The camera continues its steady tracking shot. We see the back of a young boy in a white beach hat. He is sitting next to a girl in pigtails, who rocks briefly forward as if in laughter. In the background a smiling girl is holding a large lobster intended for the pot. The director's name appears just before the camera comes to a halt on a medium close up of a handsome blond youth, drinking from what appears to be a paper coffee cup and smoking a cigarette. He is sitting with his back to the group around the fire and is framed slightly to the left of centre, staring intently at a point off to the right.
The storyboard for the credit sequence (which can be viewed as one of the extras on the 30th anniversary DVD) names the director as Stevie Spielberg. It's unlikely, however, that he ever intended to use the shortened boyish form of his first name in the opening titles, and this may just have been an affectionate in-joke. True, he did take both producing and directing credit as Steve Spielberg on the war movie Escape To Nowhere, but he made that when he was thirteen years old.
That's not to say that he had completely put away childish things by 1974. There are plenty of shots of him fooling around on set, and he was - according to movie legend - one of the enthusiastic participants in a massive food fight that broke out between cast and crew one evening. Scriptwriter John Byrum (who would go on to direct Richard Dreyfuss in Inserts) was invited to do an early rewrite of the Jaws script, but declined the offer after a meeting with Spielberg, during which the director flew a remote-controlled toy helicopter around his office to a soundtrack of James Bond music.
Spielberg was not much older than the kids sitting around the camp fire in that opening scene, but he was already something of a seasoned pro in the business. One of his early professional assignments was directing Joan Crawford - another seasoned pro, if ever there was one - in a segment for the pilot of the TV show Night Gallery, and he went on to direct a number of experienced television actors such as Dennis Weaver, Martin Landau and Peter Falk. Jaws would prove to be his toughest assignment to date and, perhaps recognising what he had let himself in for, he even tried to bail out of the job at the eleventh hour. Fortunately, Richard Zanuck was on hand to give him some fatherly advice. "This is the opportunity of a lifetime," he said. "Don't fuck it up." The rest, as they say, is history.
