Gottlieb’s book, which features an introduction by Peter Benchley, as well as about thirty stills of the production, is written in the style of a journal, with Gottlieb, who worked with Spielberg on the screenplay and also appeared in the film as the reporter named Meadows, tells of the film’s backstory as each crisis is happening, with seemingly no one having a clue how to correct each one. The book touches on every major problem that the cast and crew contended with, Gottlieb providing his analysis every step of the way.

He talks about how nobody really understood how this bestselling novel was going to be made into a movie, particularly in how the shark was going to actually move and open its mouth before the cameras. Gottlieb writes,

Let me repeat that. The production requirements of the shark action sequences in Jaws had never been done before.

Indeed, Gottlieb stresses how unprepared the crew was to deal not only with the mechanical shark in general, but how they were going to deal with it on the open sea. It was one of the great gifts in movie history, it turns out, that the shark didn’t work well because it actually forced Spielberg to only use it sporadically, giving the film more suspense and a true sense of uncertainty.

If the shark had worked beautifully from day one, the finished film would almost certainly not have been as effective.