Jaws 2 - Production

Production

The studio ordered a sequel early into the success of Jaws. The success of The Godfather Part II and other sequels meant that the producers were under pressure to deliver a bigger and better shark. They realized that someone else would produce the film if they didn't, and they preferred to be in charge of the project themselves.

In October 1975, Steven Spielberg told the San Francisco Film Festival that "making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick" and that he did not even respond to the producers when they asked him to direct Jaws 2. He told the audience that the planned plot was to involve the sons of Quint and Brody hunting a new shark. Brown said that Spielberg did not want to direct the sequel because he felt that he had done the "definitive shark movie". The director later added that his decision was influenced by the problems the Jaws production faced - "I would have done the sequel if I hadn’t had such a horrible time at sea on the first film."

Despite Spielberg's rejection the studio went ahead with plans to make the sequel, leading to an arduous 18 month pre-production process. Howard Sackler, who had contributed to the script of the original movie but chose not to be credited, was charged with writing the first draft. He originally proposed a prequel based on the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the story relayed by Quint in the first film. Although Universal Studios President Sid Sheinberg thought Sackler's treatment for the film was intriguing, the executive rejected the idea. On Sackler's recommendation, theatre and film director John D. Hancock was chosen to helm the picture. Sackler later felt betrayed when Dorothy Tristan, Hancock's wife, was invited to rewrite his script.

The film, under Hancock's direction and Tristan's writing, had originally a different tone and premise than what would eventually be seen in the final film. The two had envisioned Amity as a sort of ghost-town when the film opened with several businesses shuttered and the overall economy of the island in ruins due to the events portrayed in the original film. The new resort and condos built on the island by developer Len Peterson were to help celebrate its rebirth giving the island's economy a much needed boost. Tristan had borrowed a subplot from the original Jaws novel and from a discarded early draft of the original film, in which Amity officials were in debt to the mafia. Both Mayor Vaughn and Len Peterson were anxious for the new island resort to be a success not only to revive Amity but to pay back loans from the mob that helped build it, thus leading to Vaughn's and Peterson's ignoring of Brody's warning. Tristan and Hancock felt this treatment would lead to more character development that would make the overall story that much more believable.

Hancock began filming the movie in June 1977. However, after nearly a month of filming Universal and MCA executives disliked the dark subtle tone that the film was taking and wanted a more lighthearted and action oriented story. Additionally Hancock ran into trouble with MCA executive Sid Sheinberg. Sheinberg suggested to Hancock and Tristan that his wife Lorraine Gary "should go out on a boat and help to rescue the kids." When told of the idea, Richard D. Zanuck replied, "Over my dead body." The next draft of the Jaws 2 screenplay was turned in with Gary not going out to sea. Hancock says that this, and his later firing of another actress who turned out to be the girlfriend of a Universal executive, contributed to his own dismissal from the film.

Hancock began to feel the pressure of directing his first epic adventure film "with only three film credits, and all small-scale dramas". The producers were unhappy with his material, and on a Saturday evening in June 1977, after a meeting with the producers and Universal executives, the director was fired. He and his wife left for Rome and production was shut down for a few weeks. The couple had been involved in the film for eighteen months. Hancock blamed his departure on the mechanical shark, telling a newspaper that it still couldn't swim or bite after a year and a half; "You get a couple of shots and breaks." Echoing the production of the first film, Carl Gottlieb was enlisted to further revise the script, adding humor and reducing some of the violence. Gottlieb wrote on location at Fort Walton Beach in Florida. It cost the producers more money to hire Gottlieb to do the rewrite than it would have if they had hired him in the first place.

At this point, Spielberg considered returning to direct the sequel. Over the Bicentennial weekend Spielberg hammered out a screenplay based on Quint's Indianapolis speech. Because of his contract for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, he would not be able to film for a further year, a gap too long for the producers. Production designer Joe Alves (who would direct Jaws 3-D) and Verna Fields (who had been promoted to vice-president at Universal after her acclaimed editing on the original film) proposed that they co-direct it. The request was declined by the Directors Guild of America, partly because they would not allow a DGA member to be replaced by someone who was not one of its members, and partly because they, in the wake of events on the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales, had instituted a ban on any cast or crew members taking over as director during production of a film. The reins were eventually handed to Jeannot Szwarc, best known for the movie Bug and Night Gallery and whom Alves knew from the Night Gallery days. Szwarc recommenced production by filming the complicated waterskier scene, giving Gottlieb some time to write. He reinstated the character of Deputy Hendricks, played by Jeffrey Kramer, who had been missing from the original script. Many of the teenagers were sacked, with the remaining roles developed.

Three sharks were built for the film. The first was the "platform shark", also referred to as the "luxurious shark". Special mechanical effects supervisor Bob Mattey and Roy Arbogast used the same body mold used for the shark in the original film. The original "Bruce" sharks rotted behind sheds on the lower lot of Universal Studios, the only pieces that were salvageable were the chromoly tube frames. Mattey's design was much more complicated and ambitious than the original film. The same (male) "Bruce" body was used; even though JAWS 2's shark is described as female. A brand new head was also sculpted by sculptor Chris Mueller which made use of an all new mouth mechanism, one which incorporated jowls to disguise the pinching of the cheeks that had proven to be a problem with the original "Bruce" shark. The sharks were known as Bruce Two (after the original sharks), but on set they were referred to as "Fidel" and "Harold", after David Brown's Beverly Hills lawyer. The other 'sharks' were a fin and a full shark, both of which could be pulled by boats. "Cable Junction", the island shown in the climax of the movie, was a floating barge. This was created in order to have the effects platform positioned as close to the island as possible. Like the first film, footage of real sharks filmed by Australian divers Ron & Valerie Taylor were used for movement shots that could not be convincingly achieved using the mechanical sharks.

Although the first film was commended for leaving the shark to the imagination until two thirds of the way through, Szwarc felt that they should show it as much as possible because the "first image of it coming out of the water" could never be repeated. Szwarc believed that the reduction of the first's Hitchcockian suspense was inevitable because the audience already knew what the shark looked like from the final third of the first film. Reviewers have since commented that there was no way that they were ever going to duplicate the effectiveness of the original. The filmmakers gave the new shark a more menacing look by scarring it in the early boat explosion.

Like the first film, shooting on water proved challenging. Scheider said that they were "always contending with tides, surf and winds jellyfish, sharks, waterspouts and hurricane warnings." After spending hours anchoring the sailboats, the wind would change as they were ready to shoot, blowing the sails in the wrong direction. The corrosive effect of the saltwater damaged some equipment, including the metal parts in the sharks.

Susan Ford, daughter of US president Gerald Ford, was hired to shoot publicity photographs. Many of these appeared in Ray Loynd's Jaws 2 Log, a book documenting the production the film in the same way as Carl Gottlieb had for the first film.