The Writers Who Brought Jaws To The Screen

It's the opening of Jaws, the iconic John Williams theme is being heard for the first time and the opening credits are rolling as the shark searches through the water. We move to a beach setting at night, with a fire:

Screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb appears on screen.

Right? That's right, but that's not the full story of who helped transfer Jaws from page to the big screen.

Benchley and Gottlieb share screen credit for their script duties, not that they worked on it at the same time though. If that had been the case then the credits would have read as Peter Benchley & Carl Cotflieb, rather than Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb.

Peter Benchley

Without Benchley, of course there would have been no film, as he wrote the book it was based on. That book was sold as a film before it was even published and as part of the rights deal Benchley got to write the first draft of the script. Some sources say three drafts.

It stuck pretty close to to book, and when Steven Spielberg came on board (Dick Richard was hired as the first director, but he kept on referring to the shark as the whale) he wasn't keen on the first two acts and was keen to jettison the book's affair between Hooper and Ellen Brody.

Howard Sackler

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

Sackler's scribing was 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. Something which was never part of Benchley's original book.

Matthew Robbins & Hal Barwood

Spielberg's previous film to Jaws had been The Sugarland Express, it's said that Robbins and Barwood - who were on script duties on that film - were ported over to Jaws to help give it a polish to help get it to a place where it would work as a shooting draft.

Carl Gottlieb

Comedy and improv was his thing, which would stand Gottlieb in tremendous stead for his Jaws adventure, which was originally only going to be a one week dialogue spruce.

Gottlieb, who shared an agent at that time with Spielberg, and had worked with him on the TV move Something Evil, was sent the script - as it currently stood - with only three weeks before shooting was set to begin. It had one direction stuck to it, 'Eviscerate it'.

His job was to add both humour and help bring out the human elements, something which he did with great aplomb, which is why the dialogue still crackles as much today as it did in 1975. And why the film is so damn quotable.

At the time of getting the Jaws gig, Gottlieb was script editor on The Odd Couple TV series. He and Spielberg were already friends, the two even ended up living in the same place on Martha's Vineyard so they could squeeze every conceivable amount of time they could and dedicate it to honing that script. As a result he'd often be writing content the night before it was going to be filmed the next day.

Gottlieb also ended up appearing in front of the camera, as Harry Meadows. It was meant to be a larger part, but Gottlieb edited it down for the good of the film.

Gottlieb would be drafted into Jaws 2 and Jaws 3D to help turn those scripts around as well. On Jaws 2 Gottlieb would share screenwriting credit with Howard Sackler.

John Milius and Robert Shaw

Both are 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." And 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.

Brody, Quint and Hooper all had to work together to triumph against the shark, so you could say that the collaborative efforts of all the writers involved in bringing Jaws to the big screen helped beat the tides and Bruce, the mechanical shark to help create a classic honed by the extra time afforded it. And it's still pretty good stuff.

Words by Dean Newman

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