The making of “Jaws 2”: “everybody said that was a good idea”

Carl Gottlieb, screenwriter for Jaws 2 (as well as Jaws), was brought in a little bit into the game to flesh out the characters. He was flown down to Florida, where the entire 120-person company was basically sitting in a hotel on the beach, waiting for a script to be ready so they could shoot. No one was working. Everyone was just hanging out. All of the teenagers (including Ben Marley, ahem) were spending their days learning to sail, as well as working with a Navy SEAL to get in shape. According to Keith Gordon (who played one of the kids), there was much grumbling, much boredom (“We have to practice sailing again? When do we get to, you know, make the movie??”), as well as multiple tormented adolescent romances going on. They all were dating each other, and then breaking up, and getting back together, and guys who were friends the day before getting into fights with each other over one of the girls, and etc. and etc., which is so hysterical to me, and sounds like a blast. Can’t you imagine the dramas? What an experience. Most of them were pulled straight out of high school, and for many this was their first big credit. The first director was fired a couple weeks into the picture, everything put on hold. The filming of this movie took from start to finish over a year. So there was a lot of down-time.

Gottlieb was called in to fix the script, build it out and make it all come together. The new director (the amusing and intelligent Jeannot Szwarc) was focusing on the special effects and action sequences, Gottlieb had to flesh out the story, and the characters. He describes holing himself up in the hotel room, and writing … but every time he would leave, every other person would say to him, “How’s it going??” Not in a mean or impatient way but like: How’s that script going? Can we start shooting soon? As a writer myself, I freak out thinking about such pressure! He finally stopped leaving his hotel room because he couldn’t take it. And finally, he lit upon a theme, or an idea, that he could flesh out. He knew that the group of teens, who are basically the linchpin of the whole thing, had to be made clear – each one needed a characteristic an audience could recognize, etc., but then he came up with the idea that I personally think makes the whole movie:

I had this notion that this cruising culture that was very popular with cars at that time – I said, What if kids cruised on the water the way they cruised on the boulevard? They’ve got these elaborate boats that they fix up, they socialize, all the boy-girl stuff, the interplay between the kids can be in connection with this cruising culture. And everybody said that that was a good idea.

Yes, yes, yes. VERY good idea. When you see Jaws 2, with all the balderdash, one of the things I like about it is its evocation of that boat culture, mixed in with teenagers. I grew up in a tourist beach town, not unlike Amity – where there were the rich cats who would flock there every summer, and then there’d be us – the local kids – working at pizza joints and restaurants, serving the wealthy, and hanging out on the beach all day. After all, it was OUR town.

Jaws 2 does that very very well, and I love to hear Gottlieb’s story about how he came to that idea, and how he thought; There. I can write that. I know how to write that.

The many scenes of flirting aimless teenagers hanging out on their little sailboats really reminds me of my own adolescence in a state where there the only thing to do, in the summer, or really in any season, is hang out near or on the ocean as much as possible.

And so the director went with that idea, and he films the sailboat races with kids laughing and screaming from boat to boat as though it is American Graffitti.

What I like about this anecdote (revealed in the very nice DVD extras) is that it shows the amount of thought and, dare I say, artistry – that goes into even something like Jaws 2. Like any other writer, Gottlieb was looking for his “way in” to the story – a hook. Not just for the audience, but himself.

The “cruising culture” of American Grafitti was transposed to the world of Jaws 2, and it works. Not only does it work, but it is something that feels real (like I said, I recognize that world from my adolescence) – and in a movie like Jaws 2, with a basically sentient shark who is out for revenge, as opposed to a nice meal, you need as much grounding as possible, as much connection to the real world.