“I just went nuts”: How Dick Richards cleared the way for Steven Spielberg to make history
Things could’ve looked a lot different for cinema if Steven Spielberg had never become a major filmmaker – he practically pioneered the summer blockbuster when he made Jaws.
It was 1975, and the New Hollywood movement was rapidly altering mainstream American cinema with its more experimental approach to storytelling, and with less censorship, filmmaking became more truthful, more daring… then came Jaws, which showed just how profitable a big movie could be if it was released at the right time. Jaws tapped into people’s fears, and audiences couldn’t get enough of this story of a beach trip turned incredibly sour.
From there, Spielberg continued his ascent into Hollywood, making countless blockbusters that appealed to wide audiences, often working within the sci-fi or adventure genre – kids and adults alike came to love ET the Extraterrestrial, while the heroic Indiana Jones series further signalled the filmmaker’s popularity, and with memorable scores, sentimental themes, and accessible storytelling, Spielberg reinvented the mainstream American film, because cinema has never been the same since that fateful day in 1975 when Jaws debuted.
It wasn’t Spielberg’s first film – he’d already made Duel and The Sugarland Express – but it was the film that shot him into the spotlight, although interestingly, the filmmaker wasn’t the original director signed on to Jaws, meaning he almost missed out on making the movie that changed everything – both for cinema as a whole and for him as a filmmaker.
“I was meeting with Dick Zanuck, and I think David Brown, on the cut of The Sugarland Express, and I noticed this pile of papers in their secretary’s office that said ‘Jaws’ on the cover,” he once explained. “It turned out to be galleys from the as-yet unpublished novel by Peter Benchley. I remember asking if I could read it, and Dick and David said yes, but there was another director on it already”.
When Spielberg got his hands on Jaws, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. “Jaws – I thought it was a story about dental work, I didn’t know it was about the ocean and a shark,” he admitted, but still, he was interested enough to read the script anyway, and when he did, he knew he had to make the movie – too bad that someone was already attached to it.
“So, I took it to my house, and I read it over the weekend, and I flipped out for it. I just went nuts, especially the last 150 pages, which was the sea hunt for this great white shark,” he said, adding, “It reminded me of Duel because Duel was about this unknown force chasing this innocent bystander, and in Duel you never saw the driver of the truck… The shark was sort of a variation on the theme of Duel, so I really related to that material, it was a part of my life, and that story was still fresh in my mind.”
With a desperate desire to make Jaws, he spoke to Zanuck and Brown and told them of his interest. He had to make this film. “One day they called and said that the director did fall out, and the picture was mine.” The filmmaker was Dick Richards, who lost the job for a rather stupid reason – in meetings, he kept referring to the shark as a whale, and that was enough for him to be fired in favour of Spielberg.
So, there you have it – Jaws was subsequently born under the direction of Spielberg, and cinema was never the same again.
