Verna Fields cut around a shark that would not work

The standard telling is that the mechanical shark's failures forced Spielberg into restraint, and that restraint made the film. This is true and incomplete. Restraint is not a thing you do on set when your monster does not work; it is a thing you construct afterwards out of footage that was shot expecting a monster.

Fields won an Academy Award for this and is still described, when described at all, as having salvaged something. Salvage is the wrong frame. The withholding pattern that the entire modern suspense film is built on — the cut away, the delayed reveal, the substitution of an effect for its cause — is an editorial structure, and structures have authors.

Spielberg directed it, and the film is unmistakably his. It is also unmistakably hers, and only one of those two claims requires an argument.