Quint's USS Indianapolis speech from JAWS

Steven Spielberg's JAWS (1975) is a film bursting with classic memorable moments.

The film, a bona-fide classic, is like a greatest hits package, from the visceral opening attack on Chrissie Watkins, the Alex Kintner death scene with Chief Brody's moment of realisation, to the Ben Gardner head scene or Brody telling Quint in no uncertain terms that he is going to need a bigger boat.

But, for many one scene stands above all those, the mesmerising USS Indianapolis speech delivered by Quint (Robert Shaw) to Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Brody (Roy Scheider).

It's simplicity itself, one man sat round a small table, telling a haunting story. There's some atmospheric background music curtesy of John Williams, but that is it, one man delivering a performance that, once seen, is never forgotten and never fails to impress.  Even watching it in a packed cinema screen, you can hear a pin drop.

No matter how many times you have seen it, the power of it and the delivery by Robert Shaw never diminishes, if anything it only seems to grow in stature and power. It remains as stunning and as fresh as it was almost 50 years ago.

And, quite rightly, you cannot separate Shaw's delivery from the words. I defy anyone to read it without hearing it the way Robert Shaw annunciates each and every beat. It is impossible to, it is just such an incredible performance.

So much so, that it is almost inconceivable that - just for that very scene alone - he was not even Oscar nominated.

City hands down, the USS Indianapolis speech is one of the greatest monologues put to screen in the history of cinema.  It further sucks you into the film and the characters, practically making you the fourth crew member on the Orca.

The monologue may be a dramatic piece of fiction, but the USS Indianapolis was a very real and very tragic incident. There was never a Quint on board but for many public this once very secret mission was the very first they had heard of it.

You also won't find it feature in the original source novel by Peter Benchley. So, who wrote the speech we see in the finished film?

Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was brought in by Spielberg, to help ground the script in a sense of reality. He was best known for The Great White Hope.

Sackler's scribing was an uncredited reworking of the screenplay, which saw him introduce small but key dramatic elements to the main characters. These included the masterstroke of Chief Brody’s fear of the water and the first appearance of Quint’s USS Indianapolis sinking backstory.

John Milius and Robert Shaw are both widely credited with helping flesh out, Sackler's original idea and indeed edit down and reshape the powerful USS Indianapolis speech that we all know and love.

JAWS, as has been well-documented, is one of those films that rather than be blighted by its problems during its making, helped shape it and turn it into a classic. The shark wasn't the only thing that wasn't working, the script wasn't always in the best shape either.

All which saw several folk have a dabble at one of the films' pivotal moments, Quint's still powerful USS Indianapolis speech.

Show don't tell, so all the scriptwriting books tell you, not so with that speech. Brody and Hooper are as much audience members as we are as Robert Shaw delivers a wonderful performance that is one of the highlights of the film. Not bad for a scene in the cabin of a small boat with three people, no flashbacks.

We don't need them as the words created are so evocative that they paint a picture all themselves.

But who wrote it? Original author Peter Benchley had three passes at the script before it was tweaked by Spielberg and Producer, Zanuck and Brown. Then Howard Sackler was drafted in for a redraft followed by John Milius for Quint's USS Indianapolis speech. And then Carl Gottlieb, well that's according to Andrew Yule in his book about Spielberg, Father to the Man.

If that wasn't complicated enough the aforementioned don't seem to be able to agree quite how the speech came about as we see it in the film. Benchley recalls Shaw claimed he wrote it himself, but heard the Milius rumour.

Producer Brown states whilst Milius added to it, it was written by Sackler but that Shaw added a great deal at the end.

Gottlieb is adamant it very much belongs to Shaw who penned an extended version post examining drafts by the other writers. As an award-winning playwright and gifted actor, it certainly rings true.

Spielberg remembers Milius penning it in front of him with Shaw cutting it down, although Milius says he did it over the phone. It's more like The Usual Suspects of monologues.

In the book, Nigel Andrew on Jaws, many of the same arguments are had, you certainly get the impression that Milius and Shaw are equally adept at spinning fisherman's yarns about how the ultimate fisherman's yarn came about.

In that book Spielberg remembers it as being Shaw acting out an eight-page Milius speech, which was itself based on a Sackler two pager, with that eight-pager thinned out to five by Shaw.

As Andrews states: "Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan." With a list of founding fathers made up of the writing talent of Sackler, Milius and Shaw, is it really any wonder that it is still arguably the most loved, mesmerising and powerful moment in the whole of the film.

And if anything, it just goes to show that JAWS isn't about a shark, it really is about the three main characters and their relationship and reactions to one another and the situation they have been thrust into.

• The USS Indianapolis speech
  
  “Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. Just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.
  

  “Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was kinda like old squares in the battle, like you see on a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was the shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’, hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
  
  “Sometimes that shark he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, in spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and… they rip you to pieces.
  
  “You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up and down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.
  
  “Noon, the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and three hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.
  
  “Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
  
  What's your favourite moment from the USS Indianapolis speech in JAWS?

Words by Dean Newman

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