Jaws (novel)
Jaws is a 1974 novel by American writer Peter
Benchley. It tells the story of a great
white shark that preys upon a small resort town
and the voyage of three men trying to kill it. The novel grew out of Benchley's
interest in shark attacks
after he learned about the exploits of shark fisherman Frank
Mundus in 1964. Doubleday
commissioned him to write the novel in 1971, a period when Benchley worked as a
freelance journalist.
Through
a marketing campaign orchestrated by Doubleday and paperback publisher Bantam, Jaws was incorporated into many book
sales clubs catalogues and attracted media
interest. After first publication in February 1974, the novel was a great
success, with the hardback staying on the bestseller list for some 44 weeks and
the subsequent paperback selling millions of copies in the following year.
Reviews were mixed, with many literary critics finding the prose and
characterization lacking despite the novel's effective suspense.
Film
producers Richard D. Zanuck
and David Brown
read the novel before its publication and bought the film rights, selecting Steven
Spielberg to direct the film adaptation. The Jaws
film, released in June 1975, omitted
practically all of the novel's several subplots, mainly focusing on the shark
and the characterizations of the three protagonists. Jaws became the
highest-grossing movie in history up to that time, becoming a watershed film in
motion picture history and the very first summer blockbuster film. Three sequels
followed the film.
Plot summary
The
story is set in Amity, a fictional seaside resort town
on Long Island,
New York. One night, a massive great
white shark kills a young tourist named
Chrissie Watkins while she skinny
dips in the open waters. After finding
what remains of her body washed up on the beach, investigators realize she was
attacked by a shark. Police chief Martin Brody orders Amity's beaches closed,
but mayor Larry Vaughan and the town's selectmen
overrule him out of fear for damage to summer tourism, the town's main
industry. With the connivance
of Harry Meadows, the editor of the local newspaper, they hush up the attack.
A
few days later, the shark kills a young boy named Alex Kintner and Morris
Cater, an elderly man not far from shore. A local fisherman, Ben Gardner, is
hired by Amity's authorities to kill the shark, but disappears on the water.
Brody and deputy Leonard Hendricks find Gardner's boat anchored off-shore,
empty and covered with large bite holes, one of which has a massive shark tooth
stuck in it. Blaming himself for these deaths, Brody again attempts to close
the beaches, while Meadows investigates the Mayor's business contacts to find
out why he is determined to keep the beaches open. Meadows discovers Vaughn has
ties to the Mafia,
who are pressuring the mayor to keep the beaches open in order to protect the
value of Amity's real estate, in which the Mafia has invested a great deal of
money. Meadows also recruits ichthyologist Matt Hooper from the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution for
advice on how to deal with the shark.
Meanwhile,
Brody's wife Ellen is missing the affluent lifestyle she had before marrying
Brody and having children. She instigates a sexual encounter with Matt Hooper,
who is the younger brother of David Hooper, a man she used to date. The two go
to a motel after Ellen invites him to lunch at a restaurant several miles away
from Amity. Throughout the rest of the novel, Brody suspects the two have had a
liaison and is tormented by the thought.
With
the beaches still open, tourists pour into the town, hoping to glimpse the killer
shark. Brody sets up patrols on the beaches to watch for the fish. After a boy
narrowly escapes another attack close to the shore, Brody closes the beaches
and hires Quint, a professional shark hunter, to kill the shark. Brody, Quint
and Hooper set out on Quint's vessel, the Orca and the three men are
soon at odds with one another. Quint dislikes Hooper, dismissing him as a
spoiled rich College boy. Hooper is angry over Quint's methods, especially when
he disembowels a blue shark,
and uses an illegally caught unborn baby dolphin for bait. Brody and Hooper also argue, as Brody's
suspicions about Hooper's possible tryst with Ellen grow stronger; at one
point, Brody unsuccessfully attempts to strangle Hooper.
Their
first two days at sea are unproductive, although they do come in contact with
the shark by the end of the second day. Upon seeing it for the first time,
Hooper estimates the fish must be at least twenty feet long, and is visibly
excited and in awe at the size of it.
Larry
Vaughn visits the Brody house before Brody returns home and informs Ellen that
he and his wife are leaving Amity. Before he leaves, he tells Ellen that he
always thought they would have made a great couple. After he is gone, Ellen
reflects that her life with Brody is much more fulfilling than any life she
might have had with Vaughn, and begins feeling guilty over her prior thoughts
of missing the life she had before marrying Brody.
On
the third day, after seeing the size of the shark, Hooper wants to bring along
a shark-proof cage,
to take photos of it and then to use it in an attempt to kill it with a bang stick.
Initially, Quint refuses to bring the cage on board, even after Hooper's offers
to pay him $100, considering it a suicidal idea, but he relents after Hooper
and Brody get into a heated argument. Later that day, after several
unsuccessful attempts by Quint to harpoon the shark, Hooper goes underwater in
the shark cage. However, the shark attacks the cage, something Hooper did not
expect it to do, and, after destroying the cage, the shark kills and eats
Hooper. Brody informs Quint that the town can no longer afford to pay him to
hunt the shark, but Quint no longer cares about the money and vows to continue
pursuing the shark until he has killed it.
When
Quint and Brody return to sea the following day, the shark begins attacking the
boat. After Quint manages to harpoon it several times, the shark leaps out of
the water and onto the stern of the Orca, tearing a huge hole in the aft
section which causes the boat to start sinking. Quint plunges another harpoon into the shark's belly, but as it settles back into the
water, Quint's foot becomes entangled in the rope attached to the harpoon, and
he is dragged underwater to his death. Brody, now floating on a seat cushion,
spots the shark slowly swimming towards him; he closes his eyes and prepares
for death. However, just as the shark gets within a few feet of him, it
succumbs to its many wounds. The shark rolls over in the water and dies before
it can attack Brody. The great fish slowly sinks down out of sight, dragging
Quint's still entangled body behind it. The lone survivor of the ordeal, Brody
watches as the dead shark disappears into the depths and then he paddles back
to shore on his makeshift float.
Development
Peter
Benchley had a long time fascination with sharks, which he frequently
encountered while fishing with his father Nathaniel
in Nantucket.[2] As a result, for years, he had considered writing "a
story about a shark that attacks people and what would happen if it came in and
wouldn't go away."[3] This interest grew greater after reading a 1964 news story
about fisherman Frank Mundus
catching a great white shark weighing 4,550 pounds (2,060 kg) off the
shore of Montauk Point, Long
Island, New York.[4][5]
In
1971, Benchley worked as a freelance writer struggling to support his wife and
children.[6] In the meantime, his literary agent scheduled regular
meetings with publishing house editors.[2] One of them was Doubleday
editor Thomas Congdon,
who had lunch with Benchley seeking book ideas. Congdon did not find Benchley's
proposals for non-fiction interesting, but instead favored his idea for a novel
about a shark terrorizing a beach resort. Benchley sent a page to Congdon's
office, and the editor paid him $1,000 for 100 pages.[4] Those pages would comprise the first four chapters, and the
full manuscript received a $7,500 total advance.[2] Congdon and the Doubleday crew were confident, seeing
Benchley as "something of an expert in sharks",[7] given the author self-described "knowing as much as
any amateur about sharks" as he had read some research books and seen the
1971 documentary Blue Water White Death.[2] After Doubleday commissioned the book, Benchley then
started researching all possible material regarding sharks. Among his sources
were Peter Matthiessen's
Blue Meridian, Jacques
Cousteau's The Shark: Splendid Savage of
the Sea, Thomas B. Allen's Shadows In The Sea, and David H. Davies' About
Sharks And Shark Attacks.[8][9]
Benchley
only began writing once his agent reminded him that if he did not deliver the
pages, he would have to return the already cashed and spent money. The hastily
written pages were met with derision by Congdon, who did not like Benchley's
attempt at making the book comedic.[2] Congdon only approved the first five pages, which went into
the eventual book without any changes, and asked Benchley to follow the tone of
that introduction.[4] After a month, Benchley delivered rewritten chapters, which
Congdon approved, alongside a broader outline of the story. The manuscript took
a year and a half to complete.[8] During this time, Benchley worked in his makeshift office
above a furnace company in Pennington, New Jersey during the winter, and in a converted turkey coop in the
seaside property of his wife's family in Stonington, Connecticut during the summer.[6] Congdon dictated further changes from the rest of the book,
including a sex scene between Brody and his wife which was changed to Ellen and
Hooper. Congdon did not feel that there was "any place for this wholesome
marital sex in this kind of book". After various revisions and rewrites,
alongside sporadic payments of the advance, Benchley delivered his final draft
in January 1973.[7]
Benchley
was also partly inspired by the Jersey Shore shark attacks
of 1916 where there were four recorded
fatalities and one critical injury from shark attacks from July 1 through July
12, 1916. The story is very similar to the story in Benchley's book with a
vacation beach town on the Atlantic coast being haunted by a killer shark and
people eventually being commissioned to hunt down and kill the shark or sharks
responsible. There is another similarity in the 1916 incident and the book
where kids are attacked in a body of water other than the ocean - in the 1916 incident
a child and an adult who attempted to save him were attacked and killed in
Matawan Creek, a brackish/freshwater creek and in the film adaptation Mike
Brody is nearly killed in the "pond" which in reality is a small
inland cove that connects to the open ocean through a small tributary.
Title and cover
Shortly
before the book went to print, Benchley and Congdon needed to choose a title.
Benchley had many working titles during development, many of which he calls
"pretentious", such as The Stillness in the Water and Leviathan
Rising. Benchley regarded other ideas, such as The Jaws of Death and
The Jaws of Leviathan, as "melodramatic, weird or
pretentious".[3] Congdon and Benchley brainstormed about the title
frequently, with the writer estimating about 125 ideas raised.[8] The novel still did not have a title until twenty minutes
before production of the book. The writer discussed the problem with editor Tom
Congdon at a restaurant in New York:
We
cannot agree on a word that we like, let alone a title that we like. In fact,
the only word that even means anything, that even says anything, is
"jaws". Call the book Jaws. He said "What does it
mean?" I said, "I don't know, but it's short; it fits on a jacket,
and it may work." He said, "Okay, we'll call the thing Jaws.[3]
For
the cover, Benchley wanted an illustration of Amity as seen through the jaws of
a shark.[7] Doubleday's design director, Alex Gotfryd, assigned book
illustrator Wendell Minor with the task.[10] The image was eventually vetoed for sexual overtones,
compared by sales managers to the vagina
dentata. Congdon and Gotfryd eventually
settled on printing a typographical jacket, but that was subsequently discarded
once Bantam editor Oscar Dystel noted the title Jaws was so vague
"it could have been a title about dentistry".[7] Gotfryd tried to get Minor to do a new cover, but he was
out of town, so he instead turned to artist Paul Bacon.[10] Bacon drew an enormous shark head, and Gotfryd suggested
adding a swimmer "to have a sense of disaster and a sense of scale".
The subsequent drawing became the eventual hardcover art, with a shark head
rising towards a swimming woman.[7]
Despite
the acceptance of the Bacon cover by Doubleday, Dystel did not like the cover,
and assigned New York illustrator Roger Kastel to do a different one for the
paperback. Following Bacon's concept, Kastel illustrated his favorite part of
the novel, the opening where the shark attacks Chrissie. For research, Kastel
went to the American Museum of
Natural History, and took advantage of the Great
White exhibits being closed for cleaning to photograph the models. The
photographs then provided reference for a "ferocious-looking shark that was
still realistic."[10] After painting the shark, Kastel did the female swimmer.
Following a photoshoot for Good
Housekeeping, Kastel requested the model he was
photographing to lie on a stool in the approximate position of a front
crawl.[11] The oil-on-board painting Kastel created for the cover
would eventually be reused by Universal
Studios on the film posters.[10]
Themes and style
The
story of Jaws is limited by how the humans respond to the shark menace.[12] The fish is given much detail, with descriptions of its
anatomy and presence creating the sense of an unstoppable threat.[13] Elevating the menace are violent descriptions of the shark
attacks.[14] Along with a carnivorous killer on the sea, Amity is
populated with equally predatory humans: the mayor who has ties with the Mafia,
an adulterous housewife, criminals among the tourists.[15]
In
the meantime, the impact of the predatory deaths resemble Henrik
Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, with the mayor of a small town panicking over how a
problem will drive away the tourists.[12] Another source of comparison raised by critics was Moby-Dick, particularly regarding Quint's characterization and the
ending featuring a confrontation with the shark; Quint even dies the same way
as Captain Ahab.[16][17][18] The central character, Chief Brody, fits a common
characterization of the disaster
genre, an authority figure who is forced
to provide guidance to those affected by the sudden tragedy.[12] Focusing on a working class local leads the book's prose to
describe the beachgoers with contempt, and Brody to have conflicts with the
rich outsider Hooper.[13]
Publication history
"I knew that Jaws
couldn't possibly be successful. It was a first novel, and nobody reads first
novels. It was a first novel about a fish, so who cares?"
Benchley
says that neither he nor anyone else involved in its conception initially
realized the book's potential. Tom Congdon, however, sensed that the novel had
prospects and had it sent out to The Book of the Month Club and paperback houses. The Book of the Month Club made it an
"A book", qualifying it for its main selection, then Reader's
Digest also selected it. The publication
date was moved back to allow a carefully orchestrated release. It was released
first in hardcover in February 1974,[1] then in the book clubs, followed by a national campaign for
the paperback release.[19] Bantam
bought the paperback rights for $575,000,[1] which Benchley points out was "then an enormous sum of
money".[3] Once Bantam's rights lapsed years later, they reverted to
Benchley, who subsequently sold them to Random
House, who has since done all the
reprints of Jaws.[8]
Upon
release, Jaws became a great success. According to John Baxter's
biography of Steven Spielberg,
the novel's first entry on California's best-seller list was caused by Spielberg and producers Richard
D. Zanuck and David Brown,
who were on pre-production for the Jaws film, buying a hundred copies of
the novel each, most of which were sent to "opinion-makers and members of
the chattering class".[1] Jaws was the state's most successful book by 7 p.m.
on the first day. However, sales were good nationwide without engineering.[1] The hardcover stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for some 44 weeks – peaking at number two
behind Watership Down
– selling a total of 125,000 copies. The paperback version was even more
successful, topping book charts worldwide,[20] and by the time the film adaptation debuted in June 1975
the novel had sold 5.5 million copies domestically,[21] a number that eventually reached 9.5 million copies.[1] Worldwide sales are estimated at 20 million copies.[22] The success inspired the American Broadcasting Company to invite Benchley for an episode of The American Sportsman, where the writer wound up swimming with sharks in
Australia, in what would be the first of many nature-related television
programs Benchley would take part in.[8]
Audio adaptations
A
6-part abridged adaptation read by John
Guerrasio was broadcast on BBC
Radio 7 in 2008.[23] A 10-part abridged adaptation read by Henry
Goodman was broadcast on BBC
Radio 4 in 2018 as part of their Book
at Bedtime program.[24]
An
unabridged audio adaptation read by Erik Steele was released by Blackstone
Audio in both CD and downloadable format
in 2009. A French translation, Les Dents de la Mer, read by Pascal
Casanova was released exclusively by Audible
Studios in downloadable format in 2018.[25]
Critical reception
Despite
the commercial success, reviews were mixed. The most common criticism focused
on the human characters. Michael
A. Rogers of Rolling
Stone declared that "None of the
humans are particularly likable or interesting" and confessed the shark
was his favorite character "and one suspects Benchley's also."[26] Steven Spielberg shared the sentiment, saying he initially
found many of the characters unsympathetic and wanted the shark to win, a
characterization he changed in the film adaptation.[4]
Critics
also derided Benchley's writing. Time reviewer John Skow described the novel as "cliché and
crude literary calculation", where events "refuse to take on life and
momentum" and the climax "lacks only Queequeg's coffin to resemble a bath tub version of Moby-Dick."[17] Writing for The
Village Voice, Donald Newlove declared that
"Jaws has rubber teeth for a plot. It's boring, pointless,
listless; if there's a trite turn to make, Jaws will make that
turn."[27] An article in The Listener criticized the plot, stating the "novel only has bite,
so to say, at feed time," and these scenes are "naïve attempts at
whipping along a flagging story-line."[28] Andrew
Bergman of The New York Times
Book Review felt that despite the book serving
as "fluid entertainment", "passages of hollow portentousness
creep in" while poor scene "connections [and] stark manipulations
impair the narrative."[29]
Nevertheless,
some reviewers found Jaws's description of the shark attacks
entertaining. John Spurling of the New
Statesman asserted that while the
"characterisation of the humans is fairly rudimentary", the shark
"is done with exhilarating and alarming skill, and every scene in which it
appears is imagined at a special pitch of intensity."[30] Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised the novel in a short
review for The New York Times, highlighting the "strong
plot" and "rich thematic substructure."[31] The Washington Post's Robert F. Jones described Jaws as "much more
than a gripping fish story. It is a tightly written, tautly paced study,"
which "forged and touched a metaphor that still makes us tingle whenever
we enter the water."[32] New York Magazine reviewer Eliot Fremont-Smith found the novel
"immensely readable" despite the lack of "memorable characters
or much plot surprise or originality"; Fremont-Smith wrote that Benchley
"fulfills all expectations, provides just enough civics and ecology to
make us feel good, and tops it off with a really terrific and grisly battle
scene".[18]
In
the years following publication, Benchley began to feel responsible for the
negative attitudes against sharks that his novel engendered. He became an
ardent ocean conservationist.[4] In an article for the National Geographic published in 2000, Benchley writes "considering the
knowledge accumulated about sharks in the last 25 years, I couldn't possibly
write Jaws today ... not in good conscience anyway. Back then, it
was generally accepted that great whites were anthropophagus (they ate people)
by choice. Now we know that almost every attack on a human is an accident: The
shark mistakes the human for its normal prey."[33] Upon his death in 2006, Benchley's widow Wendy declared the
author "kept telling people the book was fiction", and comparing Jaws
to The Godfather,
"he took no more responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario
Puzo took responsibility for the
Mafia."[16]
Film adaptation
Main article: Jaws
(film)
Richard
D. Zanuck and David Brown,
film producers at Universal Pictures,
both heard about the book before publication at the same time. Upon reading it,
both agreed the novel was exciting and deserved a feature film adaptation, even
if they were unsure how to accomplish it.[3] Benchley's agent sold the adaptation rights for $150,000,
plus an extra $25,000 for Benchley to write the screenplay.[7] Although this delighted the author, who had very little
money at the time,[3] it was a comparatively low sum, as the agreement occurred
before the book became a surprise bestseller.[34] After securing the rights, Steven
Spielberg, who was making his first
theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck, Brown and Universal, was hired as the
director.[35] To play the protagonists, the producers cast Robert Shaw
as Quint, Roy Scheider
as Brody and Richard Dreyfuss
as Hooper.[36]
Benchley's
contract promised him the first draft of the Jaws screenplay. He wrote three drafts before passing the job over to other
writers;[34] the only other writer credited beside Benchley was the
author responsible for the shooting script, actor-writer Carl
Gottlieb who appears in the film as Harry
Meadows.[36] Benchley also appears in the film playing a brief onscreen
role as a TV reporter.[37] For the adaptation, Spielberg wanted to preserve the
novel's basic concept while removing Benchley's many subplots and altering the characterizations, having found all of the
characters of the book unlikable.[34] Among the major changes were the removal of the adulterous
affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper and Mayor Larry Vaughn's connections
to the mafia.[38] Quint became a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster,[39] and changing the cause of the shark's death from extensive
wounds to a scuba tank explosion.[40] The director estimated the final script had a total of 27
scenes that were not in the book.[38] Amity was also relocated; while scouting the book's Long Island
setting, Brown found it "too grand" and not fitting the idea of
"a vacation area that was lower middle class enough so that an appearance
of a shark would destroy the tourist business." Thus now the setting was
an island in New England,
filmed on Martha's Vineyard,
Massachusetts.[41]
Released
in theaters in 1975, Jaws became the highest-grossing
film ever at the time, a record it held for
two years until the release of Star Wars.[42][43] Benchley was satisfied with the adaptation, noting how
dropping the subplots allowed for "all the little details that fleshed out
the characters".[8] The film's success led to three sequels,
with which Benchley had no involvement despite them drawing on his characters.[44] According to Benchley, once his payment of the
adaptation-related royalties got late, he called his agent and she replied that
the studio was arranging a deal for sequels. Benchley disliked the idea,
saying, "I don't care about sequels; who'll ever want to make a sequel to
a movie about a fish?" He subsequently relinquished the Jaws sequel
rights, aside for a one-time payment of $70,000 for each one.[8]
References
· · Bouzereau,
Laurent (1995). A Look Inside Jaws ["From Novel to Script"]. Jaws:
30th Anniversary Edition DVD (2005): Universal Home Video.
· · Dowling, Stephen
(February 1, 2004). "The
book that spawned a monster".
BBC News. Retrieved January 19, 2009.
· · Downie, Robert M. Block
Island History of Photography 1870–1960s, page 243, Volume 2, 2008
· · Hawtree,
Christopher (February 14, 2006). "Peter
Benchley: He was fascinated by the sea, but his bestselling novel tapped into a
primeval fear of the deep".
The Guardian.
Retrieved August 18, 2008.
· · Morgan, Ted
(April 21, 1974). "Sharks". The New York Times Book Review. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
· · Gilliam, Brett
(2007). "Peter Benchley: The Father of Jaws and Other Tales of the
Deep". Diving
Pioneers and Innovators.
New World Publications. ISBN 978-1-878348-42-5. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
·
Perez, Steve (December 15, 2004). "'Jaws' author explores sharks' territory". San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved
August 18, 2008.
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