Martha’s Vineyard was a quiet place in the 1970s. Work was scarce outside of July and August, and even then, summers didn’t bring the throngs we see today. But when Hollywood came to the Island in the summer of 1974 to film Jaws, everything changed. Edgartown became Amity, Bruce the shark menaced local waters with a string of mechanical problems, and the cast and crew settled into Island life for longer than any of them had anticipated. Dozens of Islanders and washashores signed up to work on the now-legendary production. Jaws could not have been made without the knowledge and support of people who lived on Martha’s Vineyard.
Before the mechanical shark ever roamed these waters, studio producers on a tight budget needed to figure out where Jaws should be filmed. In late 1973, Universal Studios hired Joe Alves to be the production designer – Alves wound up doing much more. “The studio was not behind the movie,” Alves said. “Normally they have a location department that scouts these things, but the studio didn’t want to pay for that.” The mechanical shark would need a body of water with a flat, sandy bottom and small tidal fluctuations to work, conditions that couldn’t be found on the West Coast. Alves met Jaws author Peter Benchley for dinner in New York to get his advice and Benchley said, “Go to Nantucket. My parents live there. My mother will make you a cucumber and cheese sandwich.” Benchley dismissed the idea of going to Martha’s Vineyard: “I don’t think there’s anything there,” he said.
From Woods Hole, Alves boarded the ferry to Nantucket, but a snowstorm turned the trip around. The Islander ferry was still running to the Vineyard despite the storm; on a whim, Alves got on board. “I got off the boat in Vineyard Haven, and I saw that there was a big bay with a depth of twenty-five and a tide of only two feet, and I thought, ‘This is perfect,’” Alves said. He went out exploring and found Cow Bay, near Bend in the Road Beach. “I went to Edgartown, and it was perfect – the picket fences, the nice little wharf. The village of Menemsha was great, and there was an empty lot that was the perfect place to put Quint’s shack.”
Back in California, then twenty-six-year-old director Steven Spielberg approved the location based on Alves’s photographs, and work began on the mechanical shark.
“I was thirty years old and went to work on building the shark in the San Fernando Valley,” remembered Richie Helmer, an important part of the special effects crew, under the direction of special effects artist Bob Mattey. Helmer helped build three hydraulic-powered mechanical sharks, one which would go left-to-right, a right-to-left version, and the front-facing shark. “I didn’t know anything about Martha’s Vineyard, but in the middle of the day I would shout out, ‘Martha, we’re coming!’”
Alves returned to the Island in late winter. “I took a painter and a carpenter, really low key, and I hired all locals to build the boat and the shack,” he said. Ward Welton, the union painter from Hollywood, hired Marty Milner, an Island carpenter, as foreman of set construction for local
hires. “Back then, after the staff of the [Vineyard] Gazette put the paper to bed every week, they met at the Square Rigger on Thursday nights. It turned into a meeting place where lots of workers gathered every week,” Milner said. That’s where he started recruiting people to work on Jaws.
Kanta Lipsky (then known as Karen Shigley) was one of those workers. She had picked up her first painting job on Jungle Beach (now Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark) in the fall of 1973 from a guy wearing nothing but clay. “It was a time of so much opportunity,” she recalled. “People shared, there were potlucks, and we camped on each other’s property.” In early spring of 1974, Lipsky and her friends had just finished a cold, dirty job hanging sheetrock in closets. Her friends were out at The Ritz in Oak Bluffs when Jim Woods, the head of prop construction, showed up.
“There was a day to go apply to work on the movie,” Lipsky said. “I had a boyfriend at the time, and he was applying. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have.” She said that the guys just signed on, but that she had to convince Milner, the foreman, that she could “keep up with the fellas.”
“It was a very jolly crew, everyone was just happy to be there,” Lipsky said. “Jim Woods wanted us to go fast, he didn’t care if the joint was perfect. He was a rough-and-tumble kind of guy, wanting it to get done on time.” She worked on the cabanas used in the beach scenes and the Orca II, one of the boats used in filming. When the construction was over she went on unemployment for a while. “We got our jobs done, but we had a lot of fun while we were doing it. We were all so young!”
Eric Ropke, a local carpenter, was one of those who answered the ad for auditions in the Vineyard Gazette. “I had done some theater stuff,” he said, “so I thought I would audition. Then I met a guy named Jim Woods, who was the head honcho for the carpentry crew.” Ropke signed on and became the “hippie with a hammer,” working on the three flotation devices plus the Garage Sale barge. He stayed on after the barges were built, just being on hand to drive a nail as needed until filming wrapped up in the fall. “I got a chance to see how they do things, and it was pretty fascinating I have to say.”
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The aquatic star of the movie arrived from California via railway, tractor trailer, and ferry, and didn’t get its film debut until most of the speaking parts of the film were shot. Once Bruce the mechanical shark hit the salt water, the special effects crew realized they had to reevaluate their plans.
Helmer and the shark arrived on the Island in early June, new to the challenges of salt water, tides, and currents. “The air tank on the barge controlled the shark. It just turned into a mess,” Helmer said. “I did electrical switching to turn the valves on and off. This is where we had our problems. We were pumping not only air but also water to the electric valves, and it turned into something like glue and the valves wouldn’t work anymore.”
The skeleton of the shark was made of pipes with foam “blubber” padding them out and four-way ripstop nylon on top of that. The people who built the sharks had decades of experience in practical effects, but no experience at all with the ocean. The experiment was not going smoothly. Every day, the sharks came back to “Shark City,” located at the corner of Oak Bluffs Harbor, near the East Chop Beach Club, wet and damaged. Milner sometimes worked on them through the night. “As the foam absorbed salt water, it smelled like low tide,” he explained. “You have to squeeze the water out – biological brine. That water will prevent the epoxy from sticking.” He heated the damp foam with kerosene heaters and paint removal guns to dry it, then brushed off the loose parts with a steel brush and made a clean cut in the ripstop nylon with a razor. Then he glued it together with flexible epoxy to dry and set before the next day’s shoot. “The smell got worse the longer the movie went on. It actually made my eyes water,” Milner said.
Working on the film felt chaotic, Milner said. “You got the storyboard, but that’s not how the construction worked,” he recalled. “We worked sporadically on different things based on the weather, who was available to work, and what we guessed might be next, like in a seance. You’ve got a nonsequential series of construction orders from two or three different sources.”
Some of the locals ended up filling more than one role during the production of Jaws, and their marine expertise proved invaluable. “Lynn Murphy had a shack right by where we were building Quint’s shack,” Alves recalled. Murphy was a marine mechanic who was initially annoyed by the Hollywood crews: “You’re getting paint all over me and my boat!” Murphy complained to Alves. But soon Murphy was towing the mechanical shark through take after take. He also served as partial inspiration for the character of Quint. “My parents really liked working with the special effects team,” said Lucas Murphy, the late Lynn Murphy’s son. “The shark came to the Island as a puppet and it just plain didn’t work. My father was hired to just move some stuff around, a very minor job, but he started doing more and helping them figure out how to make that shark work.” His mother, Susan Murphy, learned to run a boat that summer to shuttle the special effects crews around on the water.
The shark left its mark on everyone. One day while working on the sharks, Alves told Helmer to swim underwater in the murky water with his snorkel on to check something. “All of a sudden I saw the face of the shark and that was the scariest moment I had on the show, even though I’d worked on it for months in California,” Helmer remembered. It also fooled casual bystanders. “People on the ferry saw us towing the shark in one day. They were yelling down at us: ‘What kind of bait did you use?’ They had no idea we were filming a movie.”
Thanks in large part to the shark’s mechanical problems, everything took longer and cost more than anticipated. “What an adventure. It was really unbelievable. I’m glad the shark didn’t work all the time,” Helmer said. “You could say, ‘Look at the horrifying problems we had,’ but there wasn’t a guy on that show who wasn’t full of adventure.”
“The amazing thing was that they were here for so long,” said Sue Carroll, whose father, the late Bob Carroll, owned the Kelley House hotel in downtown Edgartown where much of the cast and crew from Jaws stayed. Bob Carroll, who was struggling with costs at the time due to the expansion of the hotel, was saved by the late-winter arrival of a big deposit on rooms.
“They thought they would be here for a couple of months and then they were here all summer and into November,” Carroll remembered. People got to know each other. “Marriages ended, romances started,” she said. “There were a few people who got married to guys on the crew and moved out to Hollywood. None of us had any familiarity with the movie business, and it was all interesting to all of us.”
Lipsky and Ropke had a great time working on the film, but didn’t give it much thought in later years. “I didn’t even go to the opening, I was so over it,” Lipsky said.
“By the time they left no one was saying anything about whether they thought this movie was going to make it to the screen or not, so we just went back to what we were doing,” Ropke recalled. His perspective changed when he was working on a display for the Jaws festival in 2012. “When I was working on that, people found out that I had worked on the original movie and they started treating me like I was some kind of rock star. They wanted my autograph. I had no idea that it had created such a fan base, like Star Trek or Star Wars.”
Bruce the shark may have been born in California, but he wouldn’t have survived filming without Islanders’ knowledge and hard work. Vineyarders made sure that Hollywood crews could navigate and film with the challenges of salt water, currents, marine mechanics, and the wind and waves. They built and painted the Orca II and much more, building pieces of the set, breaking them down and setting them up again. They kept Bruce from melting into a mass of gummed-up valves and rotting “blubber.” Without the locals, the mechanical shark would never have learned to swim in the ocean, and thanks to them, Bruce has been terrifying audiences for fifty years.
This story originally appeared in the specialty publication Jaws 50 Martha's Vineyard: Commemorative Anniversary Edition. For more from that magazine - including write-ups on filming locations, rarely seen photos, firsthand accounts from Islanders in the film, and more - hook your own copy by purchasing it online or from Island newsstands.
