pursuing an innocent businessman. Spielberg, desperate to launch his career, filmed an entire two-and-a-half hours
The film was inspired by an actual event. In 1916, on the Jersey Shore, is the setting of the inspiration for Jaws. In 1916, swimming in the ocean was still a fairly new leisure activity. So, shark attacks did not happen. But, in that year five shark attacks happened over the course of two weeks. Peter Benchley heard the story and thought that it would make a good story. A publisher approached him and asked him to write Jaws. After the book was published, two producers from Universal Studios, David Brown and Richard Zanuck read it. The two agreed that Steven Spielberg should make a movie out of the book. When he was informed of this, Spielberg decided that he wanted to write his own script, but the two producers insisted that he contact Peter Benchley and the screenwriter Howard Sackler. Steven Spielberg may not have conceived the idea for Jaws by himself, but he created a groundbreaking classic (“The
Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, starred in the film, as three acquaintances pursuing a killer great white shark. Roy Scheider, an actor who needed a career-launching movie like Jaws, played “Officer Brody”. Scheider got his first role in The French Connection (“Scheider, Roy”). When Spielberg had just been assigned to Jaws, he ran into Scheider at a party and offered him the part. The part of “Matt Hooper”, the marine biologist, was played my Richard Dreyfuss. At first Dreyfuss was offered the job and he turned it down, because he disliked the script. Soon after, Dreyfuss saw the opening of his first movie; he believed that he was so bad that he had to get on another movie before any other directors saw it. Dreyfuss called Spielberg and got the job. Robert Shaw played “Quint”, an experienced sailor prepared to fight the shark. Shaw was not Spielberg’s first choice for the role; in fact, he was the third choice. Spielberg’s first choice, Lee Marvin was not interested in the film, and his second choice was not able to work on the film because of other commitments. The three actors ended up making the memorable group that is the center of Jaws (“The