That Verna Fields gets a full screen credit to herself in the opening titles is an acknowledgement of her contribution to the picture. Not only would she go on to win an Academy Award for her work, but she would also rise rapidly to the upper echelons of Universal Studios management, accepting the position of Feature Production Vice President. There was even talk of her co-directing Jaws 2 when that movie ran aground in the initial stages of production.
Fields accepted the plaudits and the praise with equanimity. "I got a lot of credit for Jaws, rightly or wrongly," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1982. By then Spielberg's picture had already been anointed a modern classic and the stories surrounding its epic troubled production were part of Hollywood legend. One of the most commonly repeated stories was that Verna Fields had single-handedly saved the picture in the editing suite, and the story was repeated enough for it to start being reported as fact. In 1995 screenwriter Carl Gottlieb felt compelled to scotch this rumour in a letter to The New York Times:
"Speaking from first-hand knowledge and without denigrating Verna Fields's enormous contribution to Jaws, that film didn't need saving. As the screen writer who was present on location and during post-production [...], I remind you that the movie was made by a young, accomplished, confident Steven Spielberg, whose body of work speaks for itself [...] every frame of film an editor cuts is conceived and shot elsewhere, by others. Jaws was the production of a fruitful and happy collaboration, and Steven Spielberg is the true auteur of that experience."
Verna Fields, who died from cancer in 1982, would not have disputed this. Editing is about shaping and refining material, not creating it. As the ellipses in square brackets in the text above show, I have edited Carl Gottlieb's original text, but all the words are his. Fields did, nevertheless, play a much more collaborative role on Jaws than would normally be expected of a film editor. She was there on location and - like Hooper and Brody in the Fourth of July scene - was in constant contact with the director via walkie-talkie, relaying requests for specific shots.
One undisputed contribution that Fields made to Jaws was the loan of her swimming pool as an improvised location for Spielberg's eleventh hour decision to shoot an insert of Ben Gardener's head (complete with one wormy eye socket) popping out of the shattered hull of his sunken boat. In a way, it's a perfect metaphor for the relationship between the director and the editor: Spielberg came up with the idea and Fields provided the pool.
