JAWS 2: The incredible ideas that didn't have enough bite
Film history is full of the comedy, tragedy, and drama―perhaps even horror―of floundering screenplays, ruthlessly replaced talent, and exploding (or imploding) budgets; it sometimes doesn’t do therefore to look back and wonder ‘what if?’ all that much. Filmmaking is a process, and it can be painful.
That said, with a sequel as highly anticipated as Jaws 2 would have been, right from those earliest days when the original was still ringing box office tills, coupled with the story of its false production start in ’76 and ‘77, we might be forgiven.
And so, here we are forty-five years on from Jaws 2’s US theatrical release, looking back at some of the concepts that just might have proved works of Jaws franchise genius…
Cards on the table, I don’t give too much credence to the idea of original director (one whose dramas I greatly admire, particularly Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and Baby Blue Marine) John Hancock’s version-that-never-was being a missed opportunity; I like―no, adore―the Jaws 2 we got with Jeannot Szwarc at the helm and Carl Gottlieb at the typewriter.
That doesn’t mean I’m not curious though.
So much talent involved, so many ideas mooted, and an element of mystery over lost footage that brings to mind rumours of The Wicker Man’s buried negative (supposedly ritualistically sacrificed to what would soon become the M4 Motorway near Shepperton Studios. But that’s another story).
From this creative process that ended with Szwarc’s sequel, here are the concepts that I find most intriguing, forty-five years on:
The lost Szwarc scene that most fans get their spinnakers in a twist over is the unused, grisly death of Bob, played so memorably by Billy Van Zandt. We have only one or two stills (not frames) of Bob (Van Zandt himself doing the stunt work) sprawled across one of the catamaran hulls (the Sizzler’s), the shark bearing down on him. Ironically this image is often chosen by picture researchers to represent the film, effective as it is. In early drafts, Bob is bitten in two, a reference―together with the very buoyant name ‘Bob’―that we can trace back to Quint’s USS Indianapolis recollection of bisected Bosun’s Mate Herbie Robinson, bobbing in the sea (in PG/R rating compromises, Bob supposedly was then to lose just his legs, later still to just get chomped). In the Jaws 2 we have, yanking its proverbial rudder to steer clear of an R-rating, Bob gratefully survives (thank you… thank you… thank you…), but like the rest of you, I’d pay good money to see just how that effect was realised.
Linked to Bob’s gory demise and ultimate salvation in the edit suite, is Marge’s less bloody death. Everyone’s favourite Amity teen had survived in alternate drafts, rescued from under her Lightning sailboat by the Harbor Patrol pilot, who also made it, the lucky pair swimming off underwater with the aid of a handheld oxygen tank. I’ve read conflicting stories as to whether this action was even filmed, although you’ll likely be familiar with the tense ‘deleted’ footage of the pilot in the submerged chopper cockpit bubble, rammed by the shark. RIP Marge.
There were other scenes left out of course, some available to us viewers today, some not (some left on the page). A cute one that made it onto some lobby cards is Brody gleefully giving love rival Len a parking ticket! One cannot help but think the unused footage of Mayor Larry Vaughn defending Chief Brody, loyal and with a sense of guilt at previous bad judgement, would only add depth to that relationship (watch those online if you never have).
Jaws 2’s water skier scene is of course one of its most iconic, so much so that it made it onto the equally famous poster. In a script draft dated November 30th 1976, by Dorothy Tristan (rewriting playwright Howard Sackler’s original draft), the scene was much more complex. And violent. In the speedboat were two people, Heller and Dee, and in this version there were two water skiers―Billy and his unnamed wife. In a prolonged struggle, the pursuing shark attacks and slowly eats the poor, dying woman while Billy frantically holds her by the hair. Billy, for his sins, is ultimately strangled by the boat’s towline! Tristan and Hancock were clearly interested in the gruesome reality of a man-eating shark let loose on a resort community. Nightmarish to film, as well as watch, it would have made one hell of a scene!
From Howard Sackler’s original 1976 drafts (not his original concept though―as a contributor to the original Jaws script he had favoured a USS Indianapolis prequel for Jaws 2), we get one or two very intriguing concepts: the character Boyle was to step into Quint’s deck shoes, and very much in the spirit of the three-men-in-a-boat last act of the original, his Jaws 2 was to proceed with Chief Brody, Boyle and the more familiar property developer Len Peterson (played originally by Dana Elcar) venturing out to sea in Peterson’s boat to catch the shark. At this stage it would be Boyle who would be bitten in half, Herbie Robinson/Bob-style.
Incidentally, and perhaps also intriguingly, before Dorothy Tristan (a very fine writer) introduced the familiar electrocution death scene at Cable Junction, Sackler’s script had the man-eater die in a bloody frenzy thanks to the blades of Peterson’s boat’s propellor, the shark attracted to it by the vibrations like a moth to the flame.
Many fans express an interest in seeing Amity Island portrayed in an economic depression, with boarded, vacated premises and gloomy weather to mirror Brody’s psychological state. I’m not sure. Would it have been too different, too bold, to stray from the look of the original so far? One notion I do find interesting, rooting the film firmly in the horror genre (instead of flirting with it as the whole franchise concept so cleverly does) was the denouement of the Amity kids day sailing to the Lighthouse being part of a sailing regatta, upon which not only a heavy fog would descend, causing confusion and fear, but also an inferno. Maybe a little too gothic for the Amity we know?
I’m going to return to Bob for the last word on intriguing concepts that didn’t play out. In drafts developed by Sackler and then Tristan he was intended to be the son of Quint, known as ‘Sideburns’ (later evolving to Bob’s surname, Burnside) and perhaps even ‘Quint, Jr.’, returning to Amity to claim his father’s reward for killing (sort of) the shark. His introduction to audiences would be him arriving on the Chappy Ferry whistling Quint’s naval ballad, ‘Spanish Ladies’.
Now there’s a ‘what if?’ idea worth considering.
Farewell and adieu.
Words by Scott Dingley aka @Jaws2Archivist
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