Edith Blake 'Making of JAWS' author who charted the filming on Martha's Vineyard dies
Edith Blake, who has died aged 97, didn't go hunting for JAWS, the Steven Spielberg shark film surfaced in her back yard (in Amity you say yahd) and - like many residents of Martha's Vineyard - once bitten it would change her life forever.
Blake may not have had behind the scenes insider production knowledge, like JAWS co-screenwriter and actor Carl Gottlieb in The Jaws Log, but she had islander knowledge and perspective from documenting the legendary production that was besieged with mechanical and Martha's Vineyard-made issues.
She covered the seemingly never ending production - which went from 58 days to 159 days - in The Vineyard Gazette, with those musings and her photographs forming a fascinating alternate islander narrative of one of the greatest films ever made that became On Location...On Martha's Vineyard
(The Making of the Movie Jaws). That book ended up in the number six spot in The Daily JAWS top ten JAWS books ever.
The book was republished for its 45th anniversary with a new cover, featuring Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper with that tiger shark, for a new legion of JAWS fans to discover. Ross dusted down his old copy and compared the two, he’s clearly gonna need a bigger book shelf.
According to The Vineyard Gazette in a 40th anniversary look back at the making of the film, this is how fins and fate met, ensuring Edith’s part in JAWS history.
Edith Blake, an Edgartown resident, found herself pulled into the fray when joining her future husband Henry Beetle Hough, then publisher and editor of the Gazette, to a meeting with the filmmakers about a major beach scene they were planning to shoot on Chappaquiddick.
“I got up and I said, ‘That’s not going to work. You can’t get all those hundreds of people over there and back on a ferry boat. You are going to need to find another beach,’” she recalled.
Soon she was working in the casting department and acting as a stand-in for Lorraine Gary.
Blake's memories of Martha's Vineyard from filming during 1974 were captured for an oral history of the making of JAWS as featured on Boston.com, where she recalled that JAWS was a love/hate affir for most residents.
She said: "It was a wonderful summer for those of us who were involved. Those of us who weren’t involved hated it. They were blocking traffic like mad. Moving houses to different locations, and they had honey wagons sitting around and big huge trucks that carried all of the electrical equipment."
Writing in October 1974, right around the time that filming completed on the Vineyard, Blake mused in The Vineyard Gazette about just what impact the film may have on the location that would forever by known as Amity Island.
The saga of the making of the movie Jaws will be a great one in the annals of filmdom, and no doubt stories about how it was done will surface often - so will the sharks.
The making of Jaws has attracted more documentaries and more magazine articles (even in Europe) than any of its predecessors. So, batten down the hatches, along with the trips to Dike Bridge and the County of Dukes County Court House there will now be tourists touring where Jaws was made. It’s something people will jaw about for a long time.
Edith wasn't wrong, and her words and pictures have helped keep that shark film fascination swimming for almost five decades and her memory and unique insight into 1974 on Martha's Vineyard shall forever remain alive and within us to carry forward for future generations of Jaws fans.
Edith Blake's typewriter may now sit silent and the aperture of her camera remain closed, but her JAWS legacy will never be far from the surface of the history of the classic film or Martha's Vineyard.
Edith is sadly the second person associated with JAWS to bid us farewell this week, with its First Assistant Director Tom Joyner also passing away. READ: JAWS first Assistant Director Tom Joyner passes away
Words by Dean Newman
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