« Courage and stupidity. Those are the two things Steven Spielberg thinks about when he looks back on his much younger self as he prepared to film Jaws on location on Martha’s Vineyard in the spring of 1974.
Carl Gottlieb, who was called in to finish a rough Benchley-Spielberg screenplay and who plays the publisher of the Amity Gazette in the film, concurs that it was a difficult shoot and that it could have ended in disaster.
« I had a couple of advantages, » Gottlieb says in a telephone interview from New York. « It was my first produced feature film so I had no fear. More realistically, I came from a five-six-year background of improvisational acting and directing and I knew good work could be created quickly, on the fly. »
In his 1975 book Jaws Log, which is enjoying a new hardcover re-issue by Newmarket Press, Gottlieb explains how the film was rushed into production without a finished script.
He found himself acting in scenes by day and dashing off pages of rewrites by night. »
From Screenwriter’s Utopia.