A drunk actor, broken sharks and millions over-budget

They needed a lot more than just a bigger boat.

They needed over double their initial production budget.

They needed one of their trio of leading actors to not be so drunk all the time that he’d black out at work.

And they needed their three robot sharks — “playing” the title character — to stop breaking down. 

The filming of “Jaws,” director Steven Spielberg’s horror classic that turns 50 on Friday, June 20, was plagued by issues on-set in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., during the spring and summer of 1974.

Yes, the movie grossed $476 million globally and became one of the first blockbusters and a landmark in the horror genre. But it also very nearly didn’t work.

“In many ways, launching ‘Jaws’ was a film production problem analogous to NASA trying to land men on the moon and bring them back,” wrote “Jaws” co-screenwriter and actor Carl Gottlieb in the book “The Jaws Log.” “It just had never been done.” 

When producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown hired Spielberg to direct a film based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel “Jaws,” he was just 27 years old and professionally untested. His theatrical film debut, “The Sugarland Express,” hadn’t hit theaters yet. 

But not sold on the alternatives, they went with the young hotshot. Zanuck and Brown budgeted the film at an estimated $3.5 million and wanted production to take 55 days. In the end, “Jaws” treaded water for over 150 days and cost $9 million.

The biggest diva was the shark.

The producers assumed, like with decades of Hollywood pictures, a real great white shark could be simply trained up to do what they needed, Gottlieb writes. That, obviously, was not going to work — although a stuntman was harrowingly snapped at by the genuine article in the waters of Australia. 

So the team planned to build a 25-foot-long mechanical fish. And the only man they could enlist to do it was Bob Mattley, a designer of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Flash Gordon” and others who had came out of retirement for the job. The mechanical beasts were budgeted at $1.2 million (adjusted).

The waves only got rockier. When filming began in the pretty Massachusetts beach town, the shark they called Bruce had never been tested in ocean water. Made of tubular steel covered in a sand-and-paint mixture, each weighed one ton.

The troubles were endless. There were small dents that would cost $50,000 to fix and constant touchups requiring the device be laboriously lugged out. Its motor was eroded by salt and the studio thought the teeth were too white, so they were repainted. At one point, Bruce even sank to the bottom of the ocean. The contraption rarely worked two days straight, and constant delays pushed production into July.

There was so much free time, beer had to be banned on the boat.

“All over the picture shows signs of going down like the Titanic,” Gottlieb wrote.

On booze: Robert Shaw, the actor who played Quint the shark hunter, was an Olympian drinker.

During an on-camera interview, the British actor was asked how he prepares.

“Scotch, vodka, gin, whatever,” he said.

But Spielberg underestimated this fact. When shooting Quint’s famous monologue to Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper and Roy Scheider’s Brody aboard the Orca, he let Shaw throw a few back.

“Robert came over to me and said, ‘You know, Steven, all three of these characters have been drinking and I think I could do a much better job in this speech if you actually let me have a few drinks before I do the speech,’” Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly in 2011. “And I unwisely gave him permission.”

Shaw was plastered. Crew members had to carry him onto the boat, and he was so drunk that they wrapped for the day. 

“At about 2 O’clock in the morning my phone rings and it’s Robert,” the director added. “He had a complete blackout and had no memory of what had gone down that day.”

The scene was re-shot — sober.

“It was like watching Olivier on stage,” Spielberg said.

“Jaws” was released in theaters on June 20, 1975. The movie became a global mega-hit and launched the career of one of Hollywood’s most prominent and influential directors of all time.

However, when “Jaws 2” hit theaters in 1978, the name on the poster wasn’t Spielberg — it was Jeannot Szwarc. The “Raiders of the Lost Ark” genius was traumatized by the original experience.

“[I didn’t come back for the ‘Jaws’ sequels] because making the first movie was a nightmare,” Spielberg told Total Film in 2004. 

“There were endless problems with the shark and it was an impossible shoot. I thought my career was over because no one had ever taken a movie 100 days over schedule.” 

Spielberg added: “It was successful, but I never wanted to go near the water again.”