The bizarre reason director Dick Richards was fired from ‘Jaws’
The 1975 film Jaws is known as one of the greatest movies of the 1970s, proving pivotal in changing the face of Hollywood in the 20th century. Terrifying audiences across the world with its story about a killer shark who plagues a coastal American town, Steven Spielberg’s classic would end up coining the phrase ‘blockbuster’, with the term referring to the hoards of fans who were forced to queue around the street of the cinema in order to secure a ticket to watch the film.
Unlike such movies as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg wasn’t always attached to Jaws, with producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown considering several other names during development. At first, they wanted John Sturges, the same mind behind the 1958 ocean-based drama The Old Man and the Sea, but later they decided on Dick Richards, who got the gig thanks to his successful 1972 western The Culpepper Cattle Co.
Richards wouldn’t be attached to the project for long, however, with the pair of producers becoming annoyed with how he described the shark of the movie as a whale, hastily dropping him from the project in frustration.
Refusing to work with someone who didn’t know the difference between a whale and a shark, producer Richard Zanuck recalled: “Richard, who we were meeting for the first time, starts talking about how he’ll shoot the picture. And he says, ‘Now, this is wonderful to have this small town terrified by this whale.’ And I say, ‘Wait a minute, you mean shark.’ And he says, ‘Oh yes, yes.’ And I could see that Benchley, who was working on his fifth drink, had his eyebrow raised.”
Continuing, he added: “So Richards went on to tell more about how he would approach the story, and again he said, ‘Then when the whale attacks the boat…’ and I shouted, ‘Shark! Shark!’…When lunch was over, we called Medavoy and said, ‘Everything went great, but we want to get rid of the director because he thinks it’s a whale!'”
In a roundabout kind of way, you can see where Richards was coming from, with Peter Benchley’s novel for Jaws being greatly inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a story that features a gargantuan whale at its centre. In fact, an early draft of the screenplay for Jaws introduced the character of Quint, played by Robert Shaw, in a scene where he’s watching the 1956 film version of Moby Dick.
Take a look at the original trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws below.
