A standard trope of the Hollywood romcom, a meet cute requires that characters destined for a romantic entanglement first encounter each other in an awkward, embarrassing or quirky situation. Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason provide a masterclass in meeting cute in The Goodbye Girl, a 1977 Neil Simon comedy that bagged Dreyfuss an Oscar by giving him the chance to do a comedy riff on his Jaws character.
In the novel Ellen Brody and Hooper meet in the unlikely setting of the Amity hardware store. Ellen has gone there to buy a rubber nozzle for her kitchen sink ("the kind with the switch for spraying"), a detail which could be subject to Freudian scrutiny. Hooper is in the cellar rummaging around for cleats and when Ellen hears his approach on the stairs and sees him come through the door, she feels "a surge of girlish nervousness." Hooper, the sexual predator, like the shark, rises from below.
The two engage in some conversation, which a blushing Ellen interprets as mildly flirtatious. Hooper, though, quickly reveals his true love to be sharks "They're beautiful - God, how beautiful they are!" he says, adding a line which, in a slightly different form, made it into the film script. "They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery."
The location - but not the scene - also made it into the movie, although the hardware store that Brody visits to get materials for the Beach Closed signs is a lighter more touristy place. The "narrow store" of the novel seems more like the General Store in Bodega Bay or Sam Loomis's business in Fairvale.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
History Repeating Itself
At the start of Chapter Five Benchley gives Amity some backstory by running through memorable moments in the town's history from the Revolution to World War Two. Included in the list is a reference to an illicit cargo of rum being salvaged from a wrecked ship. If you change the word rum to morphine, you have the bare bones plot of the author's next book, The Deep.
This is not the only instance of synchronicity in the paragraph. The most recent piece of local history Benchley provides is "the widely reported (though never fully ascertained) landing of three German spies on the Scotch Road beach in 1942." When including this detail he must surely have had in mind his father Nathaniel Benchley's novel The Off-Islanders, a cold war satire published in 1961, in which a Russian submarine runs aground on a sandbank off an East Coast island and sparks a fear of a Soviet invasion amongst the locals. The book was made into a less subtle film with a much less subtle title The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which gave Alan Arkin his first screen role.
The fear of a foreign invasion was, coincidentally, used to (some say) comedic effect in Steven Spielberg's 1941, a film that misfired on its initial release in 1979. The movie included a Jaws parody that - along with other examples of overblown comedy - had many critics saying that the wunderkind director had lost the plot and was all washed up. He then made Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. back to back.
This is not the only instance of synchronicity in the paragraph. The most recent piece of local history Benchley provides is "the widely reported (though never fully ascertained) landing of three German spies on the Scotch Road beach in 1942." When including this detail he must surely have had in mind his father Nathaniel Benchley's novel The Off-Islanders, a cold war satire published in 1961, in which a Russian submarine runs aground on a sandbank off an East Coast island and sparks a fear of a Soviet invasion amongst the locals. The book was made into a less subtle film with a much less subtle title The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which gave Alan Arkin his first screen role.
The fear of a foreign invasion was, coincidentally, used to (some say) comedic effect in Steven Spielberg's 1941, a film that misfired on its initial release in 1979. The movie included a Jaws parody that - along with other examples of overblown comedy - had many critics saying that the wunderkind director had lost the plot and was all washed up. He then made Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. back to back.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Gutted
The one hundred and three pages that make up Part Two of the novel are landlocked. Even when the shark makes a belated appearance in Chapter Ten the action is described from the shore, with only the fin - "a sharp blade of brownish gray" - briefly glimpsed. None of the scenes Benchley describes over these pages - Ellen Brody's meeting with Matt Hooper in the hardware store, the Brodys' dinner party, Ellen's lunchtime tryst with Hooper, Brody's confrontations with Vaughn over his mob connections, and the young swimmer's close encounter with the shark - make it into the movie.
The filmmakers essentially gutted the novel, ripping out the offensive offal of infidelity and bad sex. Benchley clearly had ambivalent feelings about the way his book was adapted for the screen. He famously bad-mouthed Spielberg in the Los Angeles Times and his interview was published just as he was due on location to deliver his cameo. Spielberg was already on record as having described the book's romantic sub-plot as 'too much like Peyton Place.' Ironically enough, both men accused each other of being weak on character development.
Jaws the novel was the work of one man, but the movie was a 'charmed churned circle' of collaboration: the writers, the director, the producers, the actors, even the composer and the editor. Peter Benchley can rightly take credit for his book, but no one individual can take credit for the movie.
The filmmakers essentially gutted the novel, ripping out the offensive offal of infidelity and bad sex. Benchley clearly had ambivalent feelings about the way his book was adapted for the screen. He famously bad-mouthed Spielberg in the Los Angeles Times and his interview was published just as he was due on location to deliver his cameo. Spielberg was already on record as having described the book's romantic sub-plot as 'too much like Peyton Place.' Ironically enough, both men accused each other of being weak on character development.
Jaws the novel was the work of one man, but the movie was a 'charmed churned circle' of collaboration: the writers, the director, the producers, the actors, even the composer and the editor. Peter Benchley can rightly take credit for his book, but no one individual can take credit for the movie.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
How Was Your Day?
Having reduced Ben Gardner's widow to tears, needled Matt Hooper and got into an argument over the phone with Larry Vaughn, Chief Brody is ready to call it a day. Before leaving his desk he does a mental tally of the effects the beach closures have been having on the community. One of the incidents - in which "two kids had rented a skiff [...and...] spent an hour ladling blood, chicken guts and duck heads overboard" - seems the most likely imspiration for the scene in the movie where an armada of ill-equipped local fisherman go chumming and turn the sea red. Another local resident - Jessie Parker - is also suspected of dumping shark bait in the ocean, but it turns out that she was simply trying to get rid of her empty vermouth bottles discretely. Brody advises her to smash the bottles with a hammer before disposing of them ("Nobody would ever know they had been bottles."). It's a tactic - along with the bottle on the string - that would be familiar to a lush - a title which was often ascribed to Benchley himself, and one which eventually became the UK title of his rehab novel Rummies. A fondness for alcohol ran in the family. The author's grandfather, humorist Robert Benchley, is often attributed with coining the witticism 'Let me get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini'.
By the time Brody gets home his kids are planted in front of the TV and his wife is in bed, slowly succumbing to a dose of Seconal, one of the drugs of choice in Jacqueline Susan's The Valley of the Dolls. Benchley devotes an entire paragraph to Brody's preparation of a sandwich from an unappealing pot roast of "brownish-gray and stringy" meat "surrounded by a scum of congealed gravy." Ellen's reaction ("Yech.") as her husband swallows the "dry and flaky" meat, which he has brought up to the bedroom, can be seen as another example of the vomiting/eating motif established in earlier chapters.
The Brodys' conversation has none of the playfulness of the bedroom-set scene early in the movie. Brody's mood is still antagonistic and he seems to be looking for a fight with his wife. When he attempts to make things up by "nuzzling her neck", his advances are checked by the Seconal. Ellen gamely suggests that he goes ahead anyway, but, unlike Guy in Rosemary's Baby, Brody snaps that he's "not very big on screwing corpses".
The bedroom scene - which reeks of what Martin Amis called "the towelly smell of marriage" - is strategically placed at the end of the novel's first part. The reader's sympathies have shifted towards Ellen, and it is with her that much of the book's second part will be preoccupied.
By the time Brody gets home his kids are planted in front of the TV and his wife is in bed, slowly succumbing to a dose of Seconal, one of the drugs of choice in Jacqueline Susan's The Valley of the Dolls. Benchley devotes an entire paragraph to Brody's preparation of a sandwich from an unappealing pot roast of "brownish-gray and stringy" meat "surrounded by a scum of congealed gravy." Ellen's reaction ("Yech.") as her husband swallows the "dry and flaky" meat, which he has brought up to the bedroom, can be seen as another example of the vomiting/eating motif established in earlier chapters.
The Brodys' conversation has none of the playfulness of the bedroom-set scene early in the movie. Brody's mood is still antagonistic and he seems to be looking for a fight with his wife. When he attempts to make things up by "nuzzling her neck", his advances are checked by the Seconal. Ellen gamely suggests that he goes ahead anyway, but, unlike Guy in Rosemary's Baby, Brody snaps that he's "not very big on screwing corpses".
The bedroom scene - which reeks of what Martin Amis called "the towelly smell of marriage" - is strategically placed at the end of the novel's first part. The reader's sympathies have shifted towards Ellen, and it is with her that much of the book's second part will be preoccupied.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Shall I Call the Cops? I'll Call the Cops.
In American cinema the role of the uniformed police officer has varied across time, genre and setting. In the silent movies he - and, up until the Nineties, it invariably was a man - was an authoritarian figure to be mocked and ridiculed. With the arrival of talking pictures he became an established bit part player, always on hand to keep back the crowd or lead the villain down to the cells. No Hollywood version of small town America would be complete without its friendly cop on the beat. An avuncular friend, he was more ready to hand out homespun advice than speeding tickets - just as in the big cities of Hollywood musicals the police officer was there to offer nothing more than a mild rebuke. Film noir, of course, offered up a more ambivalent picture of those who took the pledge to protect and serve. The year 1960 provided a new perspective and, as that decade of anti-authoritarianism progressed, cinema goers became used to seeing the police painted in increasingly darker shades of blue.
1973 - the year Peter Benchley delivered his manuscript - saw the release of three films that neatly encapsulated the perceptions of the American police force in the popular imagination. In Serpico Al Pacino ratted out his corrupt colleagues in the NYPD. The John Milius-scripted Magnum Force had Clint Eastwood taking on a gang of cloned motorcyle cops acting as vigilantes. The Seven-Ups cast Roy Scheider as an undercover cop willing to bend and even break the law in order to secure a collar.
That same year saw the start of the hit CBS show Kojak. Like Starsky and Hutch and later Cagney and Lacey that were to follow it, Kojak avoided the moral ambiguities of law enforcement that were being played out on the big screen. With advertisers to please and the need to wrap up a story within an hour, Seventies cop shows painted police work with broad strokes in bright primary colours.
Closer to reality was the depiction of the profession in popular fiction. Detective fiction in the US had produced a good number of private eyes - from Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade to Ellery Queen and Lew Archer - but it was writers like Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh who popularised the police procedural novel.
There's not much evidence in the text of Jaws to suggest that Peter Benchley devoted a great deal of research into small town law enforcement. He gives us forensic-level detail of Ellen Brody's preparations to commit adultery - "From the back of her closet she took a plastic shopping bag into which she put a pair of bikini underpants, a bra, a neatly folded lavender dress, a pair of low-heeled pumps, a can of spray deodorant, a plastic bottle of bath powder, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste." - but tells us next to nothing about her husband's working practices. Indeed, we read more of Brody at home than of him in the local precinct. When he interacts with members of the public, he is quick to become antagonistic, and his handling of basic procedures - such as informing loved ones of a person's death - would have brought him up before the police commission.
1973 - the year Peter Benchley delivered his manuscript - saw the release of three films that neatly encapsulated the perceptions of the American police force in the popular imagination. In Serpico Al Pacino ratted out his corrupt colleagues in the NYPD. The John Milius-scripted Magnum Force had Clint Eastwood taking on a gang of cloned motorcyle cops acting as vigilantes. The Seven-Ups cast Roy Scheider as an undercover cop willing to bend and even break the law in order to secure a collar.
That same year saw the start of the hit CBS show Kojak. Like Starsky and Hutch and later Cagney and Lacey that were to follow it, Kojak avoided the moral ambiguities of law enforcement that were being played out on the big screen. With advertisers to please and the need to wrap up a story within an hour, Seventies cop shows painted police work with broad strokes in bright primary colours.
Closer to reality was the depiction of the profession in popular fiction. Detective fiction in the US had produced a good number of private eyes - from Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade to Ellery Queen and Lew Archer - but it was writers like Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh who popularised the police procedural novel.
There's not much evidence in the text of Jaws to suggest that Peter Benchley devoted a great deal of research into small town law enforcement. He gives us forensic-level detail of Ellen Brody's preparations to commit adultery - "From the back of her closet she took a plastic shopping bag into which she put a pair of bikini underpants, a bra, a neatly folded lavender dress, a pair of low-heeled pumps, a can of spray deodorant, a plastic bottle of bath powder, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste." - but tells us next to nothing about her husband's working practices. Indeed, we read more of Brody at home than of him in the local precinct. When he interacts with members of the public, he is quick to become antagonistic, and his handling of basic procedures - such as informing loved ones of a person's death - would have brought him up before the police commission.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Bad Twin
Jaws the movie and Jaws the novel have always had a rather uneasy relationship. Although Spielberg was full of praise for the book's potential as a cinematic experience, he was equally vocal about its shortcomings - specifically Benchley's inability to create likeable characters. When offering Richard Dreyfuss the part of Hooper, Spielberg urged the actor not to look at the source material. It was a wise piece of direction. Had Dreyfuss read the character as written, even he might have doubted his ability to pull it off.
Physically, Hooper on the page is quite different from the Hooper on screen. When he steps forward on the dock to shake hands with Brody, he is described as being "mid-twenties ... and handsome: tanned, hair bleached by the sun ... an inch over six feet ..." Dreyfuss was twenty seven when he signed on for the movie, a year younger than his director. According to his IMBD page, Dreyfuss is five foot five.
In the novel the shark expert is every inch the priveleged WASP, a Yale graduate with the standard preppy wardrobe of Lacoste shirts and Weejun loafers. From the description on the page, an unimaginative casting director would have been more likely to call Richard Chamberlain, whose Roger Simmons in The Towering Inferno is the perfect blueprint for Benchley's Hooper.
Brody takes an instant disliking to Hooper and, like some kind of primate, immediately sizes him up as a potential threat. Within pages of meeting, the two men are locking horns. By Part Three they are at one another's throats. It is difficult too for the reader to sympathise with Hooper. Although he is referenced at several points early in the text, he does not make an appearance until page seventy six. By then our loyalties - such as they are - lie with Brody and so, inevitably, we see Hooper through his eyes.
In the movie the character dynamic experiences a seismic shift. When Brody and Hooper shake hands in the harbormaster's hut, they seem to hit it off immediately, and within minutes of screen time they are on first name terms. Scheider's Brody is not in the least threatened by Dreyfuss's Hooper, even when the newcomer trespasses on his home territory. Indeed, the banter and interplay between the police chief, his wife and the expert from the oceanographic institute has a Hawkesian innocence about it.
The one element of Hooper's character that does make it to the screen is his enthusiasm for his subject. In the book he's given several paragraph-long monologues that might have been cut-and-pasted from National Geographic. In the movie, when Hooper first sees the shark, his first instinct it to take pictures of it, coaxing it with his lens like a top fashion photographer ("Come on, darling! Come here, darling! Beautiful!").
Like it or not, the movie Hooper could not exist without the book's. We may enjoy the effervescence of Dreyfuss's performance, but we have to remember that - like the portrait of Dorian Grey - there is a darker, more complex character hidden up in the attic.
Physically, Hooper on the page is quite different from the Hooper on screen. When he steps forward on the dock to shake hands with Brody, he is described as being "mid-twenties ... and handsome: tanned, hair bleached by the sun ... an inch over six feet ..." Dreyfuss was twenty seven when he signed on for the movie, a year younger than his director. According to his IMBD page, Dreyfuss is five foot five.
In the novel the shark expert is every inch the priveleged WASP, a Yale graduate with the standard preppy wardrobe of Lacoste shirts and Weejun loafers. From the description on the page, an unimaginative casting director would have been more likely to call Richard Chamberlain, whose Roger Simmons in The Towering Inferno is the perfect blueprint for Benchley's Hooper.
Brody takes an instant disliking to Hooper and, like some kind of primate, immediately sizes him up as a potential threat. Within pages of meeting, the two men are locking horns. By Part Three they are at one another's throats. It is difficult too for the reader to sympathise with Hooper. Although he is referenced at several points early in the text, he does not make an appearance until page seventy six. By then our loyalties - such as they are - lie with Brody and so, inevitably, we see Hooper through his eyes.
In the movie the character dynamic experiences a seismic shift. When Brody and Hooper shake hands in the harbormaster's hut, they seem to hit it off immediately, and within minutes of screen time they are on first name terms. Scheider's Brody is not in the least threatened by Dreyfuss's Hooper, even when the newcomer trespasses on his home territory. Indeed, the banter and interplay between the police chief, his wife and the expert from the oceanographic institute has a Hawkesian innocence about it.
The one element of Hooper's character that does make it to the screen is his enthusiasm for his subject. In the book he's given several paragraph-long monologues that might have been cut-and-pasted from National Geographic. In the movie, when Hooper first sees the shark, his first instinct it to take pictures of it, coaxing it with his lens like a top fashion photographer ("Come on, darling! Come here, darling! Beautiful!").
Like it or not, the movie Hooper could not exist without the book's. We may enjoy the effervescence of Dreyfuss's performance, but we have to remember that - like the portrait of Dorian Grey - there is a darker, more complex character hidden up in the attic.
Monday, April 18, 2011
That's Not Writing, That's Typing
Like Jack Torrance in the Overlook Hotel, Peter Benchley would have hammered out his manuscript on a manual typewriter. Each blank sheet of paper would have to be inserted into the platen and properly aligned, and at the end of every line the carriage would have to be returned manually. As the pages built up in a neat stack on his desk, the ink on the page would gradually fade until the ribbon would have to be changed. Typing was a physical and sometimes dirty chore. Mark Twain was one of the first authors to submit a typed manuscript to his publisher, although his claim that Tom Sawyer was the first novel to be written on a typewriter is generally disputed. Even if it's not true, it seems right. There is something particularly American about the typewriter and the detritus that surrounds it.
Of his writing habits, Benchley said, 'I sat in the back room of the Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington, New Jersey, in the winters, and in a small, old turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut, in the summers, and wrote what turned out to be Jaws.' Benchley was not driven by a strong creative impulse to tell a story. It took him seven years to get the initial idea down on paper and then it took the encouragement of his editor Tom Congdon and a thousand dollar advance to flesh the story out to one hundred pages. From 1971 to 1973 (winters in the back room, summers in the turkey coop) Benchley wrote and rewrote the still untitled manuscript. It's unlikely, however, that much of that time was devoted to honing the language of the book.
'It is easy', says Nigel Andrews in his pocket movie guide on Jaws, 'to pick out bad passages.' He quotes a line from Chapter Five to illustrate his point: "Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back." Can a shimmy actually skitter? Isn't that rather like a jump leaping, or a hop skipping?
A few pages on Brody breaks the bad news to Ben Gardner's wife, a scene which Benchley records in a sentence that becomes as snarled as one of Quint's keg lines:
"She seemed calmer, but Brody was sure that the calm was a lull before the burst of grief that would come when she realized that the fears which she had lived with every day for the sixteen years she and Ben had been fishing professionally - closet fears shoved into mental recesses and never uttered because they would seem ridiculous - had come true."
It would be easy enough to trawl through the entire novel, netting an entire catch of cliches, purple prose and clunky phrasing, but - to mix a metaphor - that would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
Of his writing habits, Benchley said, 'I sat in the back room of the Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington, New Jersey, in the winters, and in a small, old turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut, in the summers, and wrote what turned out to be Jaws.' Benchley was not driven by a strong creative impulse to tell a story. It took him seven years to get the initial idea down on paper and then it took the encouragement of his editor Tom Congdon and a thousand dollar advance to flesh the story out to one hundred pages. From 1971 to 1973 (winters in the back room, summers in the turkey coop) Benchley wrote and rewrote the still untitled manuscript. It's unlikely, however, that much of that time was devoted to honing the language of the book.
'It is easy', says Nigel Andrews in his pocket movie guide on Jaws, 'to pick out bad passages.' He quotes a line from Chapter Five to illustrate his point: "Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back." Can a shimmy actually skitter? Isn't that rather like a jump leaping, or a hop skipping?
A few pages on Brody breaks the bad news to Ben Gardner's wife, a scene which Benchley records in a sentence that becomes as snarled as one of Quint's keg lines:
"She seemed calmer, but Brody was sure that the calm was a lull before the burst of grief that would come when she realized that the fears which she had lived with every day for the sixteen years she and Ben had been fishing professionally - closet fears shoved into mental recesses and never uttered because they would seem ridiculous - had come true."
It would be easy enough to trawl through the entire novel, netting an entire catch of cliches, purple prose and clunky phrasing, but - to mix a metaphor - that would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
There's A Clinical Name For It, Isn't There?
Aquaphobia is a fear of water, or more specifically a fear of being immersed in water. The symptoms include dizziness, nausea, trembling, sweating and an increased heart rate - what Brody remembers his mother calling "the wimwams." The reference to a childhood memory is a relevant one. Anyone who has learnt to swim as a child can relate to the fear of being in an element which has the ability to swallow and suffocate them. Those who carry a fear of water into their adult life most likely do so as the result of a childhood incident. Extreme aquaphobes may be freaked out by a bathtub or even a glass pitcher. Of the many recorded phobias, a fear of drowning is one that most of us can relate to - certainly more so than a random selection of other fears such as caligynephobia, ereuthrophobia or omphalophobia.
In Jaws it is not simply the water itself, but the creatures which inhabit it that we fear. In describing Brody's own fear of the water, Peter Benchley seems to morph into Stephen King: "In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned." The shark is demonised by Quint, who hurls religious insults at it more frequently than he hurls harpoons("God damn your fucking soul! .... Come up, you devil! .... Come out, you godforsaken sonofabitch! ..... God damn your black soul!").
One of the book's minor characters, Minnie Eldridge, possibly Amity's oldest living resident, invokes the Book of Job and is of the opinion that the shark is on some kind of perverse mission from God. Her firebrand warning seems to echo that of Elijah, whom Ishmael and Queequeg meet when they join the crew of the Pequod. Like shark victim Morris Cater, Minnie does not make it to the movie, but she does get to witness a suitably fiery death in the sequel.
In Jaws it is not simply the water itself, but the creatures which inhabit it that we fear. In describing Brody's own fear of the water, Peter Benchley seems to morph into Stephen King: "In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned." The shark is demonised by Quint, who hurls religious insults at it more frequently than he hurls harpoons("God damn your fucking soul! .... Come up, you devil! .... Come out, you godforsaken sonofabitch! ..... God damn your black soul!").
One of the book's minor characters, Minnie Eldridge, possibly Amity's oldest living resident, invokes the Book of Job and is of the opinion that the shark is on some kind of perverse mission from God. Her firebrand warning seems to echo that of Elijah, whom Ishmael and Queequeg meet when they join the crew of the Pequod. Like shark victim Morris Cater, Minnie does not make it to the movie, but she does get to witness a suitably fiery death in the sequel.
Ghost Ship
In Chapter Five Benchley employs a narrative trope common to horror and mystery genres: the discovery and search of an abandoned area. Ben Gardner has been hired to catch the shark and has gone out on his own. When Brody spies the fisherman's boat through binoculars with no apparent sign of activity on board, he and his deputy go out to investigate. Their exploration of the abandoned craft draws on the ghost ship tradition, in which the discovery of certain signs (a cleat torn from the gunwale, scarred woodwork, bloodstains on the transom, and - the big reveal - a tooth embedded in the hull) point to one inevitable conclusion. As written, the scene has a certain cinematic quality to it. Benchley even inserts a classic Jump Scare when the radio crackles into life and startles Brody, and you can almost hear the ominous music that by rights should underscore the moment when Hendricks leans over the side to retrieve the tooth.
The pages are liberally sprinkled with maritime vocabulary (gunwale, prow, transom, stern, bow, cleat, cockpit, port and starboard), but Brody himself seems all at sea when it comes to boats - even his question to his deputy ("Do you know how to drive this thing?") betrays his ignorance. The filmmakers took this to its logical conclusion by making the character a New York City cop transplanted to an island community, but in the book Brody is a local, though clearly not one with seawater running through his veins.
By the time it reached the movie, the scene too had changed significantly: from day to night, from on board to underwater, from Hendricks to Hooper. The jump scare is turned up all the way to eleven, with a suddenly squawking radio being replaced by a one-eyed severed head. And yet Benchley's original scene was, at least in part, filmed. When British TV reporter Iain Johnstone visited the Martha's Vineyard set in 1974 he witnessed the filming of one boat drawing up alongside another, a scene that was cut short (and probably inevitably scuppered) by one of the actors falling into the water. Johnstone's report, which can be seen as a DVD extra, also eavesdrops on Spielberg and screenwriter Gottlieb riffing on the elements of the ghost ship trope. By setting the discovery of Ben Gardner's boat at night Spielberg was able to kill two birds with one stone: he increased the spooky atmosphere by adding fog and shadow, and also gave himself more control in being able to hide his studio tank work under cover of darkness.
The pages are liberally sprinkled with maritime vocabulary (gunwale, prow, transom, stern, bow, cleat, cockpit, port and starboard), but Brody himself seems all at sea when it comes to boats - even his question to his deputy ("Do you know how to drive this thing?") betrays his ignorance. The filmmakers took this to its logical conclusion by making the character a New York City cop transplanted to an island community, but in the book Brody is a local, though clearly not one with seawater running through his veins.
By the time it reached the movie, the scene too had changed significantly: from day to night, from on board to underwater, from Hendricks to Hooper. The jump scare is turned up all the way to eleven, with a suddenly squawking radio being replaced by a one-eyed severed head. And yet Benchley's original scene was, at least in part, filmed. When British TV reporter Iain Johnstone visited the Martha's Vineyard set in 1974 he witnessed the filming of one boat drawing up alongside another, a scene that was cut short (and probably inevitably scuppered) by one of the actors falling into the water. Johnstone's report, which can be seen as a DVD extra, also eavesdrops on Spielberg and screenwriter Gottlieb riffing on the elements of the ghost ship trope. By setting the discovery of Ben Gardner's boat at night Spielberg was able to kill two birds with one stone: he increased the spooky atmosphere by adding fog and shadow, and also gave himself more control in being able to hide his studio tank work under cover of darkness.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
The Night Was Humid
Chapter Five is one of five chapters in Jaws that opens with a description of the weather. The Jaws film shoot was notoriously plagued by changeable weather, which played havoc with the continuity. If like me you are a paid up member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, you can have a lot of fun spotting the way the clouds behind the Orca change from cirrus to cumulus and back to cirrus again within a single scene. But you don't have to be a cloud geek to admire the shot of Quint silhouetted against a buttermilk sky of altocumulus.
Whilst it can only infuriate a filmmaker on location, weather is there for an author to command. It has provided literature with some memorable opening sentences from the sublime to the ridiculous but it can be difficult to write about without descending into a meteorological tangle.
Benchley's occasional weather reports are accurate enough and he knows his clouds (" ...puffy cumulus clouds meandered across the sky beneath a high blanket of cirrus") but, like many an author, he takes descriptions of nature as a cue to wax poetical: "..the cloud cover had begun to disintegrate, like pieces fallen from a jigsaw puzzle. Sunlight streaked though the gaps, stabbing shining patches of blue onto the gray-green surface of the sea."
In the novel there are occasional grey skies, and scattered showers, and fog. Bad weather gives Hooper an excuse to have lunch with Ellen Brody, who on the day of her infidelity sits like a modern day Jane Eyre looking out of a rain splashed window.
In the film the sun always shines, as unreal as the cartoon image beaming down on the girl in the bikini in Amity's public service message. The town won't make summer dollars unless it has summer weather.
Whilst it can only infuriate a filmmaker on location, weather is there for an author to command. It has provided literature with some memorable opening sentences from the sublime to the ridiculous but it can be difficult to write about without descending into a meteorological tangle.
Benchley's occasional weather reports are accurate enough and he knows his clouds (" ...puffy cumulus clouds meandered across the sky beneath a high blanket of cirrus") but, like many an author, he takes descriptions of nature as a cue to wax poetical: "..the cloud cover had begun to disintegrate, like pieces fallen from a jigsaw puzzle. Sunlight streaked though the gaps, stabbing shining patches of blue onto the gray-green surface of the sea."
In the novel there are occasional grey skies, and scattered showers, and fog. Bad weather gives Hooper an excuse to have lunch with Ellen Brody, who on the day of her infidelity sits like a modern day Jane Eyre looking out of a rain splashed window.
In the film the sun always shines, as unreal as the cartoon image beaming down on the girl in the bikini in Amity's public service message. The town won't make summer dollars unless it has summer weather.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
All The News That's Fit to Print
In both book and movie it's the media that finally blow the lid off Amity's cover up, just as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed Nixon to be a political shark. In the movie Peter Benchley himself cameos as a TV reporter - momentarily breaking the fourth wall by addressing the camera - and delivers his lines with just the right amount of earnestness.
With his own newspaper background it's not surprising that Benchley should populate his story with newsmen: apart from local newspaper editor Harry Meadows, there is Bill Whitman, a reporter for The New York Times, and Bob Middleton "from Channel Four News".
The newspaperman and - less commonly - woman has long been a convenient stock movie character for digging up dirt. From the shadowy figure of Thompson in Citizen Kane to the milk-drinking Joe Frady of The Parallax View, the hard-boiled, fast-talking reporter has doggedly followed leads through the noir landscape of American film. In the year Jaws was published the crusading reporter was given hagiographic tribute in All the President's Men.
In the novel the Times reporter, who happens to be on the beach when Alex Kintner is attacked, introduces himself as Bill Whitman, but, with a nice hint of self-importance, signs his by-line William F. Whitman. Although he reappears briefly in the final chapter, he remains a thin secondary character who doesn't make it to the final film. He simply files his copy and then fades into the background. His reporting skills are competent and he serves up the facts with journalistic precision ("At least fifteen persons witnessed the attack on Morris Cater, 65, which took place at approximately 2 P.M. a quarter of a mile down the beach from where young Kintner was attacked."). The boy's death is described in a much less lurid manner than Benchley's although there is a hint of violence in the description of the "traces of blood found on shreds of [the] rubber [raft] .." - an image that is preserved in the film. True to the motto emblazoned on its masthead, the Times bowdlerises Hendricks's description of the shark, which is now "as large as a station wagon."
The second article from The Amity Leader is couched in slightly more sensational prose and Meadows is not afraid to reach for the cliche jar: the victims were "brutally slain .... as they frolicked in the chill waters..."; Hendricks's failed rescue of Morris Cater is described as "a valiant attempt".
Although Benchley makes an effort to distinguish the two different styles of the newspapers, there is no separate font to distinguish the text of the articles from the text of the novel. We read them with Brody, interrupted by his reactions and Meadows's exegesis on the Machiavellian workings of the newspaper trade.
Meadows and Brody are themselves interrupted by Mrs Kintner - making an earlier vengeful appearance than she does in the film - and, in a telling detail, she slaps Brody across the face not with the palm of her hand but with a rolled-up newspaper.
With his own newspaper background it's not surprising that Benchley should populate his story with newsmen: apart from local newspaper editor Harry Meadows, there is Bill Whitman, a reporter for The New York Times, and Bob Middleton "from Channel Four News".
The newspaperman and - less commonly - woman has long been a convenient stock movie character for digging up dirt. From the shadowy figure of Thompson in Citizen Kane to the milk-drinking Joe Frady of The Parallax View, the hard-boiled, fast-talking reporter has doggedly followed leads through the noir landscape of American film. In the year Jaws was published the crusading reporter was given hagiographic tribute in All the President's Men.
In the novel the Times reporter, who happens to be on the beach when Alex Kintner is attacked, introduces himself as Bill Whitman, but, with a nice hint of self-importance, signs his by-line William F. Whitman. Although he reappears briefly in the final chapter, he remains a thin secondary character who doesn't make it to the final film. He simply files his copy and then fades into the background. His reporting skills are competent and he serves up the facts with journalistic precision ("At least fifteen persons witnessed the attack on Morris Cater, 65, which took place at approximately 2 P.M. a quarter of a mile down the beach from where young Kintner was attacked."). The boy's death is described in a much less lurid manner than Benchley's although there is a hint of violence in the description of the "traces of blood found on shreds of [the] rubber [raft] .." - an image that is preserved in the film. True to the motto emblazoned on its masthead, the Times bowdlerises Hendricks's description of the shark, which is now "as large as a station wagon."
The second article from The Amity Leader is couched in slightly more sensational prose and Meadows is not afraid to reach for the cliche jar: the victims were "brutally slain .... as they frolicked in the chill waters..."; Hendricks's failed rescue of Morris Cater is described as "a valiant attempt".
Although Benchley makes an effort to distinguish the two different styles of the newspapers, there is no separate font to distinguish the text of the articles from the text of the novel. We read them with Brody, interrupted by his reactions and Meadows's exegesis on the Machiavellian workings of the newspaper trade.
Meadows and Brody are themselves interrupted by Mrs Kintner - making an earlier vengeful appearance than she does in the film - and, in a telling detail, she slaps Brody across the face not with the palm of her hand but with a rolled-up newspaper.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Chewed Up in the Surf
The victims of the two shark attacks that occur in Chapter Four are a young boy of six and an old man of sixty five. The boy's death - which would provide the basis for the film's most visually inventive scene - is described in grisly detail, but before we get to it we have to wade through several paragraphs of social commentary. Benchley worked as an editor for Newsweek in the mid Sixties and so it's not surprising that his authorial voice should take on the patronising tone of a magazine trend piece.
Amity's summer visitors are described as a single herd and Benchley freely employs the third person pronoun to lump them together. The husbands are "semi-comatose" on beach towels whilst beside them their wives seem to be drinking themselves into a vermouth stupor. The teenagers are laid out in "tight, symmetrical rows", the boys "grinding their pelvises into the sand" as the girls tease them. The image seems to echo the couple's "urgent ardor on the cold sand" in the opening chapter.
Benchley suggests that privilege has granted them a physical perfection. Their teeth, unlike those of the shark prowling the shallows just yards away, are "straight and white and even." Their minds have been calibrated to a point of perfect indifference that allows them to ignore the imperfections of the world around them. Here Benchley delivers a scatter shot of social issues (race riots, eco-pollution, police corruption, soaring crime rates, food contamination, and the potentially damaging effects of hexachlorophene), no doubt ticking all the boxes that preoccupied American society in 1973.
The narrative gets back on track with a six year old boy persuading his mother to let him go out on his raft. We learn only his first name - Alex - although, just as the victim in the first chapter was simply called 'the woman', he too is depersonalised and referred to as 'the boy'. In describing the attack Benchley employs the same technique of alternating points of view (fish / boy / fish / boy) culminating in a series of sentences that run more or less parallel to those of the first chapter:
Chrissie
"The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water."
Alex
"The fish's head drove the raft out of the water."
Chrissie
"The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly."
Alex
"The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft."
Chrissie
"...most of the pieces of the corpse had dispersed. A few sank slowly, coming to rest on the sandy bottom, where they moved lazily in the current."
Alex
"The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom."
Benchley rings in some changes with the third attack by describing it through the character of Hendricks, who details it in almost Hemingway-like prose, leaning heavily on the use of the conjunction and to provide cohesion:
"He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again."
In a less Hemingway-like simile Hendricks adds, "That's the biggest fuckin' fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin' station wagon."
The third victim, later named as Morris Cater, never made it to the movie. Indeed, Chapter Four marks the point where book and film begin to diverge and move along parallel narrative tracks. However, there is an old man who gets trampled in the surf during the Fourth of July panic, and I always like to imagine that his name was Morris.
Amity's summer visitors are described as a single herd and Benchley freely employs the third person pronoun to lump them together. The husbands are "semi-comatose" on beach towels whilst beside them their wives seem to be drinking themselves into a vermouth stupor. The teenagers are laid out in "tight, symmetrical rows", the boys "grinding their pelvises into the sand" as the girls tease them. The image seems to echo the couple's "urgent ardor on the cold sand" in the opening chapter.
Benchley suggests that privilege has granted them a physical perfection. Their teeth, unlike those of the shark prowling the shallows just yards away, are "straight and white and even." Their minds have been calibrated to a point of perfect indifference that allows them to ignore the imperfections of the world around them. Here Benchley delivers a scatter shot of social issues (race riots, eco-pollution, police corruption, soaring crime rates, food contamination, and the potentially damaging effects of hexachlorophene), no doubt ticking all the boxes that preoccupied American society in 1973.
The narrative gets back on track with a six year old boy persuading his mother to let him go out on his raft. We learn only his first name - Alex - although, just as the victim in the first chapter was simply called 'the woman', he too is depersonalised and referred to as 'the boy'. In describing the attack Benchley employs the same technique of alternating points of view (fish / boy / fish / boy) culminating in a series of sentences that run more or less parallel to those of the first chapter:
Chrissie
"The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water."
Alex
"The fish's head drove the raft out of the water."
Chrissie
"The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly."
Alex
"The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft."
Chrissie
"...most of the pieces of the corpse had dispersed. A few sank slowly, coming to rest on the sandy bottom, where they moved lazily in the current."
Alex
"The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom."
Benchley rings in some changes with the third attack by describing it through the character of Hendricks, who details it in almost Hemingway-like prose, leaning heavily on the use of the conjunction and to provide cohesion:
"He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again."
In a less Hemingway-like simile Hendricks adds, "That's the biggest fuckin' fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin' station wagon."
The third victim, later named as Morris Cater, never made it to the movie. Indeed, Chapter Four marks the point where book and film begin to diverge and move along parallel narrative tracks. However, there is an old man who gets trampled in the surf during the Fourth of July panic, and I always like to imagine that his name was Morris.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Sharkfacts
Having licked his fingers clean of lemon meringue pie, Harry Meadows proceeds to give Chief Brody a crash course in sharks. "Who knows about sharks? [he says] I'll tell you this: at the moment I know a hell of a lot more about them than I did this morning." As an ex-newspaperman himself, Peter Benchley appreciated the importance of background research and he prided himself on his shark knowledge. Others, however, were not so complimentary.
Frank Mundus, the real life shark fisherman who was essentially Benchley's Deep Throat when it came to background information on Great Whites, said of the novel, 'Jaws is fiction and fiction is bull. There's nothing in that book that's true. And Peter Benchley don't know about sharks.' Although Mundus seemed to develop a grudge against the author, he was happy to lay claim to being the inspiration for the character of Quint.
In fact, he was more than that. He was the inspiration for the entire novel. In 1964 Mundus caught a 5,550 pound Great White off the town of Amagansett in Suffolk County Long Island. A newspaper article reporting the catch planted the seed of an idea in Benchley's mind and what particularly piqued his interest was the fact that the shark was caught in reasonably shallow waters frequented by bathers. Mundus was among a number of fisherman the author interviewed as research and he even went fishing with him. When book and movie became a hit, Benchley was happy to promote himself as some kind of marine expert, and his failure to acknowledge the help Mundus had given him rankled with the fisherman.
Another old man of the sea who was quick to come forward to criticise the shark facts of Jaws was Jacques Cousteau. In an interview with the Miami Herald Cousteau called the novel 'a bad book' and said simply 'sharks don't behave like that.' The comment clearly stung Benchley - more than the carpings of Frank Mundus - and he wrote letters to the Frenchman, which were never acknowledged.
Later in life, Benchley disowned the notion of a rogue shark ("It's just a theory that I happen to agree with.") and tried to redress the balance with a book called Shark Trouble, going on record to say that sharks are more curious than aggressive.
It was in the interest of the movie makers to promote the idea that a shark could - like Frank Mundus - develop a grudge. It's touched upon in Jaws 2, which helpfully provided a raft of shark facts in its promotional material, and positioned front and centre for Jaws: The Revenge. God knows what Jacques Cousteau would have thought of that movie.
Today -in part, thanks to Jaws - everybody is a shark expert. Discovery runs its annual Shark Week in the summer. We all know that the sight of a circling fin and the alternating pattern of the two notes E and F can only mean one thing: trouble.
Frank Mundus, the real life shark fisherman who was essentially Benchley's Deep Throat when it came to background information on Great Whites, said of the novel, 'Jaws is fiction and fiction is bull. There's nothing in that book that's true. And Peter Benchley don't know about sharks.' Although Mundus seemed to develop a grudge against the author, he was happy to lay claim to being the inspiration for the character of Quint.
In fact, he was more than that. He was the inspiration for the entire novel. In 1964 Mundus caught a 5,550 pound Great White off the town of Amagansett in Suffolk County Long Island. A newspaper article reporting the catch planted the seed of an idea in Benchley's mind and what particularly piqued his interest was the fact that the shark was caught in reasonably shallow waters frequented by bathers. Mundus was among a number of fisherman the author interviewed as research and he even went fishing with him. When book and movie became a hit, Benchley was happy to promote himself as some kind of marine expert, and his failure to acknowledge the help Mundus had given him rankled with the fisherman.
Another old man of the sea who was quick to come forward to criticise the shark facts of Jaws was Jacques Cousteau. In an interview with the Miami Herald Cousteau called the novel 'a bad book' and said simply 'sharks don't behave like that.' The comment clearly stung Benchley - more than the carpings of Frank Mundus - and he wrote letters to the Frenchman, which were never acknowledged.
Later in life, Benchley disowned the notion of a rogue shark ("It's just a theory that I happen to agree with.") and tried to redress the balance with a book called Shark Trouble, going on record to say that sharks are more curious than aggressive.
It was in the interest of the movie makers to promote the idea that a shark could - like Frank Mundus - develop a grudge. It's touched upon in Jaws 2, which helpfully provided a raft of shark facts in its promotional material, and positioned front and centre for Jaws: The Revenge. God knows what Jacques Cousteau would have thought of that movie.
Today -in part, thanks to Jaws - everybody is a shark expert. Discovery runs its annual Shark Week in the summer. We all know that the sight of a circling fin and the alternating pattern of the two notes E and F can only mean one thing: trouble.
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