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.