as his company's first project. Benchley's screenplay was rewritten by Tracy Keenan Wynn and Tom Mankiewicz, while Robert Shaw and Nick Nolte rewrote much of their dialogue. Filming began in July 1976 with open water diving sequences off Black Rock Point, Salt Island, near Peter Island, the location of the real shipwreck of the RMS Rhone in the British Virgin Islands. By August 1976 the production was filming land sequences on location in Bermuda. Other scenes were filmed at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Robert Shaw was paid $650,000 plus a percentage of the profits; Bissett and Nolte were paid $200,000 each. After Shaw suggested that the film would be more realistic if the filming took place underwater, the entire cast and crew were taught how to scuba dive and filmed their scenes underwater. Although some scenes were shot in the real Caribbean Sea at depths of 80 feet, many of them would ultimately be filmed in underwater sets to eliminate the need for decompression. The film originally had an alternate opening depicting the sinking of the Goliath in 1943 with a cameo appearance by Benchley, but it was cut from the film. The production was responsible for a number of technical firsts, including Al Giddings' Petermar camera system and the use of specially modified 5000-watt "Senior" luminaires to provide cinematic lighting underwater. The world's biggest underwater set was dug at the summit of a historic Bermuda hill formerly known as Hospital Island at Ireland Island South. The film was marketed with a massive advertising campaign, with Columbia spending $1.3 million in television commercials and $1.5 million in print advertising. The film was marketed in Playboy and Penthouse magazine with a still of Bisset in a wet T-shirt, although plans to make a poster of this image were cancelled after Bisset threatened to sue. After the ABC Television Network released The Making of Star Wars, Columbia produced a similar one-hour special called The Making of The Deep on the CBS Television Network. Research data reported in The New York Times showed that the marketing of the film was so extensive that the average moviegoer viewing the film had already seen a full 15 minutes of it. Music The film's score was composed by John Barry, who at the time was most famous for his work on the James Bond film series. In the same manner of a Bond film,