I’m misquoted in the digital ether all the time, often credited with quips and epigrams that were actually uttered by my grandfather, who died in 1945.)įor me, re-reading Carl’s book was more than merely pleasurable. (In sheer, raw volume, of course, the Internet overwhelms everyone, but it’s unreliable: too many so-called facts go out into cyberspace unchecked and, often, dead wrong. But no one in any medium has come close to being as comprehensive or, more important, as accurate as Carl Gottlieb is in his updated Jaws Log. The making of Jaws has been chronicled ad nauseam, in print, on film, audio tape, video tape, laserdisc, and, most recently, DVD. and in the worldwide debut of a director who would go on to influence the film industry like none other.Īll of us, however, knew that we were witnessing something memorable, exciting, probably unprecedented, and, at times, altogether weird. Back in 19, nobody -myself least of all-knew that we were involved in the birth of a phenomenon that would retain a strange resonance in the culture for a quarter of a century. I couldn’t put it down till I had read it straight through to the endnotes and final credits, for I found myself awash in vivid memories of the most astonishing, tumultuous, and momentous months of my life. I opened the book, prepared to skim through it-just for refreshment, you understand-and was hooked. I recalled reading it in 1975 and thinking then that it was an admirably accurate, balanced, and fair account of the making of the movie.įurthermore, over the ensuing twenty-five years, I had become comfortable with the recollections my personal memory bank had selected and shaped, and I wasn’t interested in disturbing the peace. When I agreed to write these few words as an introduction to the new edition of The Jaws Log, I saw no need to re-read the whole book.

The jaws log by carl gottlieb