Spielberg said, "I owe three people a lot for this speech. You�ve heard all this, but you�ve probably never heard it from me. There�s a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I�ve heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn�t want a credit and didn�t arbitrate for one, but he�s the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha�s Vineyard to shoot the movie.
I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.
Howard one day said, 'Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it�s this Indianapolis incident.' I said, 'Howard, what�s that?' And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn�t write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.
But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said 'Can I take a crack at this speech?' and John wrote a 10 page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant, but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut down. Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech."
