The filming of the movie Jaws began that morning on South Beach, and suddenly the parking lot at the end of Katama Road looked like lower Fifth avenue — trucks galore, even a bus. Some had been rented, but others belonging to Universal Studios had traveled the 3,000 miles from Pacific to Atlantic.

At Katama, shooting started yesterday on Jaws. Around the Universal Studios offices the day before, one wouldn’t have believed it was going to happen.

For a nerve-tattering 24 hours this week, Universal Studios’ production on Martha’s Vineyard of the smash-to-be film Jaws was a suspense story that no audience will ever see.

The $3 1/2-million project had run afoul of the law — the production crew had not gotten permission to do a batch of things it was doing.

And permission-getting, which involves formal public notice (see legal advertisements, Page Two), hearings, and mature deliberation, can be agonizingly long. Production costs are budgeted at $30,000 a day.

Since news broke that a film crew from Universal Studios would be making a movie on the Vineyard during the next two months, a subtle primping has been in the March wind. A few fishermen who are rarely seen in working togs have been hanging around Edgartown’s Main street with a cultivated crustiness. Waning Shakespeareans crib for an impromptu audition and casually mutter Falstaff speeches in grocery lines. Archtypal New Englanders develop brooding into a form of showmanship.

Complete with a mechanical shark, underwater footage already shot in Australia and many dollars for the Island’s spring and summer economy, a film crew from Universal Studios will shoot a movie on the Island between late April and July. The story of a rampaging great white shark terrorizing a seaside resort, the film will be directed by Stephen Stielberg, whom producer William Gilmore calls “One of the most talented bright young (26) directors in America”.

The firm, flat fields of Katama, the so-called Great Plain - what use could the energetic men of the 1920’s make of the stretching monotony to fully exploit its, well, its...evenness? The twenties were roaring, but on the Great Plains one could barely work up a sigh; the wind from the sea must be bored itself by the time it had blown over the fields and reached Edgartown.