In the words of the movies, Jaws has “wrapped,” struck its sets and stolen away in mammoth trucks.
The organized madness which has been afloat and ashore continued throughout the week as the plot unfolded in Jaws. There’s a contagiousness to the mood of the opus, and Islanders steadily stopped by to spectate when the filming was on the Norton and Easterbrooks’ dock and peered anxiously seaward when it was not.
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”.
