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Part of the series, MOTHER CUTTERS.
Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller is based on Peter Benchley's 1974 novel of the same name and tells the tale of a man-eating great white shark attacking beachgoers at a summer resort town. Defying the inept mayor and his cronies, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) sets out to hunt it down with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a curmudgeonly shark hunter (Robert Shaw).
“We all referred to Verna Fields [editor of Jaws] as Mother Cutter. She was very earthy, very maternal. She cut her films at her house, at her pool house, in the San Fernando Valley, and it was a very haimish kind of workplace. All of our disagreements happened with that darn shark! Verna was always in favor of less to be more. And I was trying to squeeze in that one more—because it took me DAYS to get that one shot! So I’m going back to, I’m on a barge for two days trying to get the shark to look real, and the sad fact was that the shark would only look real in 36 frames and not 38 frames. And that 2 frame difference was the difference between something really scary, and something that looked like a great white floating turd.” – Steven Spielberg.