By 1975 my collection of film soundtracks numbered about fifty film scores and numerous compilations, both on vinyl LP and cassette tape. Apart from my sister, who owned a few Elvis and David Cassidy records, I was the only person in our house who regularly listened to music, and so both the family record and cassette players were usually to be found in my room. The record player was a Bush model and looked something like this. My parents had bought it in the Sixties, and it still had the price tag - in guineas - stuck to it. Before I started collecting soundtracks our family's record collection was modest - mostly easy listening (Shirley Bassey and Val Doonican) and a few classical discs (Beethoven and Tchaikovsky) on the budget-priced Music for Pleasure (MFP) label. Our cassette player was an even more primitive machine and looked similar to this. After so many hours of use the tape heads would get dirty and had to be swabbed clean with alcohol using a Q-tip. Vinyl records were easily scratched and there was always a tension when playing a record for the first time to see if any of the tracks were marred by blips or jumps. Cassette tapes could warp, and if the spools stiffened the tape band could get entangled in the rollers and chewed up by the machine.
I had a lot of John Barry (various Bond scores, compilations of film and TV themes, original soundtracks such as The Day of the Locust) and a growing number of Bernard Herrmann discs (The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann, the Unicorn recording of Psycho, and Bernard Herrmann Conducts). Otherwise my collection was an eclectic mix of composers: Elmer Bernstein, Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, John Morris, Roy Budd, Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin - even Andrew Lloyd Webber, who scored the 1974 thriller The Odessa File. Although I was aware of the work of John Williams (primarily through the disaster pictures he had scored) I did not own any of his scores until Jaws.
On the record cover of a film score there was always the legend: Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. However, this was something of a misnomer for the music was not lifted directly from the soundtrack of the film but recorded separately, usually with a different orchestra. Individual tracks could be made up of various cues from different parts of the film and would often appear in an alternative sequence to the original film. None of this information was of any interest to my non-soundtrack-collecting friends. They would listen to Pink Floyd albums on headphones and marvel at the way the footsteps seemed to walk across the inside of your head. They spent hours discussing the lyrics of Yes and Genesis and admiring the gate fold album covers of Queen and Led Zeppelin. I would sit in my room listening to tracks with titles like 'Bond Back In Action Again' and 'The Giant Chameleon and The Fight'.
It was something of a comfort, therefore, to read Steven Spielberg's liner notes to the Jaws soundtrack - printed on the fold-out inlay of the cassette box - in which he described himself as "an insatiable collector of film music". I was not alone.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Poster Boy
In 1975 there were two film posters on my bedroom wall. Both were for films released the previous year (Gold and The Odessa File) and both were typical of Seventies poster design in that the images were the work of artists rather than photographers. With some notable exceptions film posters today tend to be photo-shopped and airbrushed portraits of movie stars. In the Seventies they were works of art in their own right.
Amongst my growing library of film books was a large A2 ring bound volume, which was a visual history of the art from the days of silent pictures up to the late Sixties. Some of the most striking images in the book (Bonjour Tristesse, An Anatomy of a Murder) turned out to be the work of one man: Saul Bass. Bass enjoyed a long and distinguished career (both in poster and movie title sequence design), working with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Martin Scorsese. He directed a single feature film himself (Phase IV), which was a cerebral entry into the popular Seventies nature-in-revolt genre (of which Jaws may be considered a distant cousin).
If Saul Bass is number one in my personal top ten of movie poster artists, the number two position has to go Roger Kastel. Bass gets the top spot for his body of work. Kastel, who built his reputation as an illustrator of western paperback covers, deserves his place for a single piece: the shark/swimmer image that spearheaded the Jaws promotional campaign.
Kastel was originally commissioned by Bantam Books to do the cover of the paperback version of Benchley's novel, based on the almost abstract image that appeared on the book's hardcover edition. Universal Pictures were impressed enough with his work to buy the rights to it, and over the years it has assumed the power of a corporate logo.
What is it about this particular image - and this particular interpretation of it - that resonates with the zeitgeist?
The simple Freudian explanation is that the image embodies our fear of the id, the unknown terror of the subconscious that threatens our everyday normality. It is, in a sense, a cross-section of the human psyche: above, the calm surface, and below, the primitive urge. There is, too, an undeniable sexual subtext. The rising head of the shark is a phallic symbol - although the pointed snout of Kastel's fish is considerably less priapic that the snub-nosed original dust jacket version. The swimmer's nakedness is teasingly veiled by the disturbed water around her, but there is a hint of an erect nipple and the shadow of pudenda.
Kastel paints both shark and swimmer in photo-realistic detail whilst at the same time allowing himself some artistic licence.
Above the water the woman's hair is flattened to her head with one slick lock falling over her right eye. Below the surface the hair (which is a reddish blonde) floats freely in the element. The right arm is arched behind the woman's back as she is caught in mid-stroke and there is an elegance about the posture that recalls the classical statues of antiquity. Though visually pleasing, the position of the arm seems wrong when compared to the real thing. Go to Google Images and type in 'woman swimming crawl' and almost every shot will show that the arm is bent more like a V at the elbow. The woman's eyes are closed - as they would be to keep out the stinging salt water - and her expression calm. She is completely unaware of the thing rising towards her from the deep.
Although the shark itself is painted in realistic detail, it does not seem to be anatomically correct when compared to photographs, in particular, the down-turned crescent of the jaws. The teeth are layered in rows and convincingly irregular, though their shape is more elongated that a normal Great White's. Here Kastel seems to have taken his cue from a sentence in Benchley's novel, where the shark is described as being like "a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives." The teeth in the poster even seem to have a metallic sheen to them. The shark's head is not quite symmetrical, with the right eye raised slightly more than the left. If you flip the image or look at it in a mirror, this natural irregularity seems even more pronounced. The speed at which the shark is rising is conveyed by the bubbles on either side of its jaws, and again the artist appears to favour the right with a greater sense of commotion. The head has a sleek torpedo-like shape to it, and seems closer to the shark that attacks the estuary victim than the chubbier version of the final act.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the image is the distorted sense of proportion. The shark appears monstrous in comparison to the woman, suggesting that we are not supposed to read this as a literal representation of the attack. And yet the two creatures - predator and prey - occupy the same watery element, and it seems as if we are witnessing the split-second before the shark strikes.
The colour palette is dominated by blues and greens, and within this cold environment the swimmer's tanned skin looks exposed and defenceless.
There is a pleasing geometrical symmetry to the picture. The swimmer, moving from left to right as your own eyes move along this text, is in the exact centre. This horizontal plane is contrasted with the vertical movement of the shark, the tip of whose snout is aimed directly at the woman's midriff. Three quarters of the image is water and above it a white blank onto which is stamped the film's title in bold red capital letters, the edges of the A and the W neatly dovetailing. The film poster was usually in a standard portrait format, but the image was equally striking in both landscape and sidebar. I remember The Sunday Express, which in those days was a broadsheet newspaper, running a two column version of the poster that occupied the full length of one page. Even with the sea from the sides of the image cropped the shark and swimmer were balanced in perfect harmony.
So effective is Kastel's interpretation that it is difficult to fathom why it has recently been tinkered with. The cover of my 2 disc DVD has an embossed updated version, which has little of the power of the original. The water is darker and the shape of the shark, which seems to be glowing with phosphorescence, is partly obscured by the rushing water at its flanks. The swimmer's wrist is no longer cocked and, although the movement of her arm looks more natural, it also looks less elegant. Any hint of nudity has been airbrushed away and obscured by glowing bubbles. The woman's hair has been lightened to a dusty blonde.
Just as companies insist on refreshing their logos, so Universal Studios seems to think that the image that identifies one of their most enduring films needed to change with the times. In fixing something that wasn't broken in the first place, they have failed to recognise one of the qualities of Roger Kastel's work: its timelessness.
Amongst my growing library of film books was a large A2 ring bound volume, which was a visual history of the art from the days of silent pictures up to the late Sixties. Some of the most striking images in the book (Bonjour Tristesse, An Anatomy of a Murder) turned out to be the work of one man: Saul Bass. Bass enjoyed a long and distinguished career (both in poster and movie title sequence design), working with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Martin Scorsese. He directed a single feature film himself (Phase IV), which was a cerebral entry into the popular Seventies nature-in-revolt genre (of which Jaws may be considered a distant cousin).
If Saul Bass is number one in my personal top ten of movie poster artists, the number two position has to go Roger Kastel. Bass gets the top spot for his body of work. Kastel, who built his reputation as an illustrator of western paperback covers, deserves his place for a single piece: the shark/swimmer image that spearheaded the Jaws promotional campaign.
Kastel was originally commissioned by Bantam Books to do the cover of the paperback version of Benchley's novel, based on the almost abstract image that appeared on the book's hardcover edition. Universal Pictures were impressed enough with his work to buy the rights to it, and over the years it has assumed the power of a corporate logo.
What is it about this particular image - and this particular interpretation of it - that resonates with the zeitgeist?
The simple Freudian explanation is that the image embodies our fear of the id, the unknown terror of the subconscious that threatens our everyday normality. It is, in a sense, a cross-section of the human psyche: above, the calm surface, and below, the primitive urge. There is, too, an undeniable sexual subtext. The rising head of the shark is a phallic symbol - although the pointed snout of Kastel's fish is considerably less priapic that the snub-nosed original dust jacket version. The swimmer's nakedness is teasingly veiled by the disturbed water around her, but there is a hint of an erect nipple and the shadow of pudenda.
Kastel paints both shark and swimmer in photo-realistic detail whilst at the same time allowing himself some artistic licence.
Above the water the woman's hair is flattened to her head with one slick lock falling over her right eye. Below the surface the hair (which is a reddish blonde) floats freely in the element. The right arm is arched behind the woman's back as she is caught in mid-stroke and there is an elegance about the posture that recalls the classical statues of antiquity. Though visually pleasing, the position of the arm seems wrong when compared to the real thing. Go to Google Images and type in 'woman swimming crawl' and almost every shot will show that the arm is bent more like a V at the elbow. The woman's eyes are closed - as they would be to keep out the stinging salt water - and her expression calm. She is completely unaware of the thing rising towards her from the deep.
Although the shark itself is painted in realistic detail, it does not seem to be anatomically correct when compared to photographs, in particular, the down-turned crescent of the jaws. The teeth are layered in rows and convincingly irregular, though their shape is more elongated that a normal Great White's. Here Kastel seems to have taken his cue from a sentence in Benchley's novel, where the shark is described as being like "a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives." The teeth in the poster even seem to have a metallic sheen to them. The shark's head is not quite symmetrical, with the right eye raised slightly more than the left. If you flip the image or look at it in a mirror, this natural irregularity seems even more pronounced. The speed at which the shark is rising is conveyed by the bubbles on either side of its jaws, and again the artist appears to favour the right with a greater sense of commotion. The head has a sleek torpedo-like shape to it, and seems closer to the shark that attacks the estuary victim than the chubbier version of the final act.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the image is the distorted sense of proportion. The shark appears monstrous in comparison to the woman, suggesting that we are not supposed to read this as a literal representation of the attack. And yet the two creatures - predator and prey - occupy the same watery element, and it seems as if we are witnessing the split-second before the shark strikes.
The colour palette is dominated by blues and greens, and within this cold environment the swimmer's tanned skin looks exposed and defenceless.
There is a pleasing geometrical symmetry to the picture. The swimmer, moving from left to right as your own eyes move along this text, is in the exact centre. This horizontal plane is contrasted with the vertical movement of the shark, the tip of whose snout is aimed directly at the woman's midriff. Three quarters of the image is water and above it a white blank onto which is stamped the film's title in bold red capital letters, the edges of the A and the W neatly dovetailing. The film poster was usually in a standard portrait format, but the image was equally striking in both landscape and sidebar. I remember The Sunday Express, which in those days was a broadsheet newspaper, running a two column version of the poster that occupied the full length of one page. Even with the sea from the sides of the image cropped the shark and swimmer were balanced in perfect harmony.
So effective is Kastel's interpretation that it is difficult to fathom why it has recently been tinkered with. The cover of my 2 disc DVD has an embossed updated version, which has little of the power of the original. The water is darker and the shape of the shark, which seems to be glowing with phosphorescence, is partly obscured by the rushing water at its flanks. The swimmer's wrist is no longer cocked and, although the movement of her arm looks more natural, it also looks less elegant. Any hint of nudity has been airbrushed away and obscured by glowing bubbles. The woman's hair has been lightened to a dusty blonde.
Just as companies insist on refreshing their logos, so Universal Studios seems to think that the image that identifies one of their most enduring films needed to change with the times. In fixing something that wasn't broken in the first place, they have failed to recognise one of the qualities of Roger Kastel's work: its timelessness.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
The Great White Whale
Any story about a hunt for a Great White shark is bound to invite comparisons with the hunt for the Great White Whale.
Herman Melville's Moby Dick was published in 1851 and, like many original works of art, its genius was not immediately recognised. The story of Captain Ahab's hunt for a white whale received mixed reviews on publication and then drifted in the doldrums of critical opinion for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Disillusioned with the increasingly hostile reception his subsequent novels received, Melville abandoned the literary scene and spent the latter part of his life in obscurity, working in a customs house in New York . He died in 1891, well before the early twentieth century reassessment of his work placed him where he belongs - in the front rank of American writers.
Of all the stories of the sea, Moby Dick is perhaps the greatest. Melville had spent his early life sailing around "the watery part of the world" and crammed those years of experience into his books. Like all great authors, he had a distinctively individual voice. His sentences were like the currents of the sea - long and flowing and pulling in all directions - and he wrote in a peculiar idiom that combined the voice of the folksy pioneer with the sermon of a firebrand preacher. Here is a paragraph from Chapter 48 of Moby Dick in which the boats are lowered in pursuit of a whale:
"It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;- all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;- all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;- neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale."
Into the charmed, churned circle of his narrative, Melville stirred myths and facts about the whale, giving over entire chapters to Wikipedia-type entries on the operation of the nineteenth century whaling industry. The novel starts as a first person narration - famously opening with the words "Call me Ishmael" - but employs multiple points of view as it progresses, appropriating theatrical devices such as soliloquies and stage directions. It's not surprising that this cut-and-paste text should have had Melville's contemporaries scratching their heads. An anonymous English review complained that it was an "ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition." Melville was clearly ahead of his times.
Reviewers of both the book and the movie of Jaws were quick to draw comparisons with Moby Dick. None of them went so far as to suggest that Benchley's novel had any of the literary merit of Melville's, but both books clearly shared some narrative tropes. The most obvious point of comparison was between the characters of Quint and Ahab.
In the final chapter Quint is dragged to a watery death when he is caught by the lines attached to the dying shark. At the climax of Melville's novel Captain Ahab meets a similar though more violent fate:
"The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths."
Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb recognised that Quint's almost elegiac end ("Through the stinging saltwater mist [Brody] saw the fish sink a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint - arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.") was not cinematic enough, and so in the movie Quint goes mano-a-mano with the shark, dying a bloody death like the ones he witnessed in the Pacific.
Quint's initial motive for killing the shark is purely economic ("I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him and kill him for ten.") but is later driven by a crazed monomania ("You're certifiable, Quint!"). This has echoes of Ahab's own journey from a whaleboat captain with business responsibilities to a madman possessed by all-consuming vengeance. Both men have been emotionally and physically scarred by earlier experiences with the creatures they are hunting. Just as Quint endangers his crew mates on the Orca in order to kill the shark, so Ahab is prepared to risk the lives of all aboard the Pequod in pursuit of the whale. Indeed, the scene where Quint smashes the radio to prevent Brody from calling the coastguard has a direct parallel in Chapter 118 of Moby Dick when an unhinged Ahab destroys his sextant, the instrument used to plot the ship's course.
On the Inside Jaws feature on the two disc DVD Steven Spielberg tells how he had intended to include a scene in which Quint visits a local movie theatre showing John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick. Quint ends up laughing so hard at the absurdity of the ending -which Spielberg describes with his typical filmmaker's precision - that the other patrons get up and leave. The scene, which has a grandstanding performance from Gregory Peck as Ahab stabbing his harpoon into a model whale's flank, is a patchwork of live action and miniatures with location and studio shots, and no doubt would look fake to a real fisherman. Peck, sensitive to the criticisms that met his performance as the Pequod's captain, was unwilling to allow the film to be used and so Spielberg dropped the idea.
One final piece of trivia that almost links the two books together is the curious fact that Herman Melville's publisher went by the name of Peter Bentley.
Herman Melville's Moby Dick was published in 1851 and, like many original works of art, its genius was not immediately recognised. The story of Captain Ahab's hunt for a white whale received mixed reviews on publication and then drifted in the doldrums of critical opinion for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Disillusioned with the increasingly hostile reception his subsequent novels received, Melville abandoned the literary scene and spent the latter part of his life in obscurity, working in a customs house in New York . He died in 1891, well before the early twentieth century reassessment of his work placed him where he belongs - in the front rank of American writers.
Of all the stories of the sea, Moby Dick is perhaps the greatest. Melville had spent his early life sailing around "the watery part of the world" and crammed those years of experience into his books. Like all great authors, he had a distinctively individual voice. His sentences were like the currents of the sea - long and flowing and pulling in all directions - and he wrote in a peculiar idiom that combined the voice of the folksy pioneer with the sermon of a firebrand preacher. Here is a paragraph from Chapter 48 of Moby Dick in which the boats are lowered in pursuit of a whale:
"It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;- all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;- all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;- neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale."
Into the charmed, churned circle of his narrative, Melville stirred myths and facts about the whale, giving over entire chapters to Wikipedia-type entries on the operation of the nineteenth century whaling industry. The novel starts as a first person narration - famously opening with the words "Call me Ishmael" - but employs multiple points of view as it progresses, appropriating theatrical devices such as soliloquies and stage directions. It's not surprising that this cut-and-paste text should have had Melville's contemporaries scratching their heads. An anonymous English review complained that it was an "ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition." Melville was clearly ahead of his times.
Reviewers of both the book and the movie of Jaws were quick to draw comparisons with Moby Dick. None of them went so far as to suggest that Benchley's novel had any of the literary merit of Melville's, but both books clearly shared some narrative tropes. The most obvious point of comparison was between the characters of Quint and Ahab.
In the final chapter Quint is dragged to a watery death when he is caught by the lines attached to the dying shark. At the climax of Melville's novel Captain Ahab meets a similar though more violent fate:
"The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths."
Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb recognised that Quint's almost elegiac end ("Through the stinging saltwater mist [Brody] saw the fish sink a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint - arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.") was not cinematic enough, and so in the movie Quint goes mano-a-mano with the shark, dying a bloody death like the ones he witnessed in the Pacific.
Quint's initial motive for killing the shark is purely economic ("I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him and kill him for ten.") but is later driven by a crazed monomania ("You're certifiable, Quint!"). This has echoes of Ahab's own journey from a whaleboat captain with business responsibilities to a madman possessed by all-consuming vengeance. Both men have been emotionally and physically scarred by earlier experiences with the creatures they are hunting. Just as Quint endangers his crew mates on the Orca in order to kill the shark, so Ahab is prepared to risk the lives of all aboard the Pequod in pursuit of the whale. Indeed, the scene where Quint smashes the radio to prevent Brody from calling the coastguard has a direct parallel in Chapter 118 of Moby Dick when an unhinged Ahab destroys his sextant, the instrument used to plot the ship's course.
On the Inside Jaws feature on the two disc DVD Steven Spielberg tells how he had intended to include a scene in which Quint visits a local movie theatre showing John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick. Quint ends up laughing so hard at the absurdity of the ending -which Spielberg describes with his typical filmmaker's precision - that the other patrons get up and leave. The scene, which has a grandstanding performance from Gregory Peck as Ahab stabbing his harpoon into a model whale's flank, is a patchwork of live action and miniatures with location and studio shots, and no doubt would look fake to a real fisherman. Peck, sensitive to the criticisms that met his performance as the Pequod's captain, was unwilling to allow the film to be used and so Spielberg dropped the idea.
One final piece of trivia that almost links the two books together is the curious fact that Herman Melville's publisher went by the name of Peter Bentley.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Blue Water, White Death
In 1971 a documentary film about Great White sharks called Blue Water,White Death was released in the cinemas. This was in the days before the Discovery Channel, and as colour TV in the UK was not yet the norm, the BBC's Natural History Unit was still some years away from making its name. The Sunday Times ran an article in its magazine section to promote the film, and it was illustrated with a large grey/blue photograph over the two centre pages. It was a huge close up of the open jaws of a Great White as seen through the bars of a shark cage - so close, in fact, that the tip of the shark's snout was cut off by the top of the page. The eyes of the fish were an impenetrable black ("Like a doll's eyes.") and the teeth were cruel bone-white triangles. I bent back the staples and eased the photo out of the magazine as if it was a centrefold, and stuck it to my bedroom wall, where it remained for years until we moved house. When I took it down, the hardened Blu-Tack peeled the paint away from the wall. I don't have the picture anymore and, no matter how many imaginative word search variations I've typed into Google Images, I've never been able to track it down. Not that I really need to. The image is seared into my visual memory.
As for the film itself, I have a vague memory that it was released on a double bill with the science fiction film Fantastic Voyage. There is an association in my mind of Great White sharks with miniaturized submarines, which I can only assume is the result of some imaginative programming by the film distributors. Even with a dearth of good nature documentaries on TV, it was probably still difficult to lure people into the cinema to see a documentary about fish without the bait of Raquel Welch in a white catsuit.
As for the film itself, I have a vague memory that it was released on a double bill with the science fiction film Fantastic Voyage. There is an association in my mind of Great White sharks with miniaturized submarines, which I can only assume is the result of some imaginative programming by the film distributors. Even with a dearth of good nature documentaries on TV, it was probably still difficult to lure people into the cinema to see a documentary about fish without the bait of Raquel Welch in a white catsuit.
The First Five Pages
Authors, they say, can spend more time crafting the opening of a novel than all the remaining pages put together. As Peter Benchley's editor at Doubleday tells it, the "first five pages [of the original manuscript] were just wonderful. They just went into the eventual book without any changes." When the book was published a number of critics cited the first chapter as a hook that no reader could wriggle free from. Book World said, "To read the first few pages of Peter Benchley's book is to be compelled to read them all...". Newsday said, "From the opening chapter when a young woman plunges into the surf and meets the twenty foot shark, the reader is hooked." The Chicago Sun-Times claimed the book was "pure engrossment from the very opening."
The first sentence of Jaws ("The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.") is curious in the fact that it avoids the use of the word 'shark'. Indeed, Benchley eschews the word entirely until the third chapter, and throughout the book tends to prefer the lesser charged 'fish'. The opening paragraph reads like a page from National Geographic and fills us in on on the workings of the fish's respiratory system and hardly qualifies as an attention-grabber.
The second paragraph is an early example of both bad writing and bad editing. We are told that "The land seemed almost as dark as the water, for there was no moon." Then in the very next sentence: "All that separated sea from shore was a long straight stretch of beach - so white that it shone." Interestingly, there is a similar confusion of illumination in the opening of the movie, with both a full moon and a setting sun providing alternate light sources.
The first two human characters - a man and a woman - appear in the third paragraph and make love "with urgent ardor on the cold sand". Benchley employs the language of the bodice-ripper and discretely inserts an adverb to move the story on ("Afterward, the man lay back and closed his eyes.").
The woman - who remains nameless until the end of the chapter - goes into the water. Benchley dedicates a full paragraph to her wading in, and already in this description she is being reduced to her constituent body parts ("... a small wave crashed into her knees ... the water was only up to her hips ... she continued walking until the water covered her shoulders..."). When she eventually starts swimming it is with "the jerky, head-above-water stroke of the untutored." On the film's poster, the naked girl's delicately cocked wrist suggests a certain gracefulness in her crawl.
With both prey and predator in the water, the paragraphs alternate between their points of view. We are given more National Geographic detail ("Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings...") and there is one striking image (the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water "casting a mantle of sparks over the fish."), which may be invoking the phrase "like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea" from Herman Melville's Redburn.
Benchley plays up the suspense before the attack. The woman is lifted by a small wave as the fish hurtles past her and she briefly pauses, unsure of its cause. The shark assumes the standard attack formation ("The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss.") and the tension derives from the fact that the woman is unaware of the danger she is in.
The attack is described in three graphic paragraphs. The woman's initial reaction to having her right leg severed below the knee is probably not medically accurate - she feels a tug on her leg but registers no pain until her hand groping beneath the water makes contact with "a nub of bone and tattered flesh" - but by delaying her "guttural cry of terror" for a few gory sentences, it manages to pile on the horror.
In the next paragraph the shark moves in for the kill. It attacks in a frenzy of violent verbs (hurtle, strike, knock, snap, crunch and smash), and, not for the last time, Benchley likens it to "a locomotive".The word 'jaws' is used twice within three sentences.
The final paragraph describes the shark feeding on its prey - now, no longer a woman in the text, but "the corpse" - and it closes as the body parts drift as flotsam towards the beach, where they will be discovered in the second chapter.
The remainder of the first chapter describes the man's search for the missing woman. It has its share of clunky Dan Brown-like prose ("The man stood and began to dress. He was annoyed that the woman had not woken him when she went back to the house, and he found it curious that she had left her clothes on the beach.") and seems unnecessarily protracted. At the bottom of page seven (all page numbers are for the Fawcett paperback edition) we learn that the woman was called Chrissie. There is also a suggestion that the other house guests (the Henkels) are into swinging, a lifestyle that helped to define the Seventies.
The chapter ends with the kind of line you never hear in real life ("I don't know what time the police in this town go to work, but I guess this is as good a time as any to find out."), but in fiction acts as a convenient segue into the next scene.
The first sentence of Jaws ("The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.") is curious in the fact that it avoids the use of the word 'shark'. Indeed, Benchley eschews the word entirely until the third chapter, and throughout the book tends to prefer the lesser charged 'fish'. The opening paragraph reads like a page from National Geographic and fills us in on on the workings of the fish's respiratory system and hardly qualifies as an attention-grabber.
The second paragraph is an early example of both bad writing and bad editing. We are told that "The land seemed almost as dark as the water, for there was no moon." Then in the very next sentence: "All that separated sea from shore was a long straight stretch of beach - so white that it shone." Interestingly, there is a similar confusion of illumination in the opening of the movie, with both a full moon and a setting sun providing alternate light sources.
The first two human characters - a man and a woman - appear in the third paragraph and make love "with urgent ardor on the cold sand". Benchley employs the language of the bodice-ripper and discretely inserts an adverb to move the story on ("Afterward, the man lay back and closed his eyes.").
The woman - who remains nameless until the end of the chapter - goes into the water. Benchley dedicates a full paragraph to her wading in, and already in this description she is being reduced to her constituent body parts ("... a small wave crashed into her knees ... the water was only up to her hips ... she continued walking until the water covered her shoulders..."). When she eventually starts swimming it is with "the jerky, head-above-water stroke of the untutored." On the film's poster, the naked girl's delicately cocked wrist suggests a certain gracefulness in her crawl.
With both prey and predator in the water, the paragraphs alternate between their points of view. We are given more National Geographic detail ("Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings...") and there is one striking image (the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water "casting a mantle of sparks over the fish."), which may be invoking the phrase "like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea" from Herman Melville's Redburn.
Benchley plays up the suspense before the attack. The woman is lifted by a small wave as the fish hurtles past her and she briefly pauses, unsure of its cause. The shark assumes the standard attack formation ("The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss.") and the tension derives from the fact that the woman is unaware of the danger she is in.
The attack is described in three graphic paragraphs. The woman's initial reaction to having her right leg severed below the knee is probably not medically accurate - she feels a tug on her leg but registers no pain until her hand groping beneath the water makes contact with "a nub of bone and tattered flesh" - but by delaying her "guttural cry of terror" for a few gory sentences, it manages to pile on the horror.
In the next paragraph the shark moves in for the kill. It attacks in a frenzy of violent verbs (hurtle, strike, knock, snap, crunch and smash), and, not for the last time, Benchley likens it to "a locomotive".The word 'jaws' is used twice within three sentences.
The final paragraph describes the shark feeding on its prey - now, no longer a woman in the text, but "the corpse" - and it closes as the body parts drift as flotsam towards the beach, where they will be discovered in the second chapter.
The remainder of the first chapter describes the man's search for the missing woman. It has its share of clunky Dan Brown-like prose ("The man stood and began to dress. He was annoyed that the woman had not woken him when she went back to the house, and he found it curious that she had left her clothes on the beach.") and seems unnecessarily protracted. At the bottom of page seven (all page numbers are for the Fawcett paperback edition) we learn that the woman was called Chrissie. There is also a suggestion that the other house guests (the Henkels) are into swinging, a lifestyle that helped to define the Seventies.
The chapter ends with the kind of line you never hear in real life ("I don't know what time the police in this town go to work, but I guess this is as good a time as any to find out."), but in fiction acts as a convenient segue into the next scene.
Les Dents De La Mer
In 1975 I was studying French at school and our classes were sometimes taken by a young assistant teacher from Brittany. Struggling to interest fourteen unruly boys in the subtleties of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, she tried to engage us by bringing in Xeroxed copies of articles from Paris Match. One of them was on Jaws, or, as the French rather poetically translated it, Les Dents De La Mer (The Teeth of the Sea).
That title ended up coming back and biting the French marketing people in the rear. When Jaws 2 was released they discovered that an elision of the final two words in the proposed Les Dents De La Mer Deux produced the sound merde, a word every schoolboy studying French quickly learns. The sequel was therefore hastily renamed Les Dents de La Mer, La Deuxieme Partie (The Teeth of the Sea, The Second Part). This was a detail that greatly amused the movie's French director Jeannot Szwarc.
Some countries like Israel (Meltaoth) and Poland (Szczeki) provided a direct translation of the title, but the majority chose to avoid any possible ambiguity. In Italy, Brazil and Sweden it was The Shark; in Germany and Austria it was The White Shark; in Finland, The Killer Shark; in Norway, Shark Summer; and in Belgium and the Netherlands it was the The Summer of the White Shark, which I've always thought has a touch of Hemingway about it.
Peter Benchley would famously tell the improbable story that the title was only decided on twenty minutes before the book went to press. When it was in manuscript form he had thought of calling it Stillness in the Water, a phrase which is referenced in Chapter Seven ("That's one of the things divers say about whites. When they're around, there's an awful stillness in the water."). Benchley and his editor finally agreed on Jaws because it was short and would fit easily on the book's dust jacket.
There was a time when the word lacked the resonance it has today. Spielberg, who says he read the book in 'a big block of pages', was intrigued by the title and thought it might be about a dentist. Later, talking himself into making the movie, he saw similarities between the words 'jaws' and 'duel' (the title of his killer truck TV movie) and thought that he was fated to do it.
Jaws is a good title, and in either the white font of the opening credits or the bold red of the movie poster, it grabs your attention. But, if truth be told, it's still only in second place when it comes to the Top Ten Shark Movie Title charts. At Number One, it has to be Blue Water, White Death.
That title ended up coming back and biting the French marketing people in the rear. When Jaws 2 was released they discovered that an elision of the final two words in the proposed Les Dents De La Mer Deux produced the sound merde, a word every schoolboy studying French quickly learns. The sequel was therefore hastily renamed Les Dents de La Mer, La Deuxieme Partie (The Teeth of the Sea, The Second Part). This was a detail that greatly amused the movie's French director Jeannot Szwarc.
Some countries like Israel (Meltaoth) and Poland (Szczeki) provided a direct translation of the title, but the majority chose to avoid any possible ambiguity. In Italy, Brazil and Sweden it was The Shark; in Germany and Austria it was The White Shark; in Finland, The Killer Shark; in Norway, Shark Summer; and in Belgium and the Netherlands it was the The Summer of the White Shark, which I've always thought has a touch of Hemingway about it.
Peter Benchley would famously tell the improbable story that the title was only decided on twenty minutes before the book went to press. When it was in manuscript form he had thought of calling it Stillness in the Water, a phrase which is referenced in Chapter Seven ("That's one of the things divers say about whites. When they're around, there's an awful stillness in the water."). Benchley and his editor finally agreed on Jaws because it was short and would fit easily on the book's dust jacket.
There was a time when the word lacked the resonance it has today. Spielberg, who says he read the book in 'a big block of pages', was intrigued by the title and thought it might be about a dentist. Later, talking himself into making the movie, he saw similarities between the words 'jaws' and 'duel' (the title of his killer truck TV movie) and thought that he was fated to do it.
Jaws is a good title, and in either the white font of the opening credits or the bold red of the movie poster, it grabs your attention. But, if truth be told, it's still only in second place when it comes to the Top Ten Shark Movie Title charts. At Number One, it has to be Blue Water, White Death.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Bestsellers
When Peter Benchley's first novel reached The New York Times bestseller list (where it stayed for almost a year), the author was joining a select club of popular writers who could count their readers in millions. Although it was not strictly a Seventies phenomenon, the bestseller was an integral part of the pop culture landscape of the time. Some authors - like Erich Segal, Richard Bach and William Peter Blatty - earned their place in the pantheon with a single work (Love Story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Exorcist respectively), while others consistently sold well-crafted but formulaic stories by the million. Harold Robbins published five novels between 1971 and 1979. Frederick Forsyth had an extraordinary first five years with The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and The Dogs of War. Stephen King's seemingly unstoppable run of hits began with Carrie in 1973 and he managed to produce another four major novels (Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand and The Dead Zone) before 1980. King's books, like those of many of his best-selling contemporaries, were weighty tomes, clocking in at five, six or seven hundred pages. The length of many bestsellers meant that they were more suited for transfer to the small screen, and the phenomenal success of the miniseries based on Irwin Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man opened the floodgates for TV adaptations.
Benchley's novel is modest in scope compared to the works of some of his contemporaries. In its first edition it ran to 312 pages, and, as the critic quoted on the back of the UK paperback edition attested, it could - at a stretch - be read in a single sitting. Given the Peyton Place quality of its tawdry romantic sub-plot, it is interesting to speculate how the book might have fared as a TV miniseries.
The filmmakers' decided to fillet the story of any narrative element incidental to the shark. Ellen Brody's infidelity, Larry Vaughn's moral disintegration, and the authorial observations on the fragility of the Amity community all had to go in order to serve the simple adventure plot line. Even stripped to the bone, the movie version of Jaws is packed with incident, and, like that other troubled Hollywood production Casablanca, it managed to achieve a sort of narrative perfection in spite of it all.
Benchley's novel provided a road map for Spielberg, and both film and book share many of the same narrative beats. However, they differ significantly in tone. The book leaves behind a sour and rancid taste. At the end of the final chapter, as Brody - alone - kicks towards the shore, there is no sense of triumph. In the movie, Hooper and Brody share a joke as they swim away from the camera, not unlike Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains disappearing into the fog at Casablanca's airport. It's clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Benchley's novel is modest in scope compared to the works of some of his contemporaries. In its first edition it ran to 312 pages, and, as the critic quoted on the back of the UK paperback edition attested, it could - at a stretch - be read in a single sitting. Given the Peyton Place quality of its tawdry romantic sub-plot, it is interesting to speculate how the book might have fared as a TV miniseries.
The filmmakers' decided to fillet the story of any narrative element incidental to the shark. Ellen Brody's infidelity, Larry Vaughn's moral disintegration, and the authorial observations on the fragility of the Amity community all had to go in order to serve the simple adventure plot line. Even stripped to the bone, the movie version of Jaws is packed with incident, and, like that other troubled Hollywood production Casablanca, it managed to achieve a sort of narrative perfection in spite of it all.
Benchley's novel provided a road map for Spielberg, and both film and book share many of the same narrative beats. However, they differ significantly in tone. The book leaves behind a sour and rancid taste. At the end of the final chapter, as Brody - alone - kicks towards the shore, there is no sense of triumph. In the movie, Hooper and Brody share a joke as they swim away from the camera, not unlike Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains disappearing into the fog at Casablanca's airport. It's clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Please, I Need A Picture For The Paper
Back in 1975 word of mouth was literal, not viral, but the fact that there were only newspapers and terrestrial TV to spread the word did not stop Jaws from becoming a pop culture phenomenon. Tom Shone gives an account of Jawsmania in his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.
Living in the UK, I was mostly unaware of the media feeding frenzy until Jaws opened in December. In those days it was common for a six month delay between the US and European release. There was no risk of piracy as there were no digital downloads or mobile phones with video cameras. If you had wanted to get an illegal copy of the film, you would have had to break your way into a projection booth and steal the cans of celluloid. The standard length of a 35mm motion picture reel was a thousand feet and, running at a speed of twenty four frames per second, would have lasted about eleven minutes. So Jaws - at a running time of 124 minutes - would have been just over eleven reels in length. It just wasn't worth the bother.
My first visual sightings of the movie came in the form of an early on-set article in Photoplay and a two page photo spread in Films and Filming. The January 1976 edition of Photoplay, which hit the newsstands in December, put the film on its front cover. The photos that were published avoided showing the mechanical shark in full although there was one picture that gave a sense of the size of the man-eating fish with a traditional fin-slicing-through-the-water shot.
Clips of the film prior to release were rationed to three. BBC 2's film magazine programme Film Night showed the shark's first attack on the Orca, ending just as Quint is about to fire his harpoon. Children's Saturday morning TV screened the less intense scene at the town hall where the fisherman introduces himself. ("Yall know me. Know how I earn a living."). There was something about the way it was staged and filmed - the low angled tracking shot across the room - that imbued it with a sense of foreboding.
The third clip, which was of the most interest to teenage boys, was the opening scene in which Chrissie Watkins goes swimming. It started with the tracking shot of her running along the sand dune and ended with underwater POV shots of her treading water. Fading out before the shark struck and showing nudity only in silhouette, it was a tease in every sense of the word.
As Christmas approached (the film was set for a nationwide release on Boxing Day, December 26th) newspapers were swamped with images of the poster whilst ITV ran thirty second commercials between its seasonal programming. The shot I remember from the TV ads was the one of the departing Orca viewed through the jawbone of a shark and it remains one of my favourite images in the film.
Curiously, I have no memory of seeing the full theatrical trailer in the cinema. I went to the pictures pretty often - two or three times a month - and, in retrospect, in seems unusual that I can't remember seeing it. In those pre-multiplex days cinemas were operated by competing chains and so wouldn't advertise their rivals' upcoming attractions. As I used to go more often to the Odeon and Jaws was shown at the ABC, it may simply have been that I missed the opportunity.
Living in the UK, I was mostly unaware of the media feeding frenzy until Jaws opened in December. In those days it was common for a six month delay between the US and European release. There was no risk of piracy as there were no digital downloads or mobile phones with video cameras. If you had wanted to get an illegal copy of the film, you would have had to break your way into a projection booth and steal the cans of celluloid. The standard length of a 35mm motion picture reel was a thousand feet and, running at a speed of twenty four frames per second, would have lasted about eleven minutes. So Jaws - at a running time of 124 minutes - would have been just over eleven reels in length. It just wasn't worth the bother.
My first visual sightings of the movie came in the form of an early on-set article in Photoplay and a two page photo spread in Films and Filming. The January 1976 edition of Photoplay, which hit the newsstands in December, put the film on its front cover. The photos that were published avoided showing the mechanical shark in full although there was one picture that gave a sense of the size of the man-eating fish with a traditional fin-slicing-through-the-water shot.
Clips of the film prior to release were rationed to three. BBC 2's film magazine programme Film Night showed the shark's first attack on the Orca, ending just as Quint is about to fire his harpoon. Children's Saturday morning TV screened the less intense scene at the town hall where the fisherman introduces himself. ("Yall know me. Know how I earn a living."). There was something about the way it was staged and filmed - the low angled tracking shot across the room - that imbued it with a sense of foreboding.
The third clip, which was of the most interest to teenage boys, was the opening scene in which Chrissie Watkins goes swimming. It started with the tracking shot of her running along the sand dune and ended with underwater POV shots of her treading water. Fading out before the shark struck and showing nudity only in silhouette, it was a tease in every sense of the word.
As Christmas approached (the film was set for a nationwide release on Boxing Day, December 26th) newspapers were swamped with images of the poster whilst ITV ran thirty second commercials between its seasonal programming. The shot I remember from the TV ads was the one of the departing Orca viewed through the jawbone of a shark and it remains one of my favourite images in the film.
Curiously, I have no memory of seeing the full theatrical trailer in the cinema. I went to the pictures pretty often - two or three times a month - and, in retrospect, in seems unusual that I can't remember seeing it. In those pre-multiplex days cinemas were operated by competing chains and so wouldn't advertise their rivals' upcoming attractions. As I used to go more often to the Odeon and Jaws was shown at the ABC, it may simply have been that I missed the opportunity.
Universal Monsters
If you look up the entry for Jaws on either the IMDB site or Wikipedia, you'll find the film is classified as a thriller, but in a lot of movie listings it's often labeled as a horror film. It was selected alongside movies like The Exorcist, Dracula and Psycho for the 82nd Academy Awards tribute to horror films, and when CNBC asked its online readers 'Is Jaws really a horror film?' 62% of them said yes. Websites like Class Horror.Com carry reviews of it alongside more obvious horror movies populated with zombies, vampires and demons.
In some respects, the shark in Jaws can be seen as another in a long line of Universal Monsters, a lineage that dates back to the studio's early silent films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney. The Golden Age of Hollywood horror stretched over the 1930s and 1940s when Lugosi, Karloff and Lon Chaney Jnr stalked the screen as Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, and the Wolfman respectively. Like Jaws, these creature features were subject to increasingly silly sequels (The Curse of ..., The Son of ...., Abbott and Costello Meet ...) that were made with none of the panache of the originals.
By the Fifties audiences wanted something more relevant to their lives than the traditional horror movie tropes of graveyards and haunted houses. The monsters of that decade were the products of natural rather than supernatural forces: botched atomic experiments that spawned giant insects, alien visitors from outer space and newly discovered species brought back to civilization from some remote corner of the world.
Of all the Universal Monsters, Jaws owes the biggest debt to The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). The scene where Julie Adams rashly goes for a dip in a white bathing suit and is stalked from beneath by the Gill-Man has underwater POV shots that anticipate the opening of Spielberg's film. There are also visual parallels to scenes on the Orca when the tramp steamer Rita is attacked and the creature's presence beneath the surface is indicated by the movement of the ropes in which he has become entangled. There are even some low-angle camera flourishes tracking along the steamer's gunwale that could come straight out of Spielberg's directorial bag of tricks.
What differs the monster in Jaws from the Gill-Man (or, indeed, the Frankenstein monster or the Wolfman) is the lack of any sense of pathos and identification. Even King Kong managed to evoke the audience's sympathies when he fell from the top of the Empire State Building.
The shark is closer to monsters like the huge spider from Tarantula or the giant ants from Them! - an elemental force of nature ("What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine."). Audiences tend to empathise with creatures that are at least recognisably human and are capable of showing some kind of emotion. In The Bride of Frankenstein we feel the creature's pain when he is persecuted by the pitchfork-wielding villagers. At the end of An American Werewolf in London there is a glimmer of understanding in the monster's yellow eyes as it recognises Jenny Agutter before being gunned down in a London back alley. Even Godzilla managed to gain a huge Japanese fan base even though he had trampled much of Tokyo underfoot. But at no point in Jaws are we ever rooting for the shark.
In some respects, the shark in Jaws can be seen as another in a long line of Universal Monsters, a lineage that dates back to the studio's early silent films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney. The Golden Age of Hollywood horror stretched over the 1930s and 1940s when Lugosi, Karloff and Lon Chaney Jnr stalked the screen as Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, and the Wolfman respectively. Like Jaws, these creature features were subject to increasingly silly sequels (The Curse of ..., The Son of ...., Abbott and Costello Meet ...) that were made with none of the panache of the originals.
By the Fifties audiences wanted something more relevant to their lives than the traditional horror movie tropes of graveyards and haunted houses. The monsters of that decade were the products of natural rather than supernatural forces: botched atomic experiments that spawned giant insects, alien visitors from outer space and newly discovered species brought back to civilization from some remote corner of the world.
Of all the Universal Monsters, Jaws owes the biggest debt to The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). The scene where Julie Adams rashly goes for a dip in a white bathing suit and is stalked from beneath by the Gill-Man has underwater POV shots that anticipate the opening of Spielberg's film. There are also visual parallels to scenes on the Orca when the tramp steamer Rita is attacked and the creature's presence beneath the surface is indicated by the movement of the ropes in which he has become entangled. There are even some low-angle camera flourishes tracking along the steamer's gunwale that could come straight out of Spielberg's directorial bag of tricks.
What differs the monster in Jaws from the Gill-Man (or, indeed, the Frankenstein monster or the Wolfman) is the lack of any sense of pathos and identification. Even King Kong managed to evoke the audience's sympathies when he fell from the top of the Empire State Building.
The shark is closer to monsters like the huge spider from Tarantula or the giant ants from Them! - an elemental force of nature ("What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine."). Audiences tend to empathise with creatures that are at least recognisably human and are capable of showing some kind of emotion. In The Bride of Frankenstein we feel the creature's pain when he is persecuted by the pitchfork-wielding villagers. At the end of An American Werewolf in London there is a glimmer of understanding in the monster's yellow eyes as it recognises Jenny Agutter before being gunned down in a London back alley. Even Godzilla managed to gain a huge Japanese fan base even though he had trampled much of Tokyo underfoot. But at no point in Jaws are we ever rooting for the shark.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Judging A Book By Its Cover
I bought my first copy of Jaws in our local bookshop some time in the autumn of 1975. It was a Pan paperback and, like most editions before and after, its cover image depicted a shark's head rearing up out of dark water towards the pale figure of a naked female swimmer executing a languorous crawl on the surface. Neither fish nor swimmer were depicted with great anatomical accuracy, and the shark's teeth, though ferocious, looked like those of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight.
Interestingly, the cover of the first US edition is even less realistic. The woman appears to be suspended in blackness above the rising phallic shape below her. Its mouth is a down-turned slit with no visible teeth. The UK's first hardcover edition of the book breaks with the tradition by showing a photo negative image of a Great White's open maw into which has been pasted the image of a sparsely populated beach, with a little boy - who could quite easily be Alex Kintner - waiting to be chewed up in the surf.
On the cover of the Pan paperback the novel's title was in a white jagged toothy-looking font, with the W in particular looking like the maw of a shark. Below that, in a smaller more standard typeface, was the tag line: "The spine-chilling bestseller ... one man against a giant killer shark and a town that won't face the truth!" Below that, the phrase that every popular author dreamed of: "Now a major film." On the back cover there was a quote from The Daily Express: "Pick up Jaws before midnight, read the first five pages, and I guarantee you'll be putting it down breathless and stunned, as dawn was breaking the next day."
Buried In The Back Along With The Grocery Ads
Like producer David Brown, I first encountered Jaws through Cosmopolitan magazine. Peter Benchley's novel was printed in a shortened version at the back of the UK July edition in 1974. The illustration that accompanied the story showed a shark turning towards a horrified female swimmer in a midnight sea and there was something about the image that reminded me of a picture from my childhood.
The magazine was my mother's, something she had packed for our two week summer holiday on the south coast of England. I had just finished One Bright Summer Morning, a crime novel by James Hadley Chase. It had a bright yellow cover with a bloodied bicycle chain snaking across it. Having nothing else to read, I picked up the magazine.
My mother was a regular reader of Cosmopolitan, which had started its own UK edition in the Seventies, and every month it published condensed versions of popular novels in its back pages. On reflection Jaws seems like an unusual choice for the magazine's female target readership, but the visceral horror and the crude language of the original had been quietly excised - as I discovered when I later read the full unexpurgated version. Unsurprisingly, the brief affair between Matt Hooper and Ellen Brody - the one element that the filmmakers immediately jettisoned - remained. Ellen's embarrassment at becoming over-excited in a restaurant as she indulged in a fantasy with her secret date ('She had to fight to keep from shifting on the Leatherette bench. She wanted to squirm back and forth, to move her thighs up and down. But she was afraid of leaving a stain on the seat'.) was exactly the kind of lurid confessional detail that the readers of Cosmo were likely to embrace.
Helen Gurley Brown, wife of producer David Brown, was the editor responsible for turning the magazine into the bible of the sexually liberated woman, a move which revived the publication's flagging circulation and made it one of the decade's touchstones of popular culture.
As David Brown tells the story on the Inside Jaws feature on the movie's 30th Anniversary twin disc DVD, he first came across Benchley's novel in a summary form on a small index card in the magazine's story department. He was enough of a producer to know from a single paragraph that it might make a good movie. I had pretty much the same thought when I finished reading the condensed Cosmo version in a single sitting. The difference was, of course, that David Brown was in a position to do something about it.
Incidentally, I have always thought the James Hadley Chase novel would make a great film, too.
The magazine was my mother's, something she had packed for our two week summer holiday on the south coast of England. I had just finished One Bright Summer Morning, a crime novel by James Hadley Chase. It had a bright yellow cover with a bloodied bicycle chain snaking across it. Having nothing else to read, I picked up the magazine.
My mother was a regular reader of Cosmopolitan, which had started its own UK edition in the Seventies, and every month it published condensed versions of popular novels in its back pages. On reflection Jaws seems like an unusual choice for the magazine's female target readership, but the visceral horror and the crude language of the original had been quietly excised - as I discovered when I later read the full unexpurgated version. Unsurprisingly, the brief affair between Matt Hooper and Ellen Brody - the one element that the filmmakers immediately jettisoned - remained. Ellen's embarrassment at becoming over-excited in a restaurant as she indulged in a fantasy with her secret date ('She had to fight to keep from shifting on the Leatherette bench. She wanted to squirm back and forth, to move her thighs up and down. But she was afraid of leaving a stain on the seat'.) was exactly the kind of lurid confessional detail that the readers of Cosmo were likely to embrace.
Helen Gurley Brown, wife of producer David Brown, was the editor responsible for turning the magazine into the bible of the sexually liberated woman, a move which revived the publication's flagging circulation and made it one of the decade's touchstones of popular culture.
As David Brown tells the story on the Inside Jaws feature on the movie's 30th Anniversary twin disc DVD, he first came across Benchley's novel in a summary form on a small index card in the magazine's story department. He was enough of a producer to know from a single paragraph that it might make a good movie. I had pretty much the same thought when I finished reading the condensed Cosmo version in a single sitting. The difference was, of course, that David Brown was in a position to do something about it.
Incidentally, I have always thought the James Hadley Chase novel would make a great film, too.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Disaster Movies and Slasher Movies
"I don't know. What can we do? Christ, I'd rather have a hurricane. Or even an earthquake. At least after they happen, they're over and done with. You can look around and see what's been done and what has to be done. They're events, something you can handle. They have beginnings and ends. This is crazy. It's as if there was a maniac running around loose, killing people whenever he felt like it. You know who he is, but you can't catch him and you can't stop him. And what makes it worse, you don't know why he's doing it."
In his seminal book on Jaws (the movie) Nigel Andrews quotes this passage from Peter Benchley's novel (page 192 of my Fawcett paperback edition) and points out how it references two Hollywood trends that neatly bookend the Spielberg blockbuster. Before Jaws the disaster movie was all the rage, a trend that was kicked off by Airport (1970), reached a peak with the Academy Award winning The Towering Inferno (1974) and fizzled out with the appropriately named When Time Ran Out...(1980). These were stories of group jeopardy with soap opera scripts. They were peopled with Hollywood A-list casts, who were content to chew whatever scenery remained standing after some cataclysmic event forced them to re-evaluate their lives. Cinemagoers flocked to watch the stars die grisly and painful deaths and to be amazed by pre-CGI effects that offered the kind of spectacle TV could not provide. The films were directed by workmanlike film-makers (Ronald Neame, Mark Robson, Irwin Allen, Jack Smight). Dialogue scenes played like television, and for the big spectacular stunts the camera was invariably locked off. Today the films have a certain nostalgic charm for those who can remember seeing them on their original release, but mostly the wooden acting and polystyrene sets now seem laughable - just as the Fifties Biblical epics looked tired and hackneyed to a Seventies audience.
Universal was responsible for Airport and its subsequent sequels as well as Earthquake (1974), which I think is probably the best of Seventies disaster movies. It seems that the studio was positioning Jaws as its next big disaster film. Early posters for the movie included a sidebar with head shots of the main actors and a single tag line for each character, identifying them through their role. This was the default marketing approach for big cast productions like The Towering Inferno. The posters were trying to tell us that we would really come to care about these people when in fact all the audience wanted was to see them drown, or be consumed by flames, or crushed by a falling slab of concrete. Of course, Jaws broke the mold in more ways than one; if it was a disaster movie, then it was the first one where you really did care about the characters.
The fact that Charlton Heston was seriously considered for the role of Chief Brody also says something about the studio's mindset pre-production. Heston had become associated with the genre even though he had starred in only two major disaster films by 1974. It's difficult to imagine him as Brody - except maybe in the final scene when he's looking into the jaws down the barrel of a rifle.
Three years after the release of Jaws when Irwin Allen's The Swarm was hammering one of the final nails into the disaster movie cycle's coffin, a low-budget horror film re-invented and re-invigorated another kind of cataclysm: the one-man disaster that was the faceless serial killer. The movie was Halloween. Michael Myers, who - just like the shark in Jaws - had his own signature music, stuck randomly and without warning. There are interesting structural parallels between Jaws and Halloween. Both films open with a tour-de-force killing. Both films have a trio of protagonists (the crew of the Orca and the three babysitters). Both films show characters experiencing feelings of doubt and self-denial (don't close the beaches - there is no bogeyman). Both films have show-stopping monologues (Quint's Indianapolis speech; Loomis's condensed case history of Michael Myers). Both films have final confrontations that involve improvised defence based on the materials to hand (the oxygen tank and the coat hanger as weapons). Of course, the big difference is that Jaws has a resolution whereas Halloween - like so many of John Carpenter's great endings - leaves the audience staring into the abyss. Maybe Dr Loomis should have rammed a tank of compressed air down Michael Myers's throat before he emptied his revolver into him.
In his seminal book on Jaws (the movie) Nigel Andrews quotes this passage from Peter Benchley's novel (page 192 of my Fawcett paperback edition) and points out how it references two Hollywood trends that neatly bookend the Spielberg blockbuster. Before Jaws the disaster movie was all the rage, a trend that was kicked off by Airport (1970), reached a peak with the Academy Award winning The Towering Inferno (1974) and fizzled out with the appropriately named When Time Ran Out...(1980). These were stories of group jeopardy with soap opera scripts. They were peopled with Hollywood A-list casts, who were content to chew whatever scenery remained standing after some cataclysmic event forced them to re-evaluate their lives. Cinemagoers flocked to watch the stars die grisly and painful deaths and to be amazed by pre-CGI effects that offered the kind of spectacle TV could not provide. The films were directed by workmanlike film-makers (Ronald Neame, Mark Robson, Irwin Allen, Jack Smight). Dialogue scenes played like television, and for the big spectacular stunts the camera was invariably locked off. Today the films have a certain nostalgic charm for those who can remember seeing them on their original release, but mostly the wooden acting and polystyrene sets now seem laughable - just as the Fifties Biblical epics looked tired and hackneyed to a Seventies audience.
Universal was responsible for Airport and its subsequent sequels as well as Earthquake (1974), which I think is probably the best of Seventies disaster movies. It seems that the studio was positioning Jaws as its next big disaster film. Early posters for the movie included a sidebar with head shots of the main actors and a single tag line for each character, identifying them through their role. This was the default marketing approach for big cast productions like The Towering Inferno. The posters were trying to tell us that we would really come to care about these people when in fact all the audience wanted was to see them drown, or be consumed by flames, or crushed by a falling slab of concrete. Of course, Jaws broke the mold in more ways than one; if it was a disaster movie, then it was the first one where you really did care about the characters.
The fact that Charlton Heston was seriously considered for the role of Chief Brody also says something about the studio's mindset pre-production. Heston had become associated with the genre even though he had starred in only two major disaster films by 1974. It's difficult to imagine him as Brody - except maybe in the final scene when he's looking into the jaws down the barrel of a rifle.
Three years after the release of Jaws when Irwin Allen's The Swarm was hammering one of the final nails into the disaster movie cycle's coffin, a low-budget horror film re-invented and re-invigorated another kind of cataclysm: the one-man disaster that was the faceless serial killer. The movie was Halloween. Michael Myers, who - just like the shark in Jaws - had his own signature music, stuck randomly and without warning. There are interesting structural parallels between Jaws and Halloween. Both films open with a tour-de-force killing. Both films have a trio of protagonists (the crew of the Orca and the three babysitters). Both films show characters experiencing feelings of doubt and self-denial (don't close the beaches - there is no bogeyman). Both films have show-stopping monologues (Quint's Indianapolis speech; Loomis's condensed case history of Michael Myers). Both films have final confrontations that involve improvised defence based on the materials to hand (the oxygen tank and the coat hanger as weapons). Of course, the big difference is that Jaws has a resolution whereas Halloween - like so many of John Carpenter's great endings - leaves the audience staring into the abyss. Maybe Dr Loomis should have rammed a tank of compressed air down Michael Myers's throat before he emptied his revolver into him.
You Yell Barracuda, Everybody Says, Huh, What?
When I was about nine or ten I had a book on fish. It was probably called Fish. I don't remember much about the contents, but I do remember the cover. It was a drawing of an underwater scene and, although perhaps not strictly accurate in the way in which it grouped so many different species into one small section of ocean, it managed to convey the rich variety of marine life. It was in the style used by educational publications like Look and Learn and World of Wonder, done by artists such as C.L Doughty and Angus McBride. In the foreground of the picture was a shark. It was executing a U-turn, away from the bottom right corner, and in this particular movement the artist had managed to convey both a sense of speed and savagery. I remember taking the book to school and copying out the picture in a Friday afternoon art class. It was the first in a small library of books about the ocean that I accumulated. One was called The Wonderful World of Oceans, and another was about sharks. I would sit in my bedroom - like Chief Brody in his den - flipping through the pages and being both fascinated and horrified by the pictures.
I also had a big collection of Biggles books on my shelf. I don't remember any shark-related incidents in any of them, but there must have been some in Biggles in the South Seas. Another series
that I read avidly was the Adventure stories by Willard Price, and there were some harrowing shark encounters in Underwater Adventure. Herge's Tintin books had some memorable moments: in Red Rackham's Treasure Captain Haddock almost gets his hand taken off by a shark, and Tintin dives for the treasure in a shark-shaped submarine. Disappointingly, The Red Sea Sharks does not live up to the promise of its title, although at the end it does have a shark swallow a mine and blow up. There was another exploding shark in the original 1966 Batman movie, a camp spin-off of the camp TV show. As a kid I took the heroic antics of the crime-fighting duo at face value and missed all the satirical signifiers.
Having outgrown the boys' own adventures of Tintin and Biggles and Batman and Robin, I moved on to the more adult gung-ho exploits of Alistair Maclean, and Ian Fleming. There were sharks aplenty in the novel Live and Let Die, but in the film they played a supporting role to the crocodiles. Nevertheless, they did get a Tarot card to themselves on the movie's poster (surely one of the best of Bond), which also adorned the cover of my film-tie-in paperback copy. Thunderball had Sean Connery swimming with sharks even though he was separated from them by a clearly visible Plexiglas partition. In For Your Eyes Only Roger Moore and Carole Bouquet are dragged through the Aegean as shark bait in a scene that is lifted from the novel Live and Let Die. Timothy Dalton threw a crooked federal agent to the sharks in Licence to Kill, whilst arch-villain Stromberg used them to deal with under-performance in his organisation in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Movie scenes involving sharks have always fascinated me. The only thing I remember from Disney's The Swiss Family Robinson was the shark attack at the beginning. I have vivid memories of a scene from a film about a group of castaways in which a man sacrifices himself to a pack of sharks in order to save his friends. There was also an episode of Skippy, which involved a young boy stranded on a capsized boat in shark-infested waters. Probably the most enduring celluloid shark moment I can remember prior to seeing Jaws was not from a film but from a trailer. I have no memory of the title, but it was the early Seventies and it must have been some sort of Roger Corman exploitation flick. It was about a group of hippies on a backpacking trip to South America. Their crazy hedonist antics incur the wrath of a demon on whose burial ground they have pitched their tents. I remember there were some cheesy shots of girls in bikinis grinding to a rock beat and the Voice Over Man intoned, 'They danced on his grave'. Cut to a shot of a decomposed body rising up from its tomb. There was also a scene where a young woman goes skinny-dipping in a lake and is attacked by a shark. I don't know why, but that trailer is one of those weird insubstantial pieces of pop culture that has managed to stay in the active part of my brain for nearly forty years.
In the movies of my childhood memories, sharks were always portrayed in the same way. The ominous shot of a fin slicing through the water and then an insert of real shark footage. Before Jaws, I don't think there was ever a POV shot to indicate the presence of a predator. But even if the cardboard fin was not quite convincing, it always managed to make me shudder at the thought of what might be below the surface.
I also had a big collection of Biggles books on my shelf. I don't remember any shark-related incidents in any of them, but there must have been some in Biggles in the South Seas. Another series
that I read avidly was the Adventure stories by Willard Price, and there were some harrowing shark encounters in Underwater Adventure. Herge's Tintin books had some memorable moments: in Red Rackham's Treasure Captain Haddock almost gets his hand taken off by a shark, and Tintin dives for the treasure in a shark-shaped submarine. Disappointingly, The Red Sea Sharks does not live up to the promise of its title, although at the end it does have a shark swallow a mine and blow up. There was another exploding shark in the original 1966 Batman movie, a camp spin-off of the camp TV show. As a kid I took the heroic antics of the crime-fighting duo at face value and missed all the satirical signifiers.
Having outgrown the boys' own adventures of Tintin and Biggles and Batman and Robin, I moved on to the more adult gung-ho exploits of Alistair Maclean, and Ian Fleming. There were sharks aplenty in the novel Live and Let Die, but in the film they played a supporting role to the crocodiles. Nevertheless, they did get a Tarot card to themselves on the movie's poster (surely one of the best of Bond), which also adorned the cover of my film-tie-in paperback copy. Thunderball had Sean Connery swimming with sharks even though he was separated from them by a clearly visible Plexiglas partition. In For Your Eyes Only Roger Moore and Carole Bouquet are dragged through the Aegean as shark bait in a scene that is lifted from the novel Live and Let Die. Timothy Dalton threw a crooked federal agent to the sharks in Licence to Kill, whilst arch-villain Stromberg used them to deal with under-performance in his organisation in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Movie scenes involving sharks have always fascinated me. The only thing I remember from Disney's The Swiss Family Robinson was the shark attack at the beginning. I have vivid memories of a scene from a film about a group of castaways in which a man sacrifices himself to a pack of sharks in order to save his friends. There was also an episode of Skippy, which involved a young boy stranded on a capsized boat in shark-infested waters. Probably the most enduring celluloid shark moment I can remember prior to seeing Jaws was not from a film but from a trailer. I have no memory of the title, but it was the early Seventies and it must have been some sort of Roger Corman exploitation flick. It was about a group of hippies on a backpacking trip to South America. Their crazy hedonist antics incur the wrath of a demon on whose burial ground they have pitched their tents. I remember there were some cheesy shots of girls in bikinis grinding to a rock beat and the Voice Over Man intoned, 'They danced on his grave'. Cut to a shot of a decomposed body rising up from its tomb. There was also a scene where a young woman goes skinny-dipping in a lake and is attacked by a shark. I don't know why, but that trailer is one of those weird insubstantial pieces of pop culture that has managed to stay in the active part of my brain for nearly forty years.
In the movies of my childhood memories, sharks were always portrayed in the same way. The ominous shot of a fin slicing through the water and then an insert of real shark footage. Before Jaws, I don't think there was ever a POV shot to indicate the presence of a predator. But even if the cardboard fin was not quite convincing, it always managed to make me shudder at the thought of what might be below the surface.
My Movie Obsession #1
This blog is dedicated to my number one movie obsession, Jaws. I'm not one of those clinically-obsessed fans - I don't have any memorabilia, I've never been to Jaws-Fest and I don't dress up as Quint. However, I have seen the movie more times than I care to count (I was a teenager when it was originally released in 1975) and it holds an endless fascination for me. I think we all have a movie like that - one that we encounter at a young age, and which we remain loyal to ever after. If I had been a few years younger, it would have been Star Wars, and if I had been born a little earlier, it might have been .... what? Well, in fact, before Jaws there weren't any movies that people really obsessed about. Maybe The Exorcist, but that wasn't for kids. For me, Jaws was an integral part of my movie education.
By 1975 I had already become one of those annoying know-it-all movie buffs who could quote you lines of dialogue and always sat through the credits. Back then TV (and I mean terrestrial TV, which in the UK meant three channels that closed down at about 11.30 p.m and broadcast test signals for much of the day) actually showed a lot of old black and white movies and through my early teens I watched classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Sullivan's Travels and Citizen Kane. I developed an early interest in Hitchcock after the BBC ran a lengthy season of his work.
In 1973 I bought my first copy of Photoplay magazine. I got it because it had a picture of Roger Moore as James Bond on the cover and I was really into 007. I was too young to have seen the Bond movies come out in the Sixties, but my parents had taken me to several double bills (Dr No and From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball) that were released periodically before the series was eventually sold to TV. I loved the music, especially the twanging guitar riff of 'The James Bond Theme'. Whilst my contemporaries were listening to Queen and Pink Floyd and Elton John, I started building up a collection of John Barry tunes. The first cassette tape I got was called The Best of Bond and had a picture of a blonde (smoking a cigarette and wearing only a trilby hat) artfully concealed behind a strip of film, each frame of which showed a still from a different Bond movie. My movie soundtrack collecting had actually begun a year or two earlier with a series of Music for Pleasure discs recorded by Geoff Love and His Orchestra. The very first one I had - this must have been in 1969 or 1970 - was Big War Movie Themes, which I first heard at a friend's house. There were others - Big Western Movie Themes Vol 2 and Your Top TV Themes - and in 1976 Geoff Love cashed in on the Jaws phenomenon with Big Terror Movie Themes, which was the last of his discs I bought. By then my film score tastes had been refined, thanks mainly to the RCA series of Classic Film Scores, which have recently been reissued.
My two main interests as a teenager were watching old movies on TV and listening to film music, both pretty solitary occupations. So it was no surprise that Jaws - which married modern Seventies film making with a classic Hollywood story structure and an old-school orchestral score - should blow me out of the water.
By 1975 I had already become one of those annoying know-it-all movie buffs who could quote you lines of dialogue and always sat through the credits. Back then TV (and I mean terrestrial TV, which in the UK meant three channels that closed down at about 11.30 p.m and broadcast test signals for much of the day) actually showed a lot of old black and white movies and through my early teens I watched classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Sullivan's Travels and Citizen Kane. I developed an early interest in Hitchcock after the BBC ran a lengthy season of his work.
In 1973 I bought my first copy of Photoplay magazine. I got it because it had a picture of Roger Moore as James Bond on the cover and I was really into 007. I was too young to have seen the Bond movies come out in the Sixties, but my parents had taken me to several double bills (Dr No and From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball) that were released periodically before the series was eventually sold to TV. I loved the music, especially the twanging guitar riff of 'The James Bond Theme'. Whilst my contemporaries were listening to Queen and Pink Floyd and Elton John, I started building up a collection of John Barry tunes. The first cassette tape I got was called The Best of Bond and had a picture of a blonde (smoking a cigarette and wearing only a trilby hat) artfully concealed behind a strip of film, each frame of which showed a still from a different Bond movie. My movie soundtrack collecting had actually begun a year or two earlier with a series of Music for Pleasure discs recorded by Geoff Love and His Orchestra. The very first one I had - this must have been in 1969 or 1970 - was Big War Movie Themes, which I first heard at a friend's house. There were others - Big Western Movie Themes Vol 2 and Your Top TV Themes - and in 1976 Geoff Love cashed in on the Jaws phenomenon with Big Terror Movie Themes, which was the last of his discs I bought. By then my film score tastes had been refined, thanks mainly to the RCA series of Classic Film Scores, which have recently been reissued.
My two main interests as a teenager were watching old movies on TV and listening to film music, both pretty solitary occupations. So it was no surprise that Jaws - which married modern Seventies film making with a classic Hollywood story structure and an old-school orchestral score - should blow me out of the water.
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