fights, egos and resignations of a film that continues to be afraid

In the mid -19th century, a very young Steven Spielberg frequented The select group of directors Integrated by Brian de Palma, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola who was revolutionizing Hollywood from the inside, but unlike them he did not want to be the new Jean Luc-Godard.

While his friends combined the tradition of American popular genres with the avant -garde narratives of the “new European waves,” Spielberg bought The magazines described by the industrial and financial labyrinths of the cinema meccahe was increasingly interested in technical and logistics issues, and was very aware of what each premiere raised in the ticket offices.

Sailing nights were also studying the culture of the moment in the pages of the magazines Esquire, Playboy y Timeuntil in the fall of 1973 he could finally start working in Crazy evasion (The Sugarland Express), his first “professional” film after a very achieved debut on the TV with the tense challenge to death.

At the time of its premiere, Crazy evasion could still be seen as a very New Hollywood. In that story in which a very young Goldie Hawn helped her boyfriend escape from jail to be persecuted throughout the Texas State Police there was some of the Fou love of Breathless (Godard, 1960), despite the fact that history was crossed by a tenderness that even came to soften the usually implacable criticism Pauline Kaelfor whom Spielberg became a “born popular artist.”

The good reception of the film gave him the possibility of starting working on the project of Close meetings of the third type, A kind of science fiction story with aniñado aliens and a “Working Class Hero” as the protagonist.

But the producers imposed the always traumatized Paul Schrader as a screenwriter, who tried Transform that fantasy into a religious parable And, after a hard discussion with Spielberg, the project was filed.

At that same time, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown had bought the adaptation rights of a Peter Benchley novel with which they planned to make “a monster film.”

The story of the great white shark that terrified An idyllic spa community They would allow them, they thought, revive the old spirit of the Universal Picturesidentified with creatures such as Dracula or Frankenstein. After the frustration of Encounters …,

Spielberg was looking for a new job, and when he could read Benchley’s novel he asked Zanuck and Brown to entrust him the new project of his study.

After removing all the claims of making a “author” movie with that material, the producers agreed. Yeah Shark (Jaws -Mandibules- in English) burst the ticket officesthey told him, so he could make all the films “of art and essay” that I would like. But in the company Universal They were looking to make a lot of money with that material.

Spielberg wanted to film in open sea, but The initial budget forced to film in a huge pond. That, believed the young director, took realism and likelihood to the story, because no one was going to scare with “that polyethylene doll, floating wood and steel” – as defined to the mechanical shark – floating in a pool.

The study wanted in the leading roles Charlton Heston and Jan Michael Vincent because they gave the bearing of “sea men”, but Spielberg was looking for unknown actors to narrate A story of common and currents individuals Faced with an almost supernatural threat.

Nor did he like the script adapted by Benchley himself, who dispersed in multiple sub -subtramas and characters and seemed a social portrait of the fictitious island of Amity (“Amistad”) before a horror movie about a monster that devours how much human being is at your fingertips.

At the time of starting the filming, Spielberg was more identified with the shark than with any other of the characters.

Carl Gottlieb entered the scene for Rewrite the script and Spielberg asked to be assigned to the great montajista Verna Fields, who had already edited films for George Lucas and Peter Bogdanovich.

He got Charlton Heston for Robert Shaw, and the other two main roles were for the almost unknown Richard Dreyfuss and the ascending Roy Scheider, who came from Contact in France.

This whole team had to start working without a finished script, without an approved budget and – the most serious of all – without sharks, because the three monsters that the department of FX (special effects) had created were were Designed to operate in fresh water of a pool and not submerged in the sea salt, which made them begin to break and show multiple operating failures.

The first phrase that Spielberg listened to every morning when he arrived at the set was always the same: “The shark does not work.”

Brian de Palma, who occasionally went around the filming of the film, described that scenario as “a wake.” The initial budget, of three million dollars, began to grow in an demential way due to the costs of filming in the ocean.

Changing climatic conditions and technical problems with mechanical creatures They delayed for days, sometimes the filming weeks.

The technical team considered Spielberg too young (29 years old) and inexperienced to take care of a film of those characteristics, and made fun of him behind him. Dreyfuss and Shaw -especially Shaw – They did not give a dollar for the success of the projectand wandered erratic for the set.

A week of starting the filming, Spielberg presented his resignationbut the producers forced him to stay because it was too late to replace him. Around Shark Everything was disorder and pessimism.

And yet, the continuous paratas in the filming so that the technicians would repair the mechanical sharks allowed A kind of miracle of coexistence between the screenwriter, the director and the main actors.

At night, Scheider, Shaw and Dreyfuss improvised scenes and suggested dialogues, Spielberg and their screenwriter went down to the role and rewrite them, and thus the film became something else.

Of being a simple monster movie, Shark It became the portrait of three men who, in principle, have nothing in common, but who are twinned in A camaraderie relationship When the presence of the shark on the coast of the island is revealed as a progressively metaphysical threat, which in turn discovers to the island of “amity” as a network of corruption and businesses capable of speculating with the cost of human lives.

Spielberg returned to the sets so renewed by that Rewriting experience that the mechanical disasters of creatures became a secondary problem.

Together with his montajista Verna Fields they understood that, The less the creature would be shown, the more terror it would cause in the plateforced to imagine her sinister presence. Spielberg, then, began to make a movie “Hitchcockiana”, based on tension and suspense.

The resource to the “yellow barrels” that indicate the proximity and stalking of the monster, along with the chilling soundtrack of John Williams (little more than two notes amplified by a tuba, which evoke something like the breathing of an infernal creature) completely transformed the film, which, which It went from being a simple bloodbath to a chilling masterpiece based on the power of suggestion and abstraction.

At the time of ending the filming, the budget of Shark It had tripled (reaching 10 million dollars) and producers had doubts about how to release the film. They did not know very well what they had in hand, but still decided to invest a million dollars more in an advertising spot that was issued during the prime time television in the weeks before the premiere.

In one of the first functions, Spielberg, mixed among the spectators, He saw a man get up and vomit during the scene in which the shark attacks the yellow float boyand knew that his movie was going to be a success.

It premiered on June 20, 1975 in 409 rooms, almost as many as The godfather (1972), whom he exceeded in collection, accumulating the demential figure of 129 million dollars.

While Shark burst lockers, Scorsese filmed, in the desolate streets of New York Taxi Driver.

The time would be in charge of sowing the controversy, when the glorious “New Hollywood” who was born with Easy Rider And the history of the Corleone family was suddenly buried by the success of Spielberg’s film and the demands of increasingly powerful producers who, instead of author tapes with aesthetic and social concerns, They demanded super commercial “tanks” based on simple premisesthat with a large advertising apparatus could reap bulky figures in record time.

From Spielberg’s masterpiece, Hollywood wanted a Shark Every year. In 1977 it would arrive The Galaxies War of his friend George Lucas (who surpassed the Spielberg movie) and three years later Michael Cimino would bury the studio United Artists -Found, among others, by Charles Chaplin- with the resounding failure of criticism and public of his western revisionist The doors of heaven.

Then it was clear What kind of cinematographic conception had been the winnerand Hollywood changed forever.