When Lester Kraslow struggles up the dune of Amity's private beach with his family in tow, he joins that select group of the novel's characters who would never make it into the movie. Like Minnie Eldridge, Daisy Wicker and Morris Cater, he got written out of the story in an early draft. "Grossly overweight ...[dressed in] khakis, a T-shirt, and basketball sneakers", Kraslow speaks with "the unmistakable accent of the Queens Borough New Yorker". This phonological detail would be transferred to Brody in the movie, who is gently chastised by his wife for not being able to master the islanders' broad vowels ('In Amity you say yaad.').
Kraslow drives a Winnebago, is married to a woman with fat wrinkled thighs, has two whiney boys called Benny and Davey, and says "shit" a lot. Vulgar, outspoken and with a large chip on his shoulder, he seems to be modelled on another opinionated resident of Queens, Archie Bunker. Had the character of Kraslow made it on to the screen, it's unlikely that Carroll O'Connor would have been approached to play the part. He had become so firmly associated with his TV creation that no American audience would have accepted him as anyone else. A more likely bit of casting would have been Clifton James, who had just played Sheriff J.W. Pepper (another heavily-accented bigot) in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.
