It began with an unseen tug on a female leg, and it ended with millions of swimmers around the globe vowing that they would never so much as cross the old crick in their bare feet ever again. Thirty years ago this month, a $9 million thriller, filmed on an obscure New England island of shingled houses, narrow streets, and golden beaches, was hurtling toward a record-breaking $260 million tally at the box office, and the Vineyard-as-Amity toward fame of a magnitude shared only by such byword places as Key Largo, Casablanca, and Chinatown.
    
The magazine gathered a few of the important players – in front of the camera, behind it, or both – for a series of conversations about what Jaws: the Phenomenon did for (and to) both them and the Island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Lee Fierro and Jeffrey Voorhees, actors

The backstory

Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) begs his mother (Lee Fierro) to let him go in the water. She hesitates, but relents. Alex paddles around on a yellow inflatable raft. His mother remains on the beach, absorbed by a book. Alex is suddenly pulled under water. Blood fountains up like an oil strike. Panic follows. Scores of children charge out of the water. Mrs. Kintner notices the commotion and gets up. She watches the other children reunite with their parents. She cries out for her son. All the others, except for a Labrador retriever, have been accounted for. The raft is in tatters in the wash.

The last reunion

The last time Lee Fierro of Vineyard Haven and Jeffrey Voorhees of Edgartown saw each other, Lee, now seventy-six, was dining with friends at The Wharf Pub in Edgartown. She saw an item on the menu called the Alex Kintner and mentioned the Jaws connection. Jeffrey, now forty-two, a manager at the restaurant, overheard her and approached the table.

“Can I ask you a very personal question?” he said.     
“Do you believe in reincarnation? You remind me of my mother in my previous life.”
    
Catching on, she replied, “I had a son that died years ago. How’d you die?”
    
“By an animal,” said Jeff.
    
“Was it an animal in the sea? I had a son who was killed by an animal in the sea.”
  
“What kind?” asked Jeff.
    
“A shark,” said Lee.

Casting calls

Lee Fierro: Virginia Poole, who was an Island casting director working under Shari Rhodes, told me to go down and get photographed and give my résumé. I objected because I had been out of theater for a number of years and I wasn’t interested in Jaws at all. I had read the book, but I didn’t see anything in it for me. But Virginia said, “Oh, just go down and get photographed.”
    
So I did. And I felt very uncomfortable. Shari Rhodes, who was a very pretty young Texan, Bob Carroll, and Gerry Kelly, and someone else who I can’t remember, were there. I felt like a frump. I wasn’t wearing lipstick in those days and I had my glasses. So when I left I was relieved and thought, Well, that’s the end of that. So I was surprised when two weeks later I get called up by Shari Rhodes telling me that Steven Spielberg is on the Island and wanted to see me. I went down and he asked me to improvise the beach scene with my son. Shari would play Alex and I was to keep him out of the water. I did precisely what Steven told me. And Shari tried and tried to persuade me to let her/him go in the water, and I wouldn’t. And Steven finally stopped us and he said, “You’ve got to let him go in the water or we don’t have a movie.”
    
There was a lot of swearing in the book and I had told Shari that I felt very uncomfortable about that. Two weeks later when she called me up and offered me the part, I asked her if there was any swearing in it and she said, “Oh, I’m sure not.” So I went down to get my sides [her pages in the script] and left the room with them and looked immediately to see what it was. And there was that four-letter word all over the place. And so I didn’t know what to do.
    
I went home and talked to my husband. We went down and talked to Virginia Poole and I went to Shari the next day and said, “I’m very sorry but I can’t play this role.”
    
And she said, “Can’t or won’t?”
    
And I said, “Both. I won’t swear. I don’t think it’s well written because there’s a scene just before it where they swear. I thank you very much. I appreciate Universal offering me the part, but I can’t play it. Here’s the script. Good-bye.”
    
That was Friday. Monday I was called back on the phone by Shari and she said, “If you don’t have to swear, will you play the role?”
    
And I said, “Yes, I will.”
    
And she said, “Do you mind spitting at the shark?”
    
And I said, “No, I don’t mind spitting at the shark.”
    
As it turned out what was written instead was the slap – the famous slap.

Jeffrey Voorhees: We had just moved to the Island and found out they were filming a movie and needed a lot of extras. My friends and I were told to sign up at the Kelley House [in Edgartown] and they’ll give you $40 a day. We thought that was great. We were just kids, and so we went flying down there, and we all signed up and left. And they said, “Okay, you guys will probably all be in it.”
    
A few weeks later I got a call and they asked me if I could come down and read a few lines because they needed a few speaking parts. So I came down with a friend of mine. We read a few lines. They said, “Okay, we’ll talk to you later.”
    
A week later or so we got a call asking if I would be Alex Kintner in the movie. They told me that I’d be getting $138 a day. When you’re twelve, that’s a lot of money. So I said, “Sure, I’ll do that.”

One take after another

Jeffrey: I kept messing up.

Lee: Honestly, the way they did Jeff’s scene was fascinating to watch. I remembered all the details of how they made that work. But when they actually did a take, I was sick watching the take.

Jeffrey: I was paranoid, lying on top of that thing and suddenly it’s going to explode.

Lee: It was compressed air.

Jeffrey: We did the whole “Mommy, can I go back in the water?” and all that. After begging her, she lets me go in – to die. (Chuckles.) And then I swim out on the raft and they say, “Cut.” They took the raft out of my hands and then they had a raft that was cut in half and they had this thing that was filled up with blood, and it blows all this stuff up in the air, and they put the half raft over it and they said, “Lie on top of it now, and when it blows up, go under water and stay under there for as long as you can.”
    
So I’m lying on top it and all of a sudden it goes, and I go under water and come up after a little bit, and they say, “Cut! Your arm was out of the water. Do it again.” And it would take, like, three hours for all the blood to clear out. Finally, the fifth time, they said, “Okay, this time we’re going to try something different. Two guys are going to be under water with wet suits and air and they’ll hold you.”

Lee: He [Steven Spielberg] didn’t do much. He really kind of let us alone unless we did something he didn’t like.

The Jaws effect

Jeffrey: You probably knew about royalties. I was just twelve. I didn’t know you got royalties.

Lee: I didn’t either. I didn’t know.

Jeffrey: And after making $138 a day – that was great when you’re twelve – after the first time it was on TV, I got an envelope in the mail. I opened it up. It’s from Universal Studios for thousands.

Lee: It was? I was never paid thousands at once.

Jeffrey: I was. . . . People send me pictures of me when I was a little kid and ask me to sign them.

Lee: I get letters and phone calls.

Jeffrey: I got a call at the Wharf from this gentleman from Washington who says, “I’m not crazy. I know you were in that movie Jaws and my daughter loved that movie so much and I’ll give you $400 if you’ll meet my daughter.”

Lee: Young men come up to me and they want me to slap them. Last summer I did it for the last time.

Jeffrey: Oh, you actually do it?

Lee: I said no more.

David Brown, co-producer with Richard D. Zanuck

Before Jaws became a best-selling novel, the production team of Zanuck/Brown acquired the rights to Peter Benchley’s book. David Brown, Richard D. Zanuck, and a location scout visited the Vineyard during the winter of 1974. In spite of the icy weather, they chose Martha’s Vineyard – and all six of its towns – to serve as the island and township of Amity.

David Brown, still working at ninety-three, spoke with the magazine by telephone from his office in midtown Manhattan.

When you were making this film did you have any idea you were making a classic?

David Brown: No, of course not. We thought we were making a disaster because everything went wrong with the shark. It sunk into Nantucket Sound and every other place we tried it. We had all kinds of difficulties. The beginning of the film – which is a classic beginning in which a swimmer gets accosted by the shark but we never see the shark, we only hear the screams and we hear John Williams’s music – not having the shark in working order early in the day meant we couldn’t use it very often. But it turned out less was more. Every time this creature surfaced, people screamed because it was not overdone.

The troubles with the shark must have caused you a great deal of anxiety.

Brown: The shark worked so miserably. The hydraulic system would creak and hiss and everything. And the crew was convulsed in laughter during some of the most terrifying moments of the shoot. But when we had our cast-and-crew screening – weeks and weeks, maybe months later – the crew jumped out of their seats.

Where did you look for an Amity before you found the Vineyard?

Brown: We looked all over. We went to the Hamptons and we found that a shark circling around the Hamptons would be welcomed by the residents because it would keep tourists away. . . . After a search, which consisted of many other places, we settled on the Vineyard, and we settled down there for 159 days. Many of our crew married Island girls. We became part of the community. We really tried to. We were all living in the Kelley House and Harborside Inn. It was our home. Spielberg went a little stir-crazy. Toward the end of the shoot, he wished he could dive off the Island and escape. And he did damn well. He flew back to California as quickly as he could. I don’t think he’s ever returned, but maybe.

There are also stories about Richard Dreyfuss, who played Matt Hooper, hating it here.

Brown: Well, he thought it was the worst-produced film he could ever imagine because we only shot the actors when the weather was inclement. When the weather was good, we were out at sea with the shark. It was Robert Shaw [Quint] who said one night, at I think it was the Harborside Inn, “I think this is going to be bigger than the bloody Sting.” [Zanuck/Brown produced The Sting, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 1973.] And we all said, “Oh, you’re crazy. You’re crazy.” And he said, “No, I tell you. It’s bigger than the bloody Sting.” And he’d never seen any of the dailies or the rushes. And he said, “I’ll put up all my salary, my overage (which was considerable) if I can have a piece of this film.” And we thought, “Go to bed, Bob, you’re drunk.” And the next morning he repeated the offer and his agent called. And we thought he knew something. We never took it up and he never forgave us for that.

Did you ever feel that people on the Island were upset about the shooting?

Brown: Not at all. But there was a protest against the abuse of sharks. That led to a dead shark being dropped in front of the production office.

What did you do in response?

Brown: There was nothing for us to do. We couldn’t remove the shark from the picture.

The film went famously over budget. Was there ever a time when the plug was almost pulled?

Brown: Universal Studios was quite aware that we were over budget. It was Lew Wasserman who was the head at that time. But it was Spielberg who was most concerned. At one point he wanted to stop production and move to the Bahamas or some place where the waters were quiet to do the ocean stuff, but Zanuck and I, as veterans, said, “Never let them take the film out of the camera. It’ll never be started up again; the film will never be finished. Even if we get one-eighth of a page of script a day, let’s keep shooting.”

Edith Blake, photographer and author

No one ushered the pretty blond photographer off the set – perhaps, Edith Blake of Edgartown guesses, because the film crew assumed she was supposed to be there. In the bustle of actors, production personnel, and technical experts from both coasts, it was difficult to know who was doing what for whom.
    
“When I heard they were going to start shooting, I went off with them. They were out at Katama at South Beach and they had a honey wagon. They had lunch. They had all these different people and all this equipment, and they had me,” says Edith Blake. “Nobody said, ‘Get out of here.’ So I stayed and photographed and talked and watched them make the movie.”
    
Except for a few stolen hours lobbing balls across a tennis court, Blake, now seventy-nine, spent the spring and summer of 1974 chronicling the goings-on that led to, among other things, the film that launched Steven Spielberg’s career as . . . Steven Spielberg. “I was just standing there with my mouth hanging open, and my camera, loving every minute of it,” says Blake.
    
Her involvement with Jaws was not limited to fly-on-the wall operations. She covered the shooting for the Vineyard Gazette, helped casting director Shari Rhodes by snapping Polaroid shots of Islanders, and even played an extra in the Fourth of July beach scene. But it was her meticulous memory and the complete access she was granted that allowed her to pen one of the two quintessential books about the making of the movie. On Location . . . on Martha’s Vineyard (The Making of the Movie Jaws) came out in 1975, the year the movie opened. (The other book of note is The Jaws Log, by Carl Gottlieb, a screenwriter for, and actor in, the film.)
    
Throughout the filming, Blake shot thousands of photographs. That record, combined with her behind-the-scenes knowledge of the players, makes her book an impressive chronicle of the tribulations of a big-budget location shoot, and a particularly fun read for Vineyarders seeking stories and pictures of their friends, neighbors, and themselves.
    
On Location covers everything from the difficulties with the shark to an experimental shot in which the camera zooms into a close-up of Roy Scheider, who played police chief Martin Brody, as the great white attacks a swimmer. She wrote about union problems and how the film was fast-tracked in order to avoid a threatened actors’ strike. And she writes about the weather, which rarely seemed to cooperate.
    
The impact of the film on the Vineyard? Blake feels the same as she did thirty years ago.
    
“I don’t think it changed the Island. It changed the people who lived on the Island. People who didn’t have money suddenly did. People married people that they hadn’t met before. People became actors and went off to Hollywood. I think it did a great deal of interesting, good stuff for the Island. But I don’t know about changing it. I mean, everything is still blessedly the same. . . . With Jaws, it wasn’t people coming and finding us; it was people here going out to Hollywood.”
    
Indeed, she ends her book with these words: “Not a sign was left (except perhaps in bank accounts) that an effort similar to a small war had been waged on Martha’s Vineyard.”

Bob Carroll, hotelier and actor

Bob Carroll of Edgartown knows something about everyone you want to know about. Born and raised on the Island, Carroll, nearing eighty, has had his hand in almost every facet of Vineyard life. A former selectman and president of the chamber of commerce, he has owned and sold several hospitality-based businesses. He is a raconteur with a past who is privy to information about the pasts of others. He’s got stories to tell about Chappaquiddick in ’69, novelist and playwright Lillian Hellman, and Scotty Reston and Henry Beetle Hough, publishers of the Vineyard Gazette. (He even has the goods on my husband’s grandfathers.) Bob Carroll could be dangerous, but the bottom line is, he’s a fascinating guy to talk to.
    
Carroll was one of the first people to learn that a Hollywood production company was interested in shooting a feature film on the Vineyard.
    
In February 1974, Carroll owned and ran the Kelley House in Edgartown, among other businesses. A recent Kelley House renovation and expansion project had landed him in financial trouble. He was half a million dollars in debt, and had nowhere to turn.
    
Then Zanuck/Brown rode in and delivered him a perfect Hollywood ending.
    
“They said they were coming for five weeks and needed 50 rooms. They stayed for five months and had about 100 rooms, which was absolutely wonderful,” says Carroll. “I was verging on bankruptcy and they saved my life. I made a ton of money that year.”
    
After spending the five months in close quarters with the producers, actors, and crew, he could have written a sensational tell-all book. He has bad-boy scoops on actors Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, and Roy Scheider. He watched the young Steven Spielberg at work. Verna Fields, one of Hollywood’s finest editors, spliced shots together in one of his hotel rooms. Carroll got an opportunity to cut his own acting chops and played a selectman in the film.
    
“It was a great deal of fun for all of us, but you know something, I wouldn’t be an actor full-time. It’s the most boring job.” And in typical Carroll fashion, he adds, “We did one scene thirty-six or thirty-eight times, and it never appeared in the movie. I understand why they’re either drunks or perverts or there’s something wrong with a lot of them, because it’s boring as hell.”
    
When the Jaws crew finally packed their bags and left the Island, a number of Vineyarders hitched a ride with them. Bob Carroll remained here. Now, thirty years later, he lives on the top floor of the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown and has a spectacular panoramic view of Edgartown harbor that rivals, and even trumps, the magic of Technicolor.