For Jaws production designer Joe Alves, frights were in short supply on set during the early summer of 1974.

“My concern was the audiences might laugh at the shark,” he said in a telephone conversation from his Hollywood home on Tuesday.

During production the crew would alternately cringe and chuckle during Bruce the Shark’s climactic appearances off State Beach, accompanied as they were by a racket of valves and hydraulic rams. Without the benefit of sound editing and John Williams’s driving, satanic score, the mechanical beast proved rather unintimidating. But with a little movie magic, that all changed.

“At the first screening we had, the audiences didn’t laugh at all,” he said. “They screamed.”

This Saturday Mr. Alves returns to the Vineyard for the official roll-out of Matt Taylor’s Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard at the Federated Church in Edgartown. Mr. Alves will give a lecture, a film presentation on the making of the movie, and discuss the new book, which represents the final word on the production of the landmark blockbuster and its effect on the Island community.

A temperamental and clumsy robotic star was not the only factor that threatened to sink production of the movie that summer. As Mr. Alves tells it, his crew was besieged on all sides by impatient studio executives, finicky Island selectmen, and even an impending actors strike.

“The studio didn’t want to make the movie, they screwed around, they tried to cancel it four times, they had no confidence in it at all,” he said. “They said they had more important movies to do like the Hindenburg. When [Universal Studios executive Marshall Green] said Jaws could be bigger than the Hindenburg, people sort of laughed and said yeah, whatever. They didn’t think this shark movie was going to do anything.”

Despite the unending procession of production snags, Mr. Alves reserves a special place in his heart for the Island that would make Spielberg (who offers a foreword to the book) a household name.

“It was a lot of pressure but it was such a great environment to work in,” he said.

The road to Martha’s Vineyard for Mr. Alves began in New York city in 1973. Mr. Alves, armed with nautical maps and depth charts, met with Jaws author Peter Benchley, who suggested Montauk, Sag Harbor, Covington, R.I., Marblehead and finally Nantucket for possible film locations.

“He said, ‘Go to Nantucket, my parents live there. My mother will make you some cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches.’ I said, ‘What about this other Island, Martha’s Vineyard?’ And he said ‘Eh, there’s really nothing there.’ As it turned out he had never been there, and later when I asked him, he said Island people generally don’t go to other islands.”

Mr. Alves arrived on the Vineyard after being turned around on a ferry to Nantucket by a snow squall and spent the foul night locked in the Mansion House cheering on former University of Southern California star O.J. Simpson as he broke the 2,000-yard barrier for the Buffalo Bills.

“I thought, ‘Wow, good for O.J!’ Later he turned out not to be such a nice guy.”

The next day Mr. Alves set out to scout the Vineyard.

“I drove to Oak Bluffs and thought, ‘This place has too much character. It’s too Victorian.’ ”

Edgartown proved less exotic.

“This town was so straight up New England-looking and here comes a shark and it’s going to take all that perfect etiquette and just destroy everything,” he said. When he drove to Menemsha, the Vineyard became a lock.

“I thought this is it,” he said. “I was a big fan of David Lean’s who would build these huge sets and I thought, wow, if he was doing this movie he would build Menemsha just the way it is. It was perfect.”

It wasn’t long, though, before Mr. Alves and the crew were introduced to the frustratingly languorous pace of Island life. Compared with Hollywood, where whole worlds are assembled and razed with the turning of a production schedule, they found in the Vineyard an atmosphere resistant to the ambitious pace of filmmaking.

“I made a model of Quint’s shack and showed the Chilmark selectmen and they said, it’s too high, it breaks an ordinance. I said, it’s an illusion, it’s a prop, we’re going to tear it down afterwards. When I started to build it and I put one pylon into the water the harbor master tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Well, you’ve got to have a permit for this.’ I said, ‘I’m two feet into the water and I’ve got five permits.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, well you’re going to need another permit.’ ”

When Vineyarders realized the economic boon in store, Mr. Alves said, they warmed up to the tinsel town caravan (barring the occasional dune-buggying rugrats that would hassle the State Beach set).

Mr. Alves is especially grateful to the assistance of Islanders, employed in large numbers by the studio, without whom the project would have likely failed.

“I said in the book that if you’re going to war you want Lynn Murphy by your side, and I meant it,” he said referring to the marine mechanic responsible for towing and coaxing Bruce to life. Mr. Alves reconnected with Mr. Murphy for the Jaws 30th anniversary on the Vineyard in 2005.

“He’s softened a little over the years,” he said. By his own admission, so has Mr. Alves.

“I do a lot of sculpting now, mermaids, full-sized, big ones,” he said. “Some people say it’s the softer side of my Jaws work.”

He said that at the time he had no idea whether the blockbuster would ultimately prove successful.

“You never know,” he said. “You work as hard on the ones that fail as the ones that succeed.”

When he returned to the Vineyard in 1977 to film Jaws 2, he said it was difficult to recapture the excitement and innocence of the first movie. The studio, now fully onboard after the lucrative haul from the first film, proved overbearing and meddlesome, effectively gutting the movie of the magic and suspense of the original. Mr. Alves described a shark $2 million more sophisticated than its quaint predecessor and a clueless director who wanted, among other things, the animal to jump over boats.

“The studio misunderstood the first movie,” he said. “They thought everybody wants to see it because of the shark, so we’ve got to put in a lot more shark action, which wasn’t the case. What drew people to the movie was always the filmmaking.”

Mr. Alves’s talk begins at 5:30 p.m. tomorrow, Saturday, at the Federated Church in Edgartown. There will also be a showing of Carol Fligor’s 8mm home movie footage of the Jaws production. At around 7:15, there will be a reception and book signing at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum on School street featuring numerous members of the Jaws cast and crew, including Mr. Alves, Lynn and Susan Murphy (local hire special effects), Lee Fierro (Mrs. Kintner), Jeffrey Voorhees (Alex, that Kintner boy, Kintner) and Jonathan Searle (boy with fake fin).