Jeannot Szwarc, who has died aged 85, directed Jaws 2 (1978), Supergirl (1984) and Santa Claus: The Movie (1985). This could be described as a hat-trick, but only if one were talking about own goals.
Though Szwarc was a successful television director of more than 50 years’ standing, with multiple episodes under his belt of series such as Kojak and The Rockford Files in the 1970s and Ally McBeal and Grey’s Anatomy in this century, his film career was another matter.
He did sensitive work on smaller-scale pictures such as the time-travel romance Somewhere in Time (1980), starring Christopher Reeve as a 70s playwright who is so beguiled by a painting of a woman from the turn of the century (played by Jane Seymour) that he transports himself back to her era using hypnosis. Szwarc also directed Martin Sheen and Sam Neill in the spy thriller Enigma (1982).
His blockbusters, though, were among the most maligned films of their age. When asked about Jaws 2, Szwarc said: “I do believe I deserve some credit for just pulling it off.”
The odds were not in his favour. He had less than a month to prepare when the picture’s original director, John Hancock, quit three weeks into production. Only 90 seconds of what Hancock had shot proved usable. At that point, Szwarc said, “It was the biggest disaster in the history of Universal. They had spent $10m, and they had nothing.”
An unfinished script, bad weather and a malfunctioning mechanical shark only added to Szwarc’s woes as an immovable release date loomed. He was under no illusions about the task at hand. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a cinematic masterpiece. All I went in with was knowing I had to make it scary, and that I had to finish it.”
The film, which features a scene in which a shark chomps on a sea rescue helicopter as it attempts to take off from water, was met with dismay by critics. Riding the wave of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 predecessor, however, it was still a hit, grossing $187m.
Even as Szwarc was making it, he knew that Hollywood’s business model was unsustainable. “In the long run, it’s dangerous if we only keep turning out these big mothers,” he said. “Jaws or Star Wars makes industry leaders greedy.”
Nor did he have any truck with pretension: “I don’t like films where you’re always being made aware of how brilliant the director is.” Ultimately, he rejected the auteur theory that originated among his compatriots. “I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a craftsman.”
His preference for brisk storytelling (“I always loved American films because there’s an energy to them”) did not preclude beauty. Researching the look of Somewhere in Time, he covered his walls with so many reproductions of great artworks that colleagues on the Universal lot nicknamed his office “the Louvre West”.
He was born in Paris, to Henry and Dora, who fled with him in 1940 after the Nazis invaded. Smuggled out and into Spain and Portugal, they eventually reached Argentina after eight weeks at sea. His family’s history, which included hiding in a cellar from the Gestapo for nine months, made him “aware that no matter how hard things get on a picture, nothing could be that bad”. Once they returned to France in 1947, Szwarc was educated in Paris at the Lycée Claude-Bernard and the Lycée Saint-Louis de Gonzague, then at HEC business school, from which he graduated with a master’s degree.
At HEC, he founded and ran the film society. He consumed films voraciously, as did his friends and fellow future directors Bertrand Tavernier and Yves Boisset, and directed plays. All of this steered him away from his intended career as a diplomat.
Szwarc began directing commercials and documentaries, and worked as a production assistant on Stanley Donen’s comic thriller Charade (1963), which was shot in Paris. “Just breathing the same air as Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn was a big thrill,” he said.
Feeling limited by his opportunities in France, he moved to Los Angeles in 1963. “I came cold, totally cold,” he said. “I did odd jobs. I did some writing. I wrote some textbooks, potato chip commercials.” He got his foot in the door at Universal, and was soon assisting a producer there. He became an associate producer on the crime series Ironside, graduated to directing episodes of the show and never looked back. His TV credits in the early 70s included Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man and more than a fifth of the episodes of the long-running macabre suspense series Night Gallery.
Among his television films was The Small Miracle (1973), which starred one of his heroes, the Italian neo-realist director Vittorio De Sica. “I told him I felt like an art student who had to instruct Michelangelo,” he said.
Szwarc made his big-screen debut in the same year with the Michael Crichton-scripted thriller Extreme Close-Up. He followed this with Bug (1975), a horror film about pyromaniac cockroaches, which became the swansong of the ingenious horror producer William Castle.
In one scene guaranteed to make the skin crawl, Madagascar cockroaches cluster together to spell out the words “We Live”. The effect was achieved by anaesthetising them, placing them in the correct positions and filming them as they twitched back to life; the footage was then played in reverse.
Bug opened in the US in the same week as Jaws and was promptly squashed at the box office. But it later convinced the Jaws editor and Universal executive Verna Fields that Szwarc could save that franchise from jumping the shark.
Though Supergirl was unappreciated at the time, it looks now like a scrappy but charming attempt to widen the scope of the superhero movie. It is also full of eccentric casting: Faye Dunaway as the villain, Peter Cook and Brenda Vaccaro as her sidekicks, and Peter O’Toole as a mentor to Supergirl, who was winningly played by the newcomer Helen Slater.
As with Jaws 2, Szwarc was saddled with script issues from the start. He signed on to direct a version featuring Supergirl teaming up with Superman, but this was scuppered when Reeve backed out. Drastic script changes were followed by post-production meddling from the studio.
Santa Claus: The Movie, which starred Dudley Moore as an elf who falls in with a dastardly toy manufacturer (John Lithgow), was close to an embarrassment. Vincent Canby in the New York Times said the film “manages to look both elaborate and tacky”, and observed that “the appearance of the toys that the elves turn out [suggest] Santa’s workshop must be the world’s largest purchaser of low-grade plywood”.
Szwarc made a handful of other movies but most of his subsequent career was spent in TV. Between 2003 and 2011, he returned to the Supergirl/DC Comics milieu by directing 14 episodes of Smallville, the television series about Superman’s younger years.
“Television is really the art of walking away,” he said. “You’re never going to get a scene perfect; it’s impossible. But you can do good work.”
Hart Hanson, showrunner on the police procedural drama Bones, hired Szwarc to direct 15 episodes between 2007 and 2016, and admitted that “we scheduled him at times when cast and crew were most likely to be exhausted and down because he was a spirit-raiser and energy-infuser.”
Szwarc is survived by his wife Cara de Menaul, and their sons, Sacha and Stefan. An earlier marriage, to the actor Maud Strand, ended in divorce.
• Jeannot Szwarc, film and television director, born 21 November 1939; died 14 January 2025
