Steven Spielberg’s secret James Bond shout-out in ‘Jaws’

It’s hard to imagine a time when Steven Spielberg had to ask anyone for work. Even though the filmmaking wunderkind was directing primetime television episodes with known Hollywood legends at the age of 22 (we speak of directing Joan Crawford in Night Gallery, his first substantial gig) and his first feature-length project (Duel) at 24, he was not yet in a position where he could have any project automatically greenlit. And, at the time, what he wanted to do was make a James Bond picture.

As Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly in 2011, “When I first started making movies, the only franchise I cared about and wanted to be part of was James Bond. When I started out as a TV director, my pie-in-the-sky dream was to make a little movie that would get some notoriety, and then [producer] Cubby Broccoli would call me and ask me to direct the next James Bond picture. But I could never get Cubby Broccoli to hire me.”

The first “little movie” Spielberg made, after the made-for-television Duel was re-released theatrically, was The Sugarland Express, starring Goldie Hawn. And though the call from Her Majesty’s secret service didn’t come, he did land a pretty solid next gig: bringing the hit ichthyological novel Jaws to the screen.

Some hardcore cinephiles have determined that within the literal belly of the beast, you’ll find Spielberg’s entrails, er, entreaty for the James Bond gig.

To wit: the scene where Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss perform a fish autopsy on the tiger shark (the movie’s red herring, to use more oceanic metaphors), and yank out its guts. In the muck is an old license plate. It reads 007 o 981.

The 007 could be a shout-out to Britain’s favorite debonair spy, or it could be a coincidence. However, when you look closer at it, you’ll see that it’s a Louisiana plate with the numbers 72 and 73 around the state’s name.

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The most recent Bond picture, Live and Let Die, was predominantly shot in Louisiana in 1972, and released to theaters in 1973. You can also see the slogan “Sportsmen’s Paradise” on the plate, which is also featured on a billboard in the Bond film.

Sure, sharks can swim wherever they want, but Jaws‘ Amity Island has always been accepted as somewhere in New England/Long Island. How’d this guy get so far from Louisiana?

Anyhow, this subliminal message to the Bond producer didn’t do the trick. But even after the massive success of Jaws, the director still had dreams of 007, and was rejected when he made more direct overtures. Even after his follow-up, the hugely popular Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he got a second diss, according to more recent interviews.

In fact, according to Roger Moore, Spielberg approached the Bond actor, hoping he would put in a good word with the boss, who flat-out nixed it.

“Do you know how much of a percentage he’d want?” Moore claimed Broccoli said. And, at the time, the deal was that a Bond director did not get a cut of the movie — just a flat fee. Penny wise and pound foolish, we say!

So Spielberg, licking his wounds, threw some ideas around with his old chum George Lucas and realized he could get his action-adventure kicks by making Raiders of the Lost Ark instead. (Some argue that, decades later, Spielberg finally scratched his spycraft itch with the Oscar-nominated Munich, a serious picture that still has a great number of thrilling scenes.)

Would Spielberg ever consider a 007 flick today? In that 2011 interview, he said, “Now, sadly, they can’t afford me.” But that was before Amazon acquired the rights to the property.

Hey, Jeff Bezos, quit firing Katy Perry into space, max out your Discover card, and get Steven Spielberg to make the next Bond picture! You know you want to!