By Jim Bloch
“You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
That’s the famous advice that Police Chief Martin Brody gives the beleaguered fisherman Quint after the great white shark dubbed JAWS lunges at him over the stern of Quint’s battered fishing boat Orca.
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book JAWS by Peter Benchley; a year later, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie JAWS, which was filmed almost entirely on Martha’s Vineyard, celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Benchley’s book is front and center in two Vineyard bookstores, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven and Edgartown Books in Edgartown. As you stretch out on the beach near the Edgartown Light House, novel in hand, you might be surprised to find that Benchley, who summered as a boy on neighboring island of Nantucket, set his narrative on Long Island, not Martha’s Vineyard.
Sharks — sand, blue, sometimes mako — were plentiful in the waters around Nantucket.
The water sequences of JAWS were shot in the shallow water rimming Martha’s Vineyard.
“I fished frequently, and on hot and windless days … the Atlantic Ocean surrounding Nantucket sprouted shark fins like asparagus spears,” Benchley wrote in Shark Trouble, his book about writing JAWS and making the movie. “To me, they spoke of the unknown, the mysterious, of menace, prehistory , and adventure — and (when I got carried away) of primeval evil.”
JAWS: The book
With the idea of a shark novel percolating his brain for years, Benchley finally convinced Doubleday to give him an advance of $1,000 for the first four chapters of the book, and $7,500 upon completion of the book.
It was his first novel. The book reads more like an inviting portrait of a summer vacation town on the ocean than a raw thriller. Benchley has a keen eye for class distinctions and how status envy operates to keep the residents on edge as much as the sudden appearance of a hungry shark.
Benchley considered more than 120 titles for the book, including Great White, Dark White, White Dark and Leviathan Rising before landing on JAWS a half-hour before the presses rolled on JAWS.
“No one knows what it means, but at least it’s short,” Benchley says of the title in the appendix to the 30th anniversary edition of the book.
Paul Bacon, the artist famous for the dust jacket illustrations of Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Slaughterhouse Five, produced the hardcover art. Robert Kastel tweaked it for the paperback edition, which was also used for the movie poster.
Producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown brought the rights to the novel for $175,000 in 1973, before it was published. The idea was to make and release a movie about the giant killer white shark while the book was still on the bestseller lists, assuming of course that it became a bestseller.
1974 was an animal summer for book publishers. The hardcover of JAWS, priced at $6.95, was on the bestseller list for 44 weeks, topping out at number two, behind Watership Down, Richard Adams’ marvelous novel about rabbits.
JAWS: The production
Spielberg, then 26, wanted a less congested, more remote setting for the film than Long Island and picked the Vineyard, which is called Amity in the movie. He and his crew shot all the principal photography for the movie on the Vineyard and in the surrounding waters, which are remarkable shallow, allowing for easier filming of the boat and shark scenes.
It turned out that nothing in the production was easy. Spielberg was not a fan of the first two drafts of the screenplay turned in by Benchley. He found himself rooting for the shark and not the human characters. He tried to bail out of the movie, but Zanuck and Brown convinced him to stay. The script went through a number of rewrites by a number of writers. To make the story relatable to everyday movie-goers, Spielberg wanted to cast little known actors.
“We started the film without a script, without a cast, and without a shark,” said Richard Dreyfuss, who ended up playing the shark specialist Hooper.
Benchley had a number of criticisms of the Hooper character in the final draft of the screenplay. Hooper struck the novelist as “an insufferable, pedantic little schmuck.”
“He sounds like a textbook full of errors,” said Benchley, who played a reporter on the beach on July 4 in the movie.
Mishaps plagued the production, which went from a planned 55 days to 159, pushing the budget from $3.5 million to $10 million.
“No one had ever shot on the ocean in small boat with a mechanical shark before,” drily noted film historian Peter Biskind in his “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.”
