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.
