"JAWS" - Book vs. Movie

 THE BOOK

vs.

THE MOVIE

Back in 1970 or so,  Peter Benchley, a former speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, and now a freelance writer, saw a story in a newspaper about a shark attack on humans near Long Island.  Intrigued, he clipped the story and carried it in his wallet.  Benchley was both the son and grandson of literary men, and he was an aspiring novelist himself, and he kept kicking around the idea of writing a "shark story".  Long story short,  Benchley struck a deal with Doubleday to publish what would be Benchley's first novel, "Jaws".  

The book was released February 1974 with low expectations.  What first novel ever became a best seller, right?  Well, "Gone With The Wind" did, but that was about it.  Funny thing, though, the book caught on, and even before it began its climb up the best seller lists Bantam bought the paperback rights for $500,000 and Universal Studios bought the movie rights for $150,000.   When the paperback edition was published in 1975, it ended up selling over nine million copies, and it seemed that just about EVERYONE was reading it, including a 23 year old, pre-Grandstander Bob Sproule.

Universal, meanwhile, had assigned some 27 year old kid, a guy with one feature film on his resume, named Steven Spielberg to direct the movie version of the book.   The rest is movie history.  When the movie was released in the Summer of '75 people stood in lines around the block to see it, and the concept of a Summer Blockbuster Movie was born.  If Everybody had read the book, Everybody and their Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, and Brothers went to see the movie.

So what's prompting this Blog Entry?

Well, last month on the 4th of July, I thought it would be  terrific idea to pull out my BlueRay Disc of "Jaws" and watch it once again.  This was, I felt an especially good idea since Linda had never seen the movie, a fact that I couldn't believe.  Shortly after that viewing, I saw a  Kindle Deal of the Day email that offered an e-version of Benchley's original novel for $1.99, so I snapped it up.   While I had seen the movie many times, I had only read the book once, and that was forty-nine years ago.  As I have alluded to many times in this forum, reading a book or seeing a play or movie many years after the first time  can offer a different perspective on the work in question, and I wanted to see if, like the movie, the novel has "held up" fifty years after it's publication.

It would also offer yet another opportunity to answer the age old question, What was better, the book or the movie?  

SPOILER ALERT: At this point I will tell you that there will be spoilers in the following paragraphs.  If you've neither read the book nor seen the movie, but want to do so, then don't say that you haven't been warned.

In researching for this piece, I found an article by Benchley written in 2004 where he said that the movie folks told him early on that it was the punk kid director's wish to do away with the "mafia and sex stuff" from the book and just make a movie that was an all out suspense thriller.  Benchley said, in effect, what the hell, once Universal bought the rights, it was their property to do with what they wanted.

Sex stuff?  I do remember that in the book, Chief Brody's wife Ellen had an affair with Matt Hooper, but I couldn't remember the context.  Turns out that Ellen came from a rich summer family that came to Amity every summer, and that she "married down" when she married Brody, an Amity townie (not a transplanted NYC cop as he was in the movie) who had been on the police force his whole career.  She was at a point in her life where she was questioning her life decision and missing her days as one of the summer people elite.  Oh, she loved Brody and her kids, but, man, there just HAD to be more that being a cop's wife in tourist town.   Matt Hooper, the shark expert sent down by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, turns out to also come from a summer elite family, and was, in fact, the ten years younger brother of a guy that Ellen used to date!  Well, you could see what was coming a mile away, but the affair turned out to be a one time nooner in  cheap Ling Island motel, and in the end, Ellen realized that in Martin Brody, she really did have the life that she wanted.

Mafia stuff?  Remember Mayor Larry Vaughn, played so perfectly smarmy by Murray Hamilton in the movie?

Remember how he kept saying that they just COULDN'T close the beaches for the 4th of July Weekend, because, well, Amity was tourist town nd the residents depended on people flocking to it's beaches.  If there were no tourists, the residents would be unable to survive for the other nine months of the year.  It would be an economic catastrophe.

Well, that lesson in tourist town economy is still very much a part the novel.  Mayor Larry is also a real estate broker, so his income is dependent upon lucrative summer rentals, but it also turns out that Larry was involved in some shady land deals, stemming from a loan he had to take out years earlier from some loan shark Mob guys to help pay for his wife's medical expenses.  It was contrived and cliched and the denouement of this element of the plot was wrapped up by Benchley in a couple of paragraphs almost as an afterthought.

Oh, and disappointingly, in the novel Mayor Vaughn did not utter that line, "Amity, as you know, means friendship."

The three main characters from the movie are, of course in the book:

Chief Martin Brody.  The book version of Brody is, as noted, a lifelong Amity resident, not a transplanted New Yorker.  He understands the economics that drive the town, and, unlike Roy Sheider in the movie, he is willing to hush up some lawlessness in order to avoid publicity that could ruin a summer (a series of rapes from the prior year, for example).  He even agrees to leave the beaches open and stay quiet about Crissie Watkins' ill-fated midnight swim.

Matt Hooper.  Unlike Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper, the guy in the book was not at all likable.  A know it all punk kid, who thinks nothing of boffing the police chief's wife.  The novel's Hooper meets a different fate than the Dreyfuss Hooper, and you don't really feel bad about it at all.

Quint.  The hardboiled, hard scrabble fisherman who offers to kill the shark that has been demonizing Amity, if they pay him twice his going rate.  He is still concerned only about his money, still can barely tolerate the two goofs, Brody and Hooper, who insist on being on his boat with him.  He is not as introspective as Robert Shaw's version was (and by the way, how is that Robert Shaw WASN'T even nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Award that year?)  There is no USS Indianapolis speech in the book.  In the ultimate climax of the battle between boat/men and shark, this Quint becomes an almost cardboard character spewing profanities it the great white.

As for the movie, I wrote about it in a post on July 9, 2017:

When Spielberg agreed to do the movie - and he was only 27 years old at the time, let that fact sink in on you - his vision was that the shark should not be seen by the audience for at least the first hour of the film.  This would build suspense to the point that you would leave you seat when you did see it, and, yes, I STILL jump when that shark puts his head out for the water as Roy Scheider lays out that chum line.

Two lines of dialog from that movie have made their way into the current vernacular to the point that many people who use them may not even realize from whence they came:

• "This was no boating accident." To be used when presented with a set of facts and suppositions, often in the work place, that are obviously pure unadulterated bullshit.
• When confronted with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, either at home, with your family, or in the workplace, who among us hasn't said "We're going to need a bigger boat."

So, what was better, the book or the movie?  As you can probably tell, I believe that Spielberg made the correct decision to eliminate the "sex and mafia stuff" and gave us a movie that is as fresh, and as terrifying, as it was when it first appeared in theaters almost fifty years ago.   The book is a good read, and maybe I've just seen the movie too many times to appreciate Benchley's book as I did when I first read it in 1975.  It's a Grandstander Three Star book, but the movie is a full blown Four Star movie.

Post Script:  After seeing it for the first time, what did Linda think?  She didn't like it, so what do I know?