A Little Bit of Peyton Place
How can there be so many conflicting interpretations as to the basic story line of a 4.4 million-dollar film? Maybe it's because Benchley's book was thrown out as soon as Universal paid $175,000 for Jaws' screen rights. And now, five script rewrites later, nobody has a clue how tomorrow's lines will read.
"Benchley's novel was a mixture of Peyton Place and Moby Dick," explained scriptwriter Carl Gottlieb. Normally, a staff writer for TV's The Odd Couple, Gottlieb had been rushed out to the Vineyard a few weeks before to replace Howard Sackler, who had in turn replaced Peter Benchley as scenarist. "It was OK to have all those digressions in the novel about Brody's wife running around on him with Hooper and about the Mafia's interests in Amity island, but in film you've got to think in terms of action," observed Gottlieb. He offered me a script outline he'd prepared to illustrate just how radically the film departs from Benchley's book. Whereas Benchley's Brody is a homegrown Amity cop who marries a tennis-racquet toting socialite, the Universal version, according to this synopsis, has them as a couple "who leave the garbage of New York City behind them to find a clean life in the country." Benchley allows his shark to gobble up Hooper, but Gottlieb snatches him back safe and sound.
"When I read the book, I found myself rooting for the shark," recalled director Spielberg. "In rewriting the script, we've had to keep in mind the 'like factor.' Nobody in the book is very likeable, and most of them get devoured. So, in the film, you'll be rooting for Hooper and Brody vs. the shark and Quint," he predicted.
Script changes are still coming fast and furious, prompted by the strangest circumstances. While Spielberg and I talked at East Chop, Richard Dreyfuss bounded out of a house, a tiny band-aid on his right cheek. "Don't say pimple," he fumed, "don't say zit." A blemish on a star can mean anything from frantic calls to the insurance company to shutting down production for a few days. "Yeah," mused Spielberg. "Or we could write in some news lines like Brody says to Hooper, 'you can use my electric razor next time,' and you can have a bit of tissue paper on your cheek." (Spielberg wound up using a steep camera angle that day, thus avoiding Dreyfuss' disfigurement.)
Among the script problems that have yet to be grappled with, nobody has successfully resolved Jaws' Captain Quint, and his obsession with The Great White Shark. Wasn't there some similarity between Melville's Ahab and Quint, I asked Spielberg? "No, I'm not going to allow Quint to stand with his harpoon in the ship's pulpit screaming, 'black soul, white shark.'" No comparison. Except that someone had added to Gottlieb's script synopsis a scene in which Quint watches Gregory Peck play Ahab in the screen classic Moby Dick at his neighborhood Amity Island theatre. "They said stay away from Melville, and then they put this thing right in the middle," Gottlieb complained. I asked Spielberg why it was added and he explained that it was a good way to tell the audience 'that's their movie — and now let's get back to ours.'
