‘The shark sank to the bottom and we felt our careers had gone with it' – trials and tribulations of bringing ‘Jaws' to life

Irish Independent

21-06-2025

Indeed, it had a reputation. Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb remembered the crew also referring to it as 'that sonofabitchin' bastard rig, or something equally direct'.
The shark − named Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer − could be the most maligned prop in film history. Built by special-effects legend Robert A Mattey, it was a problematic beast, notorious for causing costly delays, for looking fake and for chomping the nerves of a 27-year-old Spielberg.
There's a stage play set around it − The Shark is Broken − while Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss has suggested re-releasing Jaws with an upgraded CG shark.
Spielberg admitted he was the first to start the name-calling.
'I am kind of responsible for creating a lot of bad-mouthing about the shark because it was frustrating,' he said. 'It didn't really work all the time − it didn't work hardly at all.'
But for all the maligning, the shark might be the true hero of Jaws. If it hadn't malfunctioned, forcing Spielberg to shoot around it and suggest its presence − a fin, a barrel, John Williams' score − Jaws might not be the masterpiece it is.
It's also easy to forget what a feat of special-effects engineering Bruce was, or that Spielberg's tension-cranking wouldn't amount to anything without its eventual emergence − the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
'You can suggest it, but the audi- ence wants to see the monster,' spec­ial-effects artist Greg Nicotero said.
Fifty years on, Nicotero recalls that his first proper glimpse of Jaws's great white − gliding through the estuary of Amity Island, about to bite some poor chap's leg off − was a pivotal moment for his 12-year-old self.
'It instantly changed everything,' he said. 'I became obsessed with learning about how they built it.'
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Nicotero has recently restored the last surviving Bruce − now on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles − and produced Jaws @ 50, a new documentary that premieres on July 11.
The shark (actually three mechanical sharks) was originally designed by Jaws production designer Joe Alves, who decided it should be a 25-footer. It was a monstrous middle ground − a 20-foot shark wasn't spectacular enough, 30 feet was the stuff of science fiction. Spielberg agreed and was adamant they shoot Jaws on the actual ocean rather than in a tank on the studio backlot, a bold (albeit naive) decision that created numerous problems.
Special-effects experts told Alves that what he wanted couldn't be done. A fully mechanical shark that worked in the ocean would require years of development. Alves approached Bob Mattey, a genial, can-do effects pion­eer who built the giant squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
'We can do anything,' Mattey told Alves. 'He worked hand-in-hand with Walt Disney for 20 years,' his grandson, Craig Mattey, said. 'He was used to working in high-pressure environments.'
We were all very much afraid that it would be comical
Mattey put together a crack team of specialists − 'the Magnificent Seven' − and set to work building three sharks in Los Angeles.
There was a full-bodied 'sled' shark, which was put on a sled and towed through the water, and two 'platform' sharks. There was a left-to-right platform shark, which had a full left side and an open right side, where you could see its innards and workings; and a right-to-left platform shark, which was vice-versa.
They were mounted on a crane arm and gimbal, which was attached to a trolley that ran along rails of a submerged platform. The platform sat at the ocean floor, allowing the shark to travel about 70 feet through the water, as well as emerge and dive.
The sharks were pneumatically powered, with flesh made from neoprene foam and a polyurethane skin. Inside them was a network of valves and hoses that controlled their movements. Each weighed over 900kg and had two sets of teeth − hard elastomer teeth for biting boats and cages, and softer teeth for biting people (it lost most of its teeth eating Robert Shaw as Quint).
The eyes were clear resin, while the rough skin texture was achieved with special paint and silica. But there were problems from the beginning. Effects man Roy Arbogast spent weeks on the skin because it kept ripping.
Spielberg had reservations.
'I was always afraid that the mechanical shark wouldn't look like a real one,' he told Laurent Bouzereau, director of Jaws @ 50.
Alves agreed. 'We were all very much afraid that it would be comical, that people might laugh at it,' he said. But, as detailed in Jaws @ 50, Spielberg's pal George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, knew they had a monster hit when he saw the still-under-construction fish.
John Milius, screenwriter of Apoca­lypse Now, recalled that Spielberg took him, Lucas and Martin Scorsese to see the sharks, and when Lucas popped his head in, Spielberg closed the jaws on him and they had to yank him back out.
'Steven tried to open the mouth and it wouldn't open, we'd broken it,' Milius told Premiere in 1995. 'We all just ran. We knew we'd broken something expensive.'
Mattey's team only had a matter of months. They began construction in November 1973 and the sharks had to be transported to Martha's Vineyard, the Massachusetts island where Jaws was filmed, for May. The studio insisted on rushing into production to avoid an upcoming actors' strike and to capitalise on the publication of Peter Benchley's novel.
'The only thing wrong with the shark was that it wasn't finished yet,' special-effects assistant Kevin Pike said. Indeed, the Bruces had been tested 'dry', but they hadn't been put in the ocean yet. They also weren't camera-ready − some detailing and painting had to be completed at a boathouse workshop on Martha's Vineyard called Shark City.
Every single person on the island took pictures of the shark
There was anticipation for the sharks' arrival, but, as Roy Arbogast later explained, 'the problems with the sharks began before we even got them off the truck'. They had worked loose during transit and arrived damaged, needing repairs immediately.
Bruce caused a different kind of headache for producers Richard Zan­uck and David Brown, who wanted secrecy to maintain the idea that the shark on screen might be real.
Alves was almost fired when he was duped into granting access to a journalist from the Christian Science Monitor, who took pictures of the sharks and their mechanical workings. Zanuck said the stress over secrecy turned to 'paranoia'.
The sharks were hidden with sheets whenever they sat in purpose-made wooden cages. It was a losing battle, though. Local kids tried to sneak a look, while others followed the sharks around the water in motorboats and graffitied them if left unattended.
'Every single person on the island took pictures of the shark and posed with it,' says Nicotero. 'They'd take the sharks out on barges where everybody could see them. If that happened now, there'd be 50,000 photos online that day.'
Bruce didn't come out for a camera test until 38 days into the shoot. Zanuck and Brown were there, awaiting the big moment, while tourists watched from boats. It was a bad start − after delays getting on to the water, Bruce came up tail first and sank.
'It came right out perfectly,' Spielberg told Richard Schickel. 'And then the head kind of went down like a submarine. And then the tail sort of fell over the other way, there was an explosion of bubbles and another, then it was eerily quiet. We were actually witnessing the shark sinking to the bottom of the ocean.'
Brown said: 'The shark simply sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound and we felt that our careers in motion pictures had gone with it. Frogmen were delegated to recover it and bring it back to the surface.'
Word came back that it would take several weeks until Bruce was ready to shoot again.
The lack of ocean testing proved a big problem. The saltwater caused electrolysis, which corroded and damaged the submerged platform rig. It also ate into the sharks' internal mechanisms, and electrical compon­ents had to be replaced with mechanical valves.
The ocean bashed up the shark itself, which needed constant repairs and repainting. The skin got waterlogged and baggy and tore from the mouth to gills.
Arbogast estimated that they worked 12 hours a day for five months, getting it ready to be towed out to sea and attached to the crane, where it didn't work properly. It was then towed back to Shark City to be dried, painted and repaired all over again.
'I heard the trials and tribulations from my grandfather,' said Craig Mattey. 'And my grandmother would complain. They worked my grand­father to death on that one.'
There were other problems: paint tests carried out in Los Angeles proved to be useless because the temperature and humidity were different on Martha's Vineyard. The eyes wouldn't behave properly and the inside of the mouth would fall out. The pneumatic hoses floated in a tangled mess when they filled with air. The platform rig got covered in barnacles.
All the while, the film was delayed and the budget swelled
Gottlieb, writing in The Jaws Log, estimated that a dented chin cost the production an extra $50,000, including the delays. The shark was also loud, expelling a racket of gassy mechanisms that could be heard long before it surfaced − a far cry from the heart-thumping brilliance of John Williams' score.
Nicotero said the sharks changed colour as production went on.
'Every time they had to fix it, they would cut the top of the shark open, fix it, glue it back over and spray-paint it. They were painting it darker and darker every single time.'
At first, it was such a light grey that it looked almost white in the water.
'That's why Steven made that joke about the Great White Turd,' Nicotero said.
All the while, the film was delayed ­and the budget swelled, and Spielberg did everything he could to shoot around the shark. The sled shark caused such delays that a Universal executive came to assess if it was worth continuing with production.
'I was only getting two shots on some days,' Spielberg said. 'We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this movie, sitting around for seven, eight hours, waiting for the shark to work, or waiting for the barrels to sink without coming right back up. I was getting one shot before lunch and one shot before five o'clock in the afternoon.'
Realism was also an issue for Spielberg.
'The more fake the shark looked in the water, at least to the crew watching it being hauled behind a speedboat, the more my anxiety told me to heighten the naturalism of the performances,' the director later said.
The stress led the crew to call the production 'Flaws' and Mattey's team 'the special-defects department'.
Mattey's can-do positivity continued, but he took the brunt of Spielberg's frustrations.
'They were really up against hostile conditions,' Mattey said about the ocean. 'My grandfather would get very upset with Spielberg. There was a lot of strife there. Spielberg was young and pretentious. My grand­father did not appreciate that.'
Spielberg later admitted he took out all of the film's problems on the shark.
'It seldom worked, so it was an easy target,' he told Laurent Bouzereau. 'Yet it worked well enough that we, for a while there, had the biggest hit of all time. So I really owe the shark a lot more than I want to take away from it right now. And I owe Bob Mattey and his team a lot as well.'
The platform shark eventually worked.
'Bob was elated,' one crew member said in the Memories from Martha's Vineyard book. A few days later they filmed the classic scene when the shark emerges from the water and prompts Roy Scheider's Chief Brody to declare: 'You're gonna need a bigger boat'.
Jaws was released on June 20, 1975. Nicotero went to see the film 12 times that summer − just to get another look at the shark.
The three sharks were left to rot on the Universal backlot
According to Craig Mattey, his grandfather was 'very happy on the last day of shooting', but also proud of Jaws.
'He tried to go into retirement, but they drew him into Jaws 2,' he said.
Mattey didn't stew on the tensions and criticism. 'He was somewhat upset with Spielberg. Other than that, he got over it,' Craig said.
It's a bit of a cliche to say the shark looks fake, a rep that really comes from the increasingly silly sequels and their increasingly visible sharks. Spielberg endorsed some mickey-taking as producer of Back to the Future Part II. When Marty McFly travels to the future and sees an ad for Jaws 19, he says: 'Shark still looks fake.'
But the not-quite-real monstrosity of the shark is what makes it work. The shark's full reveal is as terrifying as the build-up. The scene of the shark eating Quint is the ultimate primal fear made flesh and rubber − a moment imprinted on many childhoods.
The three sharks were left to rot on the Universal backlot, but the studio had a fibreglass version made from the original mould, which was used as a photo-op attraction at Universal Studios. It was moved in the early Nineties and stood in a junkyard for the best part of 15 years. Nicotero spent four months overseeing a restoration of the shark, which has been on display since 2021.
After all these years, has Spielberg softened on Bruce? 'I find it hard to believe that he would ever look at it with any affection,' Nicotero said. 'I said to him at one point, 'Do you want me to make a shark head for you? You can put it in the offices of Amblin'. I can't imagine that he wants to walk though his offices every day and see that. It might just be a constant reminder. I could be wrong…'
The shark − whether it worked or looked fake or not − deserves a spot alongside the likes of King Kong and Godzilla as one of the great monsters. 'I'll tell you that when Jaws came out, everybody was terrified,' Mattey said. 'People weren't telling you it looked fake. They were telling you they weren't going into the ocean.'