In the rapid back-and-forth
exchange between police chief, shark expert and mayor it’s easy on a first
viewing to overlook a niggling inconsistency in the dialogue. Challenged to
produce the tooth that is the ‘size of a shot glass’, Brody sheepishly admits
that Hooper had dropped it. ‘We had an accident on the way in,’ he adds by way
of explanation, only for Hooper to correct him with the line ‘I had an accident.’ Taken at face value,
this could be read as a subtle piece of character development: Brody glossing
over the details of the ‘accident’ in an attempt to cover for his new-found
friend, with Hooper demonstrating that he is man enough to take responsibility
for his own actions. However, the truth of it is that these scripted lines refer
not to the night time scene we have just witnessed, but to another version of
the Ben Gardner boat sequence that was only partially filmed.
As originally
written the discovery of the wreck was to take place in daylight (as it did in
the novel), with Hooper, Brody and Meadows on board. The circumstances of the
shooting of this scene are given prominence in Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log due to the fact that the
screenwriter (who also had landed the part of Amity newspaper man Meadows) fell
overboard on the third take. Coincidentally, this moment was caught on camera
by a BBC film crew, who were doing a location report with movie critic Iain Johnstone, and the hapless Gottlieb can be seen being hauled ignominiously out
of the water on one of the Blu-Ray’s extras. The filming was abandoned and,
in one of their many spitballing story conferences, Spielberg suggested
that the sequence would be spookier if set at night with only the two principal
actors involved. Gottlieb, no doubt anxious to avoid another possible soaking,
happily wrote himself out of the scene. What appears in the finished movie was
eventually shot on the Universal backlot and the MGM tank, with the noctural environment
and the fog effects helping to disguise what would otherwise have been an
obvious studio setting.
