Blistering Barnacles

Like that other eccentric seafarer Captain Haddock, Quint has a seemingly endless stream of invective to draw upon. However, whereas Tintin's companion ransacks the language from A (Aardvark! Abecedarians!) to Z (Zapotecs!), most of Quint's curses revolve around the letter F. The insults with which he taunts the shark are almost entirely sexual: over three pages of text he calls it "a motherfucker", a "cocksucker", a "godforsaken sonofabitch", a "miserable prick", an "uppity fuck" and a "shit-eater". Only at the moment of reckoning - when he plunges a final harpoon into the shark's belly - does Quint's language take on a biblical tone ("God damn your black soul!").

Quint had his mouth washed out with soap by the scriptwriters. In the movie he recites a dirty limerick ("Here lies the body of Mary Lee ...") and teases Brody with innuendo as they leave harbour ("Don't worry, chief! They may not like you going out, but they'll love you coming back in!"). Otherwise, his cursing is kept within PG limits and the worst thing he calls the shark is not a "fucker" but a "porker." The fishermen of Amity use mild alternatives to the F word ("Why don't you stuff your friggin' head in there, man, and find out if it's a man-eater.") and Brody's final expletive (Smile, you sonofab-") is deleted by the boom of the exploding tank. The only word likely to offend some members of a Seventies audience ("Come on down and chum some of this shit.") was deliberately placed to generate a laugh before the big reveal of the shark's head. In the Inside Jaws documentary on the DVD Spielberg explains how in 1975 the word had the power to make different sections of the audience gasp, giggle or silently cheer.

Bad Book

 
'There are a lot of people I have met who consider this a reference to [sic] sharks, which is a disaster. However well-written and advertised it was, it is a bad book. Sharks don't behave like that.' So said Jacques Cousteau of the novel Jaws in an interview with the Miami Herald in the 1970s. As an avid diver, Benchley had great admiration for Cousteau and it was the Frenchman's criticism of the book - above any others - that cut him to the quick. Even as late as 1999 in an online Time interview Benchley could not help raking over these coals. "I never met Cousteau," he said. "He spent a lot of time and energy criticizing Jaws and I wrote him once or twice, but he never wrote back." Benchley alludes to this unanswered correspondence in a letter he wrote to Spielberg, which is quoted in Carl Gottlieb's The Jaws Log.

In fact, the author came to regret the way his novel had demonised the Great White in the public imagination and he was later the first to admit that he had got some things wrong. "My research for the book was thorough and good, for the time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts [but not Cousteau]. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions."

Benchley did get some things right. The biological details - the shark's lack of a flotation bladder that compels it to always keep moving, the mucus-filled canals that send signals of water activity to its brain, the rows of triangular serrated teeth - these facts could have been copied out of National Geographic. Where Benchley got it seriously wrong was the way in which his shark behaves. This gross misconception comes to a head in the book's final chapter when Quint, purely on a hunch, orders Brody to start chumming and, almost immediately, the shark appears.

" 'He was waiting for us!" yelled Brody.
  'I know,' said Quint.
  'How did he -'
  'It don't matter,' said Quint. 'We've got him now.' "

It clearly did matter to Jacques Cousteau. Sharks didn't behave like that. Indeed, Benchley was being more than a bit disingenuous when he claimed that they did. By making the shark a vengeful creature with enough cunning to outwit its hunters, Benchley was drawing not on scientific fact but on a well-established monster movie convention. Given that he was writing a work of popular entertainment, there should have been no shame in that. The spat between the two men was nothing more than a storm in a teacup. If Cousteau's words still rankled after all those years, at least Benchley could have taken some comfort from the fact that his later commitment to marine conservation would have met with the approval of the old Frenchman of the sea.

Stormy Weather

When Brody arrives at the dock at the beginning of Chapter Fourteen, Quint is already waiting for him, "sharpening a harpoon dart on a Carborundum stone" like a latter day Queequeg. He is dressed for foul weather in "yellow oilskins" and - just to make sure we don't miss the significance of the "dark sky" - Benchley inserts a brief exchange between the police chief and the fisherman:

"Brody looked up at the scudding clouds. 'Gloomy enough.'
'Fitting,' said Quint, and he hopped aboard the boat."

Quint has brought along the carcass of a sheep as bait and Brody's remark about sacrifice is one more signifier that the shark might just be an agent of the devil. Brody is about to cast off the stern line when the Times reporter Bill Whitman drives up to the pier and tries to hitch a ride ("If you're going to catch that fish, I want to be there."). It's a curious episode, and suggests that perhaps in an earlier draft of the novel the newspaper man had a bigger role. As it is, he's left high and dry without the scoop his editor has ordered him to get. It's unlikely that he would even bag the exclusive rights to Brody's story beyond the chapter's end as these would surely go to Harry Meadows in return for his reputation-saving editorial.

The movie was filmed in bright sunlight and any shots of grey overcast skies that Verna Fields was forced to include were cleverly hidden in the editing mix. Had Jaws 2 remained true to its original premise and its original director, it might have preserved some of the original book's dark tone. In the end, the sequel dumbed down the story with teenage high jinks.

The End Of The Affair

Although a simple call to Daisy Wicker from the phone booth at the end of the dock would put an end to his nagging doubt about his wife's fidelity, Brody chooses to remain in denial. Under the pretence of assuring Ellen that he is okay, he gets the coast guard to inform her of Hooper's death, and so avoids having to deal with her initial reaction to the news. By the time he gets home she has "long since finished crying". In her mind she has already consigned Hooper to the "distant past", and it's more than likely that she has removed the shark tooth charm from its silver chain and stowed it at the back of some drawer.

Ellen now seems eager to start building bridges in her marriage rather than contemplate those she has already burned. Desperate to be the housewife, she greets her husband at the door with a kiss, mixes him a drink and teases him about his bald spot. For her the story is at an end ("Well, it's over now."). She remains unaware of how close she came to being busted, and no doubt at the back of her mind there is the thought that - with Hooper dead - there are unlikely to be further temptations or complications.

The anger Ellen displays when Brody announces his intention to go back out on the Orca is more a symptom of her own selfishness than a sign of any concern for her husband. Having re-established her role as the good wife/mother, she is now faced with the possibility of being made a widow. When she levels the charge of egotism against him ("Can't you think about anybody but yourself?"), Brody is forced to confront the idea that he might be motivated by "a personal need for expiation."

The mixture of overwrought emotion and bland cliche allows the casual reader to dismiss the Brodys' final argument as another example of the book's soap-opera quality - the element of Peyton Place, which Spielberg complained of. Coming at the end of the book's penultimate chapter, the dialogue in fact serves to restate the novel's main theme of responsibility to the community and responsibility to oneself.

This is made explicit in the two editorials due to appear in the next day's Amity Leader, which Harry Meadows delivers to Brody's front door after Ellen has gone to bed. Written in the same style as the report on Morris Cater's death from Chapter Four, the first mourns Hooper. It reports that he has been "struck down by a savage menace" and bestows upon him an epitaph of empty rhetoric ("He was a friend, and he gave his life so that we, his friends, might live."). The second praises the "extraordinary fortitude and integrity" of Police Chief Martin Brody, who "has spent his every waking minute trying to protect his fellow citizens." It glosses over Brody's initial complicity in the cover-up, and (though Harry Meadows could never have known it) ignores the fact that Brody spent as much time needling and bating "the young oceanographer [sic] from Woods Hole."

The public declaration of support allows Brody some sense of resolution, and the chapter ends quietly. Brody plays master of the house, checking the doors and windows as a gale blows outside, and then falls asleep in front of a movie on TV.  The film - Weekend at the Waldorf - is not a random choice by Benchley, but a sly tip of the hat to his grandfather Robert, who appeared in the comedy-drama alongside Ginger Rogers in one of her non-dancing roles. Brody wakes up to white noise at five a.m. and, before he leaves for the dock, he plays out the part of loving husband and father by kissing his sleeping wife's brow (furrowed in a frown even in her sleep) and looking in on his sons.

Along Comes Mister Whitey

After gliding by like "an angel of death", the shark swims away from the cage until it becomes "a spectral silver-gray blur" at the very edge of Hooper's vision. Up to this point the shark's movements have been almost languorous, but as it turns it begins to accelerate, its "tail thrusting vigorously". Great Whites can reach twenty five miles an hour in open water, but it's unlikely that the shark would have been able to reach this speed over just forty feet - the maximum visibility in the murky water. When it rams the cage with its snout it has gathered enough velocity to bend the hollow aluminum tubing of the bars out of shape. Hooper loses his mouthpiece and sucks in a lungful of salt water, which momentarily disorientates him. He looks down to see the shark's giant head lunging for him. Hooper feels "as if his guts were being compacted" as the jaws (with a bite force of over 9,000 Newton at the tip and around 18,000 at the back hinge) close around his torso. The last thing he sees is the black eye of the shark "gazing at him through a cloud of his own blood." Recent research suggests that the strength of a shark's bite is related not to its overall length but to the size of its head. Benchley's fish has a head "four feet across" so it's fair to assume that it would be able to chomp down with the power of a Death Star trash compactor.

Hooper's death is described within a sentence - unlike that of the first victim who took two long paragraphs to die -, but its immediate aftermath is gruesomely protracted. Like a cat with a dead mouse, the shark keeps hold of its prey and, when it surges up out of the water in a predatorial display of power, Hooper's body "...[protrudes] from each side of its mouth, head and arms hanging limply down one side, knees, calves, and feet from the other." Just as with the description of Chrissie in Chapter One, Hooper has been broken down to a number of body parts. His corpse is subjected to one final indignity when Brody shoots three rounds from the rifle, and the third bullet strikes Hooper in the neck.

In the original movie script the unnamed estuary victim (played by stuntman Ted Grossman) met a similar fate, dying in the clamped jaws of the shark. The scene was filmed, but Spielberg thought it was "too bloody" and cut it out. Hooper, of course, survives in the movie, able to squirm out of the cage and swim to the sea bed thanks to some creative editing. Given the Hawksian bond Spielberg had established between the fish expert and the police chief, it was never likely that either of them would end up as fish food. Besides, the director had dramatic real life footage of a Great White tearing apart an empty cage that was simply too good to pass up.

Shark's In The Water

When once asked how he spent his time away from the typewriter, Peter Benchley said, "I dive as much as I can." Even towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from chronic pain due to herniated discs in his neck, he was still pulling on a neoprene suit and rubbing spit into his face mask. Perhaps being underwater gave him relief from that pain. As Hooper describes it, the world beneath the waves can have a calming effect:

"He felt serene. It was the pervasive sense of freedom and ease that he always felt when he dived. He was alone in the blue silence speckled with shafts of sunlight that danced through the water. The only sounds were those he made breathing - a deep, hollow noise as he breathed in, a soft thudding of bubbles as he exhaled. He held his breath, and the silence was complete."

Much of the action of Benchley's second novel would take place several fathoms deep, with a plot that combined the author's twin interests of diving and underwater archaeology. He would return to the same environment for his most Hemingway-like of books, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, and, to prove his credentials, his photo on the dust jacket showed him swimming with a giant Manta ray. In all of his years of diving - which included swimming with sharks - Benchley claimed that he was never harmed by anything more dangerous than a sea urchin or jellyfish.

Hooper, floating four feet below the Orca's hull, tethered to the boat by only two coils of rope, is not so lucky. The shark approaches him in another one of the book's great sentences: "Rising at him from the darkling blue - slowly, smoothly - was the shark." The choice of the Keatsian adjective, the twin sibilant adverbs, and the particular placing of the noun - all these combine to produce a poetically disturbing effect. Just as the Great White appears to take form out of the "edge of gloom" so it only comes into the reader's field of vision at the very end of the sentence. It's a pity that having achieved this effect Benchley then reaches for a melodramatic metaphor, describing the fish as "an angel of death gliding toward an appointment foreordained."

Hooper's instinct to flee is checked by his admiration for the creature and Benchley's description also encourages a sense of wonder. The upper part of the shark's immense body is "a hard, ferrous gray", the lower part "creamy, ghostly white", a combination that suggests both invincibility and vulnerability. Indeed, Quint will finally kill the beast by plunging a harpoon into its "soft white belly". The shark passes close enough to the cage for Hooper to admire its "slack and smiling" jaws, its "black, fathomless eye" and its rippling gills, like "bloodless wounds in the steely skin". Then - in a moment of what can only be described as piscine erotocism - Hooper reaches out to caress the shark's flank from the pectoral fins to the "firm genital claspers". Rebuffing this advance, the fish slaps his hand away with its tail.

The scene of the shark appearing out of the murky water and sliding slowly past the cage did make it into the movie, but Spielberg could not allow his camera to linger on the mechanical shark for too long for fear of breaking the illusion. The one detail that is preserved is the rippling gills, but that may have been by accident rather than design.

I Got No Spit

The cage goes in the water and Hooper gets ready to go in the cage. He pulls on his neoprene suit and - with Brody's help - straps on his airtank. Before climbing into the cage he rubs spit on the inside of his face mask to prevent the glass from fogging up when he is underwater. In the movie Hooper's mouth is too dry with fear and when he jokingly admits to having no saliva Quint gives him a look of begrudging respect. In the novel there's a similar moment between the two men when Hooper tells Quint to be ready with his harpoon and the fisherman replies, "I'll do what I'll do [...] You worry about yourself." Otherwise, Quint remains aloof from the preparations, puncturing any notion of heroism on Hooper's part with cynical putdowns ("I should have brought weights," said Hooper. Quint said, "You should have brought brains.") and gallows humour ("How much air does he have?" [Brody] said. "I don't know," said Quint. "However much he has, I doubt he'll live to breathe it.")

Armed with his camera and bang stick, Hooper kneels on the gunwale and then remembers that he needs one more piece of equipment: his lucky tiger shark's tooth "rimmed in silver". The charm is "an exact duplicate of the one he had given Ellen" at the Brodys' dinner party. When he presents her with the gift he tells the story of how he came across it in Macao:

"I passed through there a couple of years ago on a project. There was a little back-street store, where an even littler Chinese man spent his whole life polishing shark teeth and mouding the silver caps to hold the rings. I couldn't resist them."

Delighted with the gift and impressed by the exotic-sounding anecdote ("I don't think I could place Macao on a map if I had to."), Ellen fails to read the subtext of Hooper's remark - that he most likely bought a boxful of the charms and has been using them as part of his seduction strategy for the past two years. He goes on to describe the dangers of carrying the tooth with him ("It's like carrying an open-blade knife around in your pocket."), which could be read as an early foreshadowing of his eventual fate.

Having thrown the Hooper/Ellen romance overboard, the movie has no need of sentimental lucky charms. The preparations for the dive and Hooper's suiting up are really just camouflage. What Spielberg really wants to plant in the audience's mind at this stage is the tank of compressed air that Brody will later use for target practice.

Cage Goes In The Water

In the novel the shark cage comes ready assembled. Its dimensions ("over six feet tall and six feet wide and four feet deep") mean that Hooper - at "an inch over six feet" - is able to fit snugly inside. The cage is fitted with two buoyancy tanks on the top and has a control panel inside, the purpose of which is never demonstrated. Made of aluminium (or, as the original American edition of the novel  has it, "aluminum"), it's lightweight and easy to slide over the gunwale and into the water. It floats a few feet below the surface "rising and falling slowly in the swells" and is attached to the boat by two coils of rope secured to cleats aft and amidships.

In the movie the cage comes as a flatpack and has to be screwed and bolted together like a piece of  Ikea furniture - a task which, thanks to a lively scherzo from John Williams and some nimble editing from Verna Fields, is completed swiftly and efficiently (unlike the assembly of a piece of Ikea furniture). The cage is then lowered into the water using a block and tackle.

In the wake of the Jaws phenomenon shark watching from cages became a popular tourist attraction and it remains so to this day. Although it undoubtedly provides the curious with an up close and personal encounter with the ocean's predators, there are those who view the practice as ecologically unethical. One concern is that the chumming that is necessary to attract the sharks to the cage can affect their behaviour which ultimately could lead to an increase in attacks on humans. Anyone thinking of trying the experience would do well to watch this clip before going in the water.

Obviously

Having established through Quint that fish are "stupid as sin", Peter Benchley goes on to suggest that this particular Great White may be smarter than the average shark. It appears thirty yards to the Orca's stern and maintains a cautious distance as if aware that to come any closer means risking a harpoon. Not being able to give the shark a voice of its own, Benchley has to resort to Narrating The Obvious, a technique which  puts redundant comments into the mouths of characters. When the shark holds back, Quint comments "I don't get it [...] He should come in and take a look at us". A couple of pages later the shark finally takes the proferred bait of the baby porpoise. Quint pulls the empty hook on board and we're told that "it was nearly straight, marked by two small bumps where once it had been tempered into a curve." This, you would think, would be enough information, but to emphasise the point both Brody and Quint feel compelled to comment:

" 'Jesus Christ!' said Brody. 'He did that with his mouth?'
  'Bent it out as nice as you please,' said Quint."

The film is equally guilty of stating the obvious. In the scene when the Orca is taken on a Nantucket sleighride the shark chews down on the line and Brody says: "He's eating his way right through that line." Hooper acknowledges this blindingly obvious statement with one of his own: "Yeah , and he's working his way right up to us." As the boat is pulled backwards, its transom cannonading against the water, Hooper provides a commentary on the action: "Boys, it's too tight! He's pulling us! You've got to cut him loose! We're breaking up over here!" It's clear that these lines were added in post production, probably with actor Richard Dreyfuss gargling them Method-like over a  bowl of water on a Hollywood soundstage just as he had witnessed Susan Backlinie doing for the dubbing of her screams in the opening night attack.

Losing My Religion

With the shark cage stowed on board, the Orca sails past Montauk Point and sets a course of south by southwest into the open ocean. Brody sits in the fighting chair, brooding. Just as there's a suggestion of meaning in the sharpness of Quint's name, so the chief's name is only one vowel away from an adjective. His mind churns over feelings of inadequacy and outrage, certainty and doubt, and Benchley gives us a quietly poetic sentence that links the turbulent ocean to the cuckolded husband's state of mind: "Gradually, as the boat fell into the rhythms of the long ocean swells, Brody's fury dulled."


Brody tries to distract himself by engaging Quint in conversation about the shark. The fisherman has nothing but contempt for his prey ("They're stupid as sin.") and there's an inevitable sense of hubris in his words. He shares a brief anecdote of falling into the ocean alonside "a fair-size blue shark" - which may have been the spark of inspiration for the movie's Indianapolis speech - and makes a not-entirely-heartfelt reference to divine retribution. In a line that prefigures the movie trailer's voiceover, Quint says, "[God] made the damn thing. I suppose he can tell it what to do." When challenged, he admits that he doesn't "put much stock in religion" although, tellingly, the final insult he hurls at the shark ("God damn your black soul!") has something of the hellfire rhetoric that infuses Ahab's final speech: "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

You Talkin' To Me?

Chapter Thirteen is the only chapter in the novel that opens with a line of dialogue (" 'You're not putting that thing on my boat,' said Quint."), and so it's as good a place as any to consider Benchley's use of the spoken word. And a good place to start is with the Ten Rules for Good Writing by Elmore Leonard, a master of the art, who uses dialogue over multiple pages to develop character and convey plot. His ten commandments include a couple of "Thou shalt nots" with regard to speech: Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue and Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said". Although Benchley rarely transgresses on these two technical points, he commits far greater sins.

Apart from Quint, whose speech is seasoned with four letter words and profanities, none of the characters possess an identifiable idiolect. Their conversations rarely have the ebb and flow of real speech, and often have to bear the burden of narrative exposition. Sometimes the dialogue seems simply redundant. A case in point is at the beginning of Chapter Thirteen. Hooper's shark cage has been delivered to the dock and - just to make sure we do not assume it's a piece of equipment he normally carries around with him - Benchley describes the vehicle that brought it:

"At the end of the dock a man got into a pickup truck and started the engine, and the truck began to move slowly off down the dirt road.The words stenciled on the door of the truck read: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute."

A few lines later Hooper describes what the cage is for to Quint: "Divers use them to protect themselves when they're swimming in the open ocean. I had it sent down from Woods Hole - in that truck that just left." At this point you almost expect Quint to reply, "What? You mean that truck with the words Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute stenciled on the door that's beginning to move slowly off down the dirt road?" A couple of pages further on Brody finally confronts Hooper with his suspicions regarding his wife. It should be an emotionally charged moment, but the only energy from the scene comes from the punctuation and the author's liberal use of the exclamation mark:

"Where were you last Wednesday afternoon?"
"Nowhere!" Hooper's temples were throbbing. "Let me go! You're choking me!"
"Where were you?" Brody twisted his fists tighter.
"In a motel! Now let me go!"
"With who?"
"Daisy Wicker."
"Liar!  ... Daisy Wicker's a goddam lesbian! What were you doing, knitting?"

As Harrison Ford famously said of Lucas's dialogue in Star Wars, "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it." Of course, Jaws the movie crackles with great lines, but none of them come from the book. Like Casablanca (another troubled production that started shooting without a completed script), almost every scene resonates with a memorable phrase or exchange. Even scenes that require exposition (such as the one played out in front of the defaced billboard or the dinner scene at the Brodys' house) have an energy and rhythm to them.

Ahab's Wife

When Ishmael joins the Pequod in Chapter Sixteen of Moby Dick and signs on for a three hundredth part of "the clear nett proceeds of the voyage", he expresses his curiousity about the ship's captain, and is given the following answer by Captain Peleg:

" ...    I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is - a good man -  [...] I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody - desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee - and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife - not three voyages wedded - a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!"

Peleg speaks up for Ahab's basic humanity, maintaining that beneath his rough exterior there beats a good heart, capable of loving a sweet girl. Quint's carapace, however, hides no such soft centre. He has no wife ("I never saw the need for one.") and his laugh - "a short, derisive bark" - seems, in Peleg's terms, to make him a bad rather than a good captain.

Ahab's wife - like Lady Macbeth's children - has been the subject of whimsical scholarly speculation and more recently has inspired a novel. We can imagine a life for her beyond the pages of the book in which she briefly appears. Widowed by the white whale with her child - like Ishmael - made an orphan, she would erect a tablet in the chapel to her late husband's memory and "wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief" for the remainder of her life.

The prospect of a similar fate comes to Ellen at the end of Chapter Twelve. With the textual equivalent of a cross cut, Benchley switches the action from the Orca to the Brody household without even the benefit of a single line spacing. Ellen is fixing the children's supper when Larry Vaughn appears at the kitchen door. He heads directly for the liquor cabinet, pours himself "a glass full of gin" and explains that he has come to say farewell. Ellen is shocked by his wan appearance (his eyes are "a pasty gray") and she recalls the last time she saw him (two weeks earlier, or at the end of Chapter Six) - the day she flirted with Hooper in the hardware store.

In fact, there are echoes of that earlier conversation in the exchange she has with the mayor. Just as Hooper pays Ellen a compliment ("If David had any sense, he would have known when he had it good and he would have held on to you."), so Vaughn makes a belated claim for her affection (" ... you and I would have made a wonderful couple."). In both cases Ellen blushes. Typically, and less romantically, Larry Vaughn then goes on to describe the lost opportunity in monetary terms ("You would have been a real asset to me."). Ellen picks up on the word herself ("I don't know what kind of ... asset I would have been."). Earlier in the novel, when she was standing naked before a full-length mirror and planning adultery, she viewed herself in similar terms: "Were the goods good enough? Would the offer be accepted?"

After Vaughn has left Ellen goes upstairs to the bedroom. As she contemplates his retrospective promise ("I could have given you a life you would have loved."), she comes to realise "the richness of her life [...] an amalgam of minor trials and tiny triumphs [...] something akin to joy." And with the realisation she becomes aware of her absent husband and suddenly fears that - like Ahab - he might not return from the sea. At that same moment the front door opens. Ellen races downstairs and greets Brody with a full-mouthed kiss, wrapping her arms around his sunburnt neck.

Megalodon

Over the centuries the superstitious minds of sailors have populated the oceans of the world with monsters: from the aspidochelone of Ancient Greece and the kraken of Norwegian mythology to the ubiquitous giant sea-serpent and the Old Testament Leviathan. Today this is the stuff of legend, but there are those who want to believe that the deep oceans are home to species of as yet undiscovered fabulous creatures. Matt Hooper is one of them. "Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white," he says in one of his less-scientific pronouncements,"doesn't mean they couldn't exist."

The creature he's referring to is megalodon, an extinct species of shark which - because its fossilised teeth were similar (not "exactly like" as Hooper claims) to those of the Great White - was assigned to the genus Carcharadon. In fact, little of the megalodon has survived in the fossil records except for its teeth and fragments of vertebrae - its shark cartilage skeleton would have been eroded rather than preserved by time. It is from this limited amount of evidence that scientists have attempted to reconstruct the creature, using the Great White (Carcharodon carcharias) as a template. The tooth of a Great White averages about three inches in length and weighs a couple of ounces whilst the largest megalodon tooth measures more than twice that size at seven inches and weighs in at more than a pound. Early estimates of the creature's size - based around a 1909 jaw reconstruction - put it at ninety eight feet, and this presumably is the statistic that Peter Benchley came across in his research for the novel. Coincidentally, it was in 1973 - the year he delivered his manuscript - that scientists came up with a revised figure of forty to fifty feet. Despite a lot of scientific squabbling since then on how to arrive at an accurate estimate, the consensus among experts today seems to be that the megalodon had a total length of fifty two feet.

Hooper expounds on the theory that the megalodon may still lurk in the deepest depths of the oceans:

"What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. [...] They'd have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?"

This is not a view that is shared by the experts. It is generally believed that the megalodon became extinct about one and a half million years ago as a result of changes in global ocean circulation and a subsequent reduction in the creature's food supply. It's quite likely that it even "had to resort to cannabilism to stay alive."

The megalodon does still exist in the popular imagination. Science fiction author Steve Alten has made a successful writing career out of a series of novels involving a megalodon, and direct-to-video movie studio the Asylum had a surprise hit on its hands in 2009 when the trailer for Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus went viral.

That's A Twenty Footer

The average length of a Great White shark is fifteen feet, which puts it at about two thirds the size of a school bus. Bigger specimens are not unknown. In 2009 fishermen off the coast of Queensland in Australia reeled in a ten foot shark that had almost been bitten in half by a bigger predator, which was estimated to be a twenty footer. This is the size Benchley settled on for his monster fish in the book. He helpfully provides some basic vital statistics - the head is four feet across, the dorsal fin is more than a foot high, and the tail even higher - but, rather than numbers, it is the reaction of the three characters that helps to convey something of the brutal majesty of the beast.

Quint remains unimpressed by the scale of the shark - "With them things, it don't make much difference over six feet. Once they get to six feet, they're trouble." - and dismisses the animal as "just a dumb garbage bucket." Hooper is in awe of the creature - "That fish is a beauty. It's the kind of thing that makes you believe in a god." - and reacts with the same enthusiasm he displayed when describing the species to Ellen in Chapter Six. Brody projects his own fears onto the fish - he reacts with a chill and a shudder (what his mother would have called the "wimwams"), and says, "You can't tell me that thing's a fish [...] It's more like one of those things they make movies about. You know, the monster from twenty million fathoms."

The film added five feet to the shark's length and tweaked the intial reactions of the three main characters. Hooper exudes boyish enthusiasm and can barely contain his excitement as he snaps pictures for a future issue of National Geographic. Brody is at first paralysed with shock and momentarily incapable of action ("How do we handle this?"). Only Quint remains unmoved, assembling his harpoon gun, dismissing the interruption of a radio call from the Amity coastguard, and issuing orders in a calm but commanding tone.

Adaptation

Adaptation, as Charlie Kaufman will tell you, is a tricky business, but in Hollywood - as in life - you need to be able to adapt in order to survive. Benchley, whose movie deal contract gave him first dibs at an adaptation of his novel, took three passes at the screenplay before handing it in. Neither producers nor director were happy with what they read, and other writers (first Howard Sackler, and then Carl Gottleib) were drafted in for further drafts. Spielberg is on record as saying that he produced his own version over a weekend. His friend and fellow filmmaker John Milius is also known to have contributed lines of dialogue ("I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him and kill him for ten.") and whole scenes. Even actor Robert Shaw, who had written a trilogy of novels and had adapted one of them (The Man in the Glass Booth) for the stage, worked on some of his own speeches. During the extended rehearsals that filled the time spent waiting for the mechanical shark to work, other actors may well have come with up their own ideas. The movie's most iconic line - "You're going to need a bigger boat." - was the result of one such piece of improvisation by Roy Scheider.

President Kennedy said that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. If you substitute the words victory and defeat for box-office smash and bomb, this adage can be applied as equally well to show business as it can to politics. Filmmakers are in the myth-making business, and that can often include myths about themselves. Orson Welles was particularly adept at rewriting and redrafting his own life into a series of impish anecdotes, and he would repeat these so often on regular chat show appearances that they began to be accepted as fact.

It's unlikely that the myths surrounding the making of Jaws will ever be stripped away to reveal the cold hard facts. There is a final draft screenplay online which, if it is the genuine article, gives some indication of how much of the script must have been written on location. Nevertheless, it's always worth remembering that the book came first, and the text provided not only the film's basic structure but also some of its most iconic moments.

The most iconic moment is, of course, the first appearance of the shark to the crew of the Orca. It's a classic piece of cinematic sleight-of-hand in which a character in the foreground is unaware of something that the audience can see. And yet the moment - right down to the positioning of the shark - was already there on the page:

"Hooper bent down, filled his ladle with chum, and tossed it into the slick. Something caught his eye and made him turn to the left. What he saw sucked from him a throaty grunt, unintelligible but enough to draw the eyes of the other two men. [...] No more than ten feet off the stern, slightly to the starboard, was the flat, conical snout of the fish."

In the end, of course, Benchley was well served by his collaborators. In a 1999 online chat with Time.com he said of the experience, "I discovered in the process [of adapting the novel for the screen] that books and movies are completely different media. I was very pleased with the movie in its incarnation, but I liked the book as a book."

Benchley shared screenplay credit with Tracy Keenan Wynn on The Deep and - perhaps as a result of the increased clout he had gained from the box office of Jaws -  he was able to transfer his novel pretty much intact onto the screen. The film would have benfitted from cuts and rewrites, but even the presence of Robert Shaw was not enough to save the flat dialogue. Of The Island, for which Benchley took solo screen credit, the less said, the better.

Hooks And Lines

Nineteen pages into the hunt the shark finally takes the bait. Brody reels in the line to discover that the wire attached to the squid bait has been "neatly severed [and] chewed clean through". When a second line goes the same way as the first, Quint breaks out "a four-foot length of three-eights-inch chain." The scene made it into the movie, but, like many others, went through significant changes. In the movie Quint first hears the tick of the reel as the line plays out and straps himself into the fighting chair before the fish runs. Hooper thinks they have hooked nothing more than a marlin or a stingray, but is chastised when their catch bites through Quint's #12 piano wire and both he and Brody are thrown across the deck.

Die-hard Jaws fans know the number of the wire because they have seen the deleted scene on the DVD extras where the fisherman goes to Amity's local music store to buy a supply of it. Piano strings have to be tough because they take a regular beating - a piano is, after all, a percussive instrument. Even so, #12 has a breaking strain of only three hundred pounds, which is several thousand short of the weight of the three ton Great White.

In fact, Quint has no intention of hooking the shark and reeling it in. "All I'm trying to do is goose him a little and bring him to the surface." In the movie Quint says more or less the same line when he instructs Hooper to secure the floating barrels with a boat hook just before the shark lunges at the two of them.

Is That A Gun In Your Pocket?

After lunch Quint and Brody indulge in some male bonding by shooting at empty beer cans. Quint's weapon of choice is an M1 Garand, which - like the Marine Corps fatigue cap he wears to keep the sun off his bald head - is probably a memento from his days in the service. Using a device that looks like "a potato-masher hand grenade", Brody fires an empty can into the air and Quint - like an expert gunslinger - hits it  with "a loud whang" as it drops into the ocean. Skeet shooting - of which this is an improvised form - was used in Thunderball to allow Bond to present his macho credentials to arch-villain Emilio Largo, and it is a sport at which Spielberg came to be an expert under the tutelage of gun-loving John Milius.

When Brody takes a turn, he misses his first shot and is only able to hit a floating can twenty yards from the boat with a less impressive sounding "plop". Was it this scene that inspired the movie's explosive finale where the chief has to shoot at a much larger metal container?

Hooper declines to take a shot, and is mocked by Quint for his antipathy to firearms and his lack of a service record. The gun has long been a potent phallic symbol and the subtext of Quint's dismissive remark -"Christ, I'd even bet you're still a virgin." - draws a parallel between Hooper's refusal to use the rifle and an implied impotency.

In the next chapter the tables are turned when Hooper flourishes a "bang stick" with which he intends to kill the shark. Tellingly, Hooper's weapon is much smaller than Quint's M1 and it prompts the fisherman into more derisive mockery ("If that doesn't work you can tickle him to death."). Hooper calls Quint's own manhood into question (" ... I think this fish is more than you can handle.") and accuses him of inaction ("You'll be dead of old age before he comes up ..."). Stung by these remarks, Quint automatically reverts to calling Hooper a "boy" and goads him into getting into the cage and going to his certain death.

The film transforms the cruel pissing contest between the two men into something comic. When Quint crushes his can of Narraganasett beer, Hooper imitates the action by crumbling an empty Styrofoam cup in his fist. As Pauline Kael observed in her original review "the director ... sets up barechested heroism as a joke and scores off it all through the movie."

Fast Fish

Late in the morning of the second day of the hunt "the scythed dorsal fin" of a swordfish approaches the Orca. Benchley devotes a paragraph to Quint's unsuccessful attempt to harpoon the fish and provides the reader with a description for future reference of how to throw an iron. The equipment is already rigged ("One harpoon dart was [...] attached to the throwing pole, and a line-covered barrel stood ready at the bow.") and so there is none of the frantic knot-tying ("Hooper, hurry it up now, tie it on ... Don't screw it up now.") that provides the movie's most thrilling sequence.

Quint positions himself at the end of the pulpit and uses the harpoon like a giant compass needle to signal to Hooper in which direction to turn the boat. Fearing that the swordfish will sound, they try to "creep up on the fish [ ... ] with the engine sound barely above a murmur." In the movie Quint employs the same primitive GPS - planted at the end of the pulpit like a ship's figurehead, shouting directions to Hooper ("Watch my arm! You see - watch my hand now! Follow me! Follow me!") - to put a second iron in the shark. Here, though, the chase is as swift and thrilling as a Nantucket sleighride.

Needle In A Haystack

In a case of life imitating art, the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh - heavily dependent on the tourist trade - suffered from a series of shark attacks in December 2010. The story received worldwide media coverage with many journalists drawing comparisons with Jaws - a de rigeur reference whenever shark attacks are reported in the press. In this case, however, even the experts were invoking the Spielberg blockbuster. When asked to comment on the attacks (which included one fatality and were believed to be the work of a single predator), shark biologist Dr Samuel H Gruber said,  "In all my years reading about shark attacks and writing about them you never hear about sharks biting more than one person. Then for it to happen [ ... ] is almost like a Jaws scenario." He went on to suggest that the chances of finding the shark in the Red Sea were - as Hooper puts it in the movie - a "hundred to one". What this real-life bearded icthyologist in fact said was: "It's really pretty much a crapshoot. Finding the actual shark is like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

Although he probably didn't know it, Dr Gruber was quoting the novel. Quint remains evasive about his methods for tracking down the Great White and Brody tries to prompt him by offering up the very same simile. In another case of the dialogue being flipped from page to screen, it is actually Brody who then goes on to wonder if "it [would] be better if we stayed the night out here." In the movie, of course, he is the one who repeatedly suggests they go back for a bigger boat as dusk falls.

Like Moby Dick, Jaws is built on the false premise that a man could corner a prey in an environment that leaves no tracks or spoors for the hunter to follow. Melville confronts the issue head-on in a chapter called 'The Chart' and makes a good case for the method behind Ahab's madness:

"Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the Sperm Whale's food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey."

By compressing the shark hunt into a day, a night and a day, the film manages to sidestep the issue. Besides, it is one of the tropes of the monster movie genre that the creature - be it a velociraptor learning how to open a door, or a new strain of shark switching on an oven - is more intelligent than you first think. In the novel the shark, once it appears, seems to occupy the same stretch of water - a covenience that allows the Orca to resume the hunt on each successive day.  Throwing credibility to the winds, Benchley also gives Quint a sort of sixth sense ("I got a feeling.") that seems more reliable that Hooper's fish-finder in the movie.