Jaws stars Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss Photo: Alamy
Jaws is perhaps the most famous four-letter name in literature . and film history, was, according to Doubleday editor Thomas E. Congdon, «the 237th name» proposed for Peter Benchley's sensational debut novel about a series of shark attacks in the fictional Long Island beach town of Amity.
Benchley's first suggestion was «Stillness in the Water.» Other titles suggested by Congdon included Terror of the Monster, Summer of the Shark, The Year the Beaches Closed and Why Us? Writer Nathaniel Benchley laughingly suggested to his son that he call his ocean thriller Who's That Nostalgic in My League? Finally, when Congdon suggested «Jaws of Leviathan,» Benchley said, «The only word we both like is 'jaws.' Why don't we call the damn thing Jaws?
Peter Bradford Benchley, born May 8, 1940, has been interested in sharks since his father took him fishing in the waters off Nantucket as a child. They caught very few swordfish, but a lot of sharks. “The water was full of sharks. I took them home, cut out their jaws, and was left on the lawn with 150 pounds of rotting meat. I was struck by the threat inherent in prehistoric eating machines,” Benchley told the New York Times in 1974.
Benchley was born a writer—his grandfather Robert was the drama editor of The New Yorker—and after graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, he traveled to Europe and published a memoir of his academic year in 1964, Time and Ticket. After serving six months in the Marine Corps Reserves, he began working as a freelance journalist, including writing short obituaries for The Washington Post. His biggest disappointment was that The New Yorker rejected 50 of his 52 submissions.
In 1964, Benchley read a local news story about a fisherman who caught a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island. He saved the idea for future use, believing he could make something out of it because «everyone in the world was fascinated by either sharks or dinosaurs» and that people «love our monsters.» For years he had been mulling over the story of one of those great white sharks that «came and didn't want to go.»
The book took another eight years to complete. In the meantime, he worked in television and served as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson from 1967 to January 1969. “I was a low-level aide,” he recalled, “but it was a chance to see the inside of the White House.” Benchley rarely talked about his contributions to speeches about the Vietnam War, but he recalled writing Johnson's 1967 National Day of Prayer proclamation (joking that he told the audience, «On your knees, America»).
He said Johnson sometimes complained about «chicken writers» filling speeches with names he couldn't pronounce. “Depending on his mood, he knew your name or forgot it, but he always knew the name of my wife. God, he was a good politician,” Benchley added. He was not hired by Richard Nixon, the man he nicknamed «Old Fuzzy.» In 1986, Benchley satirized some of his experiences in the White House in a comic novel called Q-Clearance, which tells the story of an angst-ridden presidential speechwriter named Timothy Burnham who unwittingly becomes the target of Soviet spies.
In 1971, when he was freelancing again, Benchley met Congdon for lunch to pitch a non-fiction book about pirates. When Congdon asked, «Have you ever thought about fiction?» Benchley replied, «I was thinking about a novel about a great white shark that shows up at a Long Island resort and hits him.» After Benchley's agent Roberta Pryor sent Congdon a one-page resume, Doubleday bought the rights for $1,000, and Benchley spent the winter of 1971 and spring of 1972 writing the first chapters while working in a rented room above Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington. New Jersey and then in a converted turkey house in Stonnington, Connecticut. Congdon made significant changes to tighten up the story, but was convinced they had potential success.
Original Jaws Jacket 1974 year
Benchley was definitely in need of money. When he sold the rights, he had just $600 in his bank account, while the struggling writer and his wife Wendy, a waitress from Nantucket, had three young children — Tracy, Christopher and Clayton. Unlike Congdon, the author did not expect a bestseller and laughed at his brother-in-law's question: “Can you make money from a novel?” Benchley later said: «I knew Jaws couldn't make it. It was the first novel, and no one reads first novels. It was the first fish novel, so who cares?
The author downplayed the «fish» he created, a fantastical, terrifyingly deadly 25-foot beast that terrorized the community. Reports of sharks eating people alive in Jaws were vivid and unwavering. As the young swimmer was torn apart, Benchley described how the shark clamped its jaws around her torso, «pulverizing bones, flesh and organs into jelly… holding the woman's body in its mouth, the shark crashed into the water with a thunderous crash.» a splash that spews foam, blood and phosphorescence in a bright shower.” When the little boy was grabbed and eaten from the raft, “his legs were severed at the hips and they sank slowly to the bottom in a slow rotation.”
Shark hunter Quint (memorably played in Steven Spielberg's film adaptation by Robert Shaw) was loosely based on Frank Mundus, a charter captain from Montauk who killed whales for chum and harpooned sharks, a practice now outlawed. Friendship Police Chief Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider) and his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary) are also very different in the book from their film adaptations. In the novel, they are a bickering couple, not at all like the lovers depicted in the film.
Brody has a violent streak, describing his wife as «cadaverous» in bed. In Benchley's novel, Ellen has an affair with marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), who comes to help hunt a killer shark. In the book, he is a far cry from the plump, cheerful, bearded hero that Dreyfus portrays; The first scientist, Benchley, was tall, tanned, egotistical and smug.
«The first thing I told Peter Benchley was that I didn't see any room in this adventure for a romance between Ellen and the ichthyologist,» Spielberg told Vanity Fair in 2023. “It was like the Peyton Place scandal, which I didn’t feel. took place in the film I wanted to make. What I was most intrigued and impressed by was Peter's immense storytelling skills in the rest of the novel, which chronicles the adventures of the sea-hunting survivors. That's what I wanted to focus on — and I wanted to achieve it without having to deal with the unimportant peccadilloes that happen in the city without pity.»
Despite Benchley's reassuring public statements that he had «no problem with the changes… I understood what they had to cut,» there were some uncomfortable moments between Spielberg and the author. The director was unimpressed with elements of Benchley's original script and brought in playwright Howard Sackler to rewrite it. When that didn't work, Spielberg hired Carl Gottlieb (who is mentioned) to rework Benchley's script.
In 2015, Gottlieb told the LA Times that Benchley's script was an example of «a journalist who didn't understand scripts» and that Spielberg «sent him a copy of the script with the word 'gut' scrawled on the title page. » Gottlieb reportedly cut down the dialogue about social tensions between rich and poor in New England and reworked some plot elements.
Susan Backliny in the movie «Jaws» Photo credit: Alamy
For example, Hooper is allowed to live in the film even though he was killed in a shark cage in a key scene in the novel. Additionally, Mayor Larry Vaughn, the man Boris Johnson once called «the real hero of Jaws» for keeping the beaches open to tourists despite evidence that a huge shark was eating townspeople, had connections with Benchley in the original novel. mafia. His «keep the beaches open» policy was motivated by greed: he and the mob bosses owned shares in beachfront rentals.
Benchley was able to separate the novel from the film, and by the time the film contracts were exchanged, he knew his financial future was secure. Bantam offered Jaws $575,009 for the paperback rights, and in the weeks leading up to its February 1, 1964 publication, there were intense discussions over the cover design at Doubleday. Art director Alexander Gottfried initially commissioned Wendell Minor to illustrate Benchley's own idea for the jacket: «to show a peaceful, unsuspecting town through the bleached mouth of a shark.»
In an article in The New York Times (two months after its publication), reporter Ted Morgan said that the idea was abandoned because sales executives believed that the cover image would make potential buyers recall Freud's horrific fantasy of the «vagina serrata.» (teeth in vagina). ). A subsequent idea to use just the word «Jaws» without illustrations was rejected by Bantam chief Oscar Distel, who said: «Without an image, no one would know what 'Jaws' meant.» It could be a book about dentistry.”
Shaw, Scheider, Spielberg and Dreyfuss on the set of Jaws in 1974. Photo: Alamy
Bantham insisted on a shark on the cover. Doubleday invited famous artist Paul Bacon. Although his first rough design of a huge shark head depicting a young swimmer was rejected as it was too reminiscent of a «protruding penis with teeth», Bacon's revised version, depicting a more dramatically predatory shark, was so striking that it was also used as the poster image for the iconic film.
When the novel Jaws was released, it became an instant hit, selling 5.5 million copies in America by the time the film was released in June 1975. Benchley's book remained on the bestseller list for 44 weeks and eventually sold over 20 million copies. making it one of the most successful debut novels of all time. «People today think of a movie as a summer book, but with 'Jaws' it was exactly the opposite,» said Samuel Vaughn, Doubleday's president in 1974. “This book set the marketing pace, and Hollywood followed suit.”
Although Benchley tried to maintain some normalcy in his life (maintaining a love of social tennis, changing his home phone to an unregistered number), his newfound wealth changed his life «in every way», especially when Spielberg's film became a No. 1 box office hit, grossing over $88 million worldwide. Despite the blockbuster's success (the film made the phrase «just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water» part of the popular vernacular), Benchley said he did not allow his children to see the film (with its chilling «primal soundtrack»). from John Williams) “because they love water too much.”
Producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown told the 26-year-old Spielberg that Dick Richards was their first choice to direct, but he irritated Benchley by constantly referring to the great white shark as a «white whale.» “Peter became completely uninterested in his shark being called a whale. And that’s how this project finally came to me,” Spielberg admitted. This may not have pleased Benchley because he knew that under the influence of Herman Melville's Moby Dick he created his sinister, cruel and seemingly supernaturally invincible sea creature.
Although Benchley was aware of the production problems (Spielberg admitted that a malfunctioning mechanical shark, seasickness among the crew and constant delays made the set «a complete nightmare»), the author enjoyed attending the Martha's Vineyard shoot, even filming a small cameo. the role of a reporter. He noted with interest that during filming, rescuers noticed real huge whites on local beaches. Although he imprinted on the popular consciousness the instinctive fear of being eaten or maimed by sharks, Benchley himself was more concerned about the prospect of flying, as he feared, to American cities as part of a nationwide promotional tour.
Jaws made Benchley a household name, and he continued to write (though he had nothing to do with the terrible Jaws sequels that followed Spielberg's blockbuster), achieving his most significant post-Jaws success with The Abyss, an adventure story about lost treasure. and shipwrecks off Bermuda. . Benchley co-wrote the screenplay for the 1977 film adaptation, which starred Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte.
His lifelong love of the ocean also found expression in the 1982 novel «Girl of the Sea of Cortez,» about a fearless young woman who becomes involved with a manta ray, and the 1991 thriller «The Beast,» about a giant squid that begins to attack people. Benchley wrote eight novels in total, perhaps the most unusual of which was 1989's Rummy, about the residents of an alcohol treatment clinic run by a celebrity named Stone Banner.
Peter Benchley in 2000. Photo: PA
One of the emotions that united Spielberg and Benchley at the end of their lives was deep regret over the impact of Jaws on the global shark population. “I sincerely, to this day, regret the destruction of the shark population due to the book and film. I really, really regret it,” Spielberg said in an interview with BBC Desert Island Discs in 2022.
Benchley has become a vocal advocate for marine conservation, speaking out against the threat hunters pose to vulnerable shark populations. In a 2000 interview with Animal Attack Files, Benchley said: «What I know now that wasn't known when I wrote Jaws is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark that develops a taste for human flesh.» » A week before his death, Benchley told a British newspaper: “I could never write Jaws today.” Sharks don’t attack people and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”
Benchley died at the age of 65 from pulmonary fibrosis on February 11, 2006. He was posthumously honored by the Shark Research Institute, which established the Peter Benchley Prize for Shark Conservation. His widow Wendy, who will be 83 in February 2024, continued his environmental campaign and authorized the publication of Quint, the prequel to Robert Lautner's Jaws.
Despite his reservations about Jaws, Benchley will forever be remembered for facilitating a unique form of mass terror: the predator shark. While Wendy remained proud of her husband's novel (and Spielberg's «superb film»), she was at pains to stress that it was just a story, reminding the Associated Press in 2006: «Peter kept telling people the book was fiction. this is a novel,” and that he no more took responsibility for his fear of sharks than Mario Puzo took responsibility for the Mafia.
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