the screenplay, didn’t agree.
Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.
The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent. Almost in passing, the trade papers of 21 June 1973 announced that Jaws had a director.
Spielberg was unaware that he had enlisted for the duration. The bane of Zanuck and Brown’s days at Fox had been Darryl Zanuck’s veto, exercised in its most extreme form when he fired them. Going into business on their own, they had agreed privately never to reverse a firm decision. As Bob Woodward put it, ‘Loyalty was their vice.’ They even refused to give interviews separately. If one spoke to the press, the other was always present, even if only on a telephone line. Like an old married couple, they often finished one another’s sentences.
Meanwhile, the board of an ailing Columbia, Hollywood’s most underfunded and troubled studio, had installed, at the urging of the town’s most reclusive and Machiavellian power broker, Ray Stark, a new president, David Begelman. The ex-agent, one of Hollywood’s great gamblers, took over in the summer of 1973. Within three years, he would have turned Columbia’s loss into a huge profit. Begelman’s first act was to sign a number of old friends and clients to lucrative production deals. Michael and Julia Phillips were given a contract for two pictures, both written by Schrader. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ‘Watch the Skies’. With Jaws still lacking a script, Spielberg signed that deal too.
All summer, editing on Sugarland had continued. Satisfied with finishing only five days over its fifty-five-day schedule and near enough to the $2.5 million budget, Spielberg initially spoke warmly of the film. ‘I guess if I had Sugarland to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything,’ he said at the time. But within a few years he all but disowned it as mechanistic and heartless, unconcerned with its characters.
Universal had promised that, if he had a release print before 10 September, the film could open on the November Thanksgiving weekend. Spielberg delivered, but from the moment the studio viewed the rough cut, they decided they had a loser. Richard Zanuck drove down to Palm Springs and showed it to his parents. Darryl didn’t think much of it either. Nor did Goldie Hawn, who found it ‘too serious, too unrelenting and too uptight’.
It contrasted starkly with their period comedy thriller The Sting, which had worked out far better than Zanuck and Brown had dared hope. After ousting scriptwriter David Ward as director, they replaced him with the bankable George Roy Hill, who had a deal at Universal but also, more important, inspired confidence in Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who starred as the two swindlers of gang boss Robert Shaw. Hill realised the film brilliantly. With its Depression setting, lovingly recreated on the Universal backlot, its ragtime score skimmed from Scott Joplin and the inspired joint performance of Redford and Newman, it exuded the heady perfume of a hit.
Rather than damage The Sting’s Christmas release, Zanuck persuaded Spielberg to withhold Sugarland Express until the following April. As their Universal deal guaranteed control of advertising, he argued that this would give them time for some intelligent promotion. Spielberg reluctantly agreed.
‘Our early ads were our own,’ said Zanuck. ‘Spielberg himself shot one of them.’ They featured the image of a road leading to an empty horizon which he would use again for Close Encounters. In the middle distance was a police car. In the foreground, scattered over the centre line, were broken glass, handcuffs, a policeman’s Stetson, a handgun, a rifle and a teddy bear. The advertising copy was ambivalent: ‘It’s Not Every Day You Take a Ride Like This!’
These ads barely survived the press and trade screenings in the first weeks of March. ‘Our campaigns didn’t work,’ Zanuck admitted. ‘We learned that any ad with a gun is anathema to the East Side public on Third Avenue in New York City. On Broadway, however, show lots of guns. We learned a great deal.’
Zanuck and Brown took Sugarland, and Spielberg, to Cannes. Benchley was also in Europe to promote his novel, so the four men met in a cabana at the Hôtel Cap d’Antibes to chew over Benchley’s screenplay, which Spielberg was due to start shooting almost immediately. After Benchley left, the film-makers gloomily contemplated the chasm between their perception of Jaws
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