Jawspocalypse Wow: Profiling uncredited JAWS script rewriter John Milius

“I’ve always had trouble with authority.” - John Milius

A surfer, a barbarian and what he liked to call a ‘zen-anarchist’, John Milius has never been one to fly under anyone’s radar. If he hated something, he said so. If he loved something, likewise.

The writer of ‘Jeremiah Johnson’, ‘Judge Roy Bean’, ‘Magnum Force’, ‘Apocalypse Now’ and much of ‘Dirty Harry’ to name but a fistful. He was a ball of barely controlled rage wrapped in a cloak of poetry, swathed in prose and swimming in historical verbiage.

Brought up in the Mid-West and California you can see how this clash of cultures informed his thinking. He held fast to his ‘Apple pie American’ early childhood but also soaked up the easy-going Southern Californian lifestyle. It was this combination of conservative and liberal that informed his writing.

He styled himself accordingly, carving out an image of a cigar chomping bearded bear of a man who ended up bestriding Hollywood like a colossus, cranking out the best scripts in town and lending his magic to one or two that needed some polishing.

Every JAWS fan knows the tale of Milius coming up with the real meat of the USS Indianapolis speech (with a little help beforehand from Howard Sackler and a good deal of editing from Robert Shaw afterwards), but how did ‘Milius the man’ effect the speech?

Well, Steven Spielberg maintains that it was indeed Sackler, who told the then 26 year old director, “Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it’s this Indianapolis incident.” Spielberg was bowled over by the tale. He pouncing on it, recognising it as exactly what his movie needed. This was how what could easily have been an ordinary film about a killer shark would rise above its pulpy ‘airport book’ source material. It was a defining moment in the history of cinema and Sackler should always be commended for bringing it to Spielberg’s attention. But really it was Milius who cranked it up to 11. He took the essence of the material and ran with it. Sackler’s speech was maybe just three quarters of a page but then Milius arrives (probably striding through a cloud of cigar smoke) and asks to have a crack at it, just to see what he could do, the thing takes on a life of its own.

The whole idea of servicemen clinging to life in the middle of a hostile ocean, being attacked by wave after murderous wave of blood-thirsty sharks was like catnip to Milius. He lived for this sort of thing. The manly drama, the total secrecy of the mission, the whole death-or-glory angle brought out a huge, four page soliloquy for Quint and even though Shaw had to cut it down, if it hadn’t been for Milius’ rewriting brilliance, JAWS would have been very different. That speech is its dark heart, it shows Quint for who he is - and maybe deep down he knows this is his final mission. He’s survived the worst possible ordeal and now he’s here for some payback. He wants revenge on the monsters who took his pals. Of course, he figured without Bruce.

And this was Milius’ life motivation too. He saw the movie business as a monster, ready to swallow him whole, chew him up and spit him out as yet another mediocre writer with nothing new to say. But dammit, he wasn’t about to be dragged down by a system! He had a point to prove. Once before, in a different life, he’d been told he wasn’t good enough for his chosen life path, but thanks to his writing, his life would mean something.

But wait, who was is that had told him he couldn’t hack it? And what had been his initial ambition?

As a young man, John Milius had wanted one thing - to serve in the military. To lead a platoon of men up some Godforsaken hill, slogging his way through the mud, blood and guts. To have the air filled with hot lead and mortar rounds, the smell of napalm in his nostrils with the odds stacked against him - this had been his dream. Maybe he’d been a touch gung-ho about it all but he also understood the very real dangers.

Whether or not when he arrived at the Front and witnessed the reality of it all, his opinion of war might have been different. But right then and there, he was convinced, intoxicated by it.

It was a simple plan: Go to Vietnam and to hell with ever coming back again. Dead by 26 with a folded flag on his casket. Milius didn’t give a damn. It was his destiny.

However bold and courageous his heart might’ve been, his lungs had other ideas - he flunked the physical because of asthma. Not only the recruitment office but his physiology had told he wasn’t good enough.

Now, not only had he failed to realise his one and only ambition, he had a real problem. What the hell was he going to do with his life?

“I wandered into a theatre and saw a week of Kurosawa films…After seeing those films it occurred to me that a director… was the next best thing (to being a military leader”).

He might not be commanding men in the field, but instead of leading troops into battle with guns and grenades, he’d just weaponise the English language in his scripts instead.

Milius was a man who really liked a fight. And it seemed that any enemy would do. It could be the Viet-cong or Liberal Hollywood - to him it didn’t matter, just so long he was sticking it to someone.

This was the 1960s and Milius’ views were very different from the majority of his classmates at USC. While most of his fellow students wore badges that said ‘Nirvana Now’ with a peace sign in the middle, he “modified it so it looked like a B-52 and instead of having ‘Nirvana Now’, I changed it to ‘Apocalypse Now’”

It could be said that Milius was an ‘all or nothing’ kinda guy.

John Milius and Arnold Schwarzenegger

He didn’t want to sit about talking about stuff, he didn’t want to discuss it, he wanted to get on and do it! And he saw that the best way for him to get stuff moving was to ignite the argument - get under people’s skin and make them think.

And if you fast forward to look at JAWS, you see exactly the character he was closest to - he wasn’t Brody or Hooper, he was Quint.

But with all this railing against the social norms, we realise how Milius became so good at writing his scripts. He understood that the world wasn’t just how one side of society saw things, it was a combination. That’s how he wrote better stuff than anyone else at the time - he knew you needed light and shade (even if his characters were sometimes bigger and more outspoken than other people’s). George Lucas remembers when he was putting on a full screen colour version of his student film THX-1138. The professor in charge said Lucas couldn’t show it because other crews hadn’t finished theirs, that it would be embarrassing to them.

Milius was incensed. And to make his point, he punched the guy.

In addition to this, Milius wasn’t working with Lucas, he was on an opposing crews - in direct competition with Lucas.

He didn’t care about what side you were on, what he cared about was quality and who’d worked hardest and people being allowed to show it what they’d achieved.

One of his first real writing jobs was the 1971 movie, ‘Evel Knievel’ about the life of the motorcycle stuntman starring George Hamilton. Milius fell on the role like a bear on a salmon, completely enraptured by the idea of concocting a script about this daredevil Harley rider in a Vegas-era Elvis jumpsuit. It perfectly summed up everything wild, brash and totally unapologetic about America.

Hamilton recognised Milius as a real talent and said he’d set the writer up in his house in Palm Springs and Milius could have whatever he wanted.

John Milius Liddle by Patrick James

“He told me he wanted gold, girls and guns,” remembers Hamilton. And he was provided with exactly that, no questions asked.

Unfortunately, way too much fun was being had by the young writer and pretty soon Hamilton realised he wasn’t getting what he’d paid for. So he told Milius if he didn’t start fulfilling his end of the bargain, all the goodies would come to a shuddering halt.

The next day, while Hamilton was at the Plaza in New York, telegrams started began to descend from California. Over a hundred of them in fact. Milius ended up writing the movie in around four days.

He had arrived.

Next came ‘Dirty Harry’. Except the name John Milius didn’t appear anywhere on the script. He claimed he’d been tasked with writing a version of the story with a view of Frank Sinatra starring in it. A job he managed in three weeks.

And this is why he was so popular - he got the work done better than anyone else and he did it quicker than anyone else too. The movie solidified Clint Eastwood as a megastar and was such a huge hit, Milius was hired for the sequel, ‘Magnum Force’.

He moved on to writing ‘Jeremiah Johnson’, a movie starring staunch Democrat Robert Redford battling the elements and hostile Native Americans as a mountain man. The movie was violent, unrelenting and most of all thoroughly watchable, mostly because it didn’t shy away from its central idea - that the frontier life was desperately hard. Milius believed it couldn’t be lived in any other way than as a battle. If you didn’t fight (and fight dirty) then you’d wind up dead.

His telling of the legend of American antihero John Dillinger was another deep dive into the American psyche. A desire to do what the hell you wanted and not give a damn what anyone thought. In the movie Warren Oates played the bank robber as a charming fox, just doing whatever he had to, to get by. FBI man Melvin Purvis - played by Ben Johnson who’d been in so many of Milius’ hero, John Wayne’s westerns, was a superb foil and with a young Richard Dreyfus amongst the cast, it’s a great watch. Other movies (whether they were scripted or directed) fell into the same anti-establishment vein.

John Goodman’s character in ‘The Big Lebowski’ is alledgely based on John Milius

When the chance came to contribute to JAWS, Milius dived right in. He could probably sense the primal fear bubbling just under the surface, that the movie needed focus and drive at its heart. He also no doubt recognised and identified with Quint as a man who never got to fully realise his military potential. Quint also had ‘his war’ taken from him, but for him it was the sharks who stole it.

When you hear the USS Indianapolis speech and when you know how John Milius writes, you can hear him in every word. Its the ominous tone, the directness of the language and the poetry of the whole thing.

It remains Spielberg’s favourite scene in the entire movie and with good reason. For all the terrifying attacks and tension, it’s the words spoken by Quint that make you stop and think. Without them - without Milius’ unflinching directness - JAWS simply wouldn’t be JAWS.

And that’s why it should never be lumped into the category of ‘shark movie’.

Milius knew his friend was making a movie about war, about digging deep and taking a stand when every other soul had turned tail and run.

For him, movies should stand for something, they were art - not commerce. They were a call to arms. They should contain defiance, pathos and significant dialogue and yet never be ‘wordy’ just for the sake of it.

Milius has said he wanted to ‘tell and retell The Trojan Wars so that in the end no one would know who the original characters were’, meaning if a story is good enough, it can be melted down, forged and moulded into more and more tales. If it’s done with enough zeal and enthusiasm, it can be just as powerful with each new version.

He calls himself a Zen-Anarchist and many have questioned just what on earth that means - his friend Martin Scorsese being one of them.

Three years after gifting Steven Spielberg one of the greatest monologues in history, Milius went back to the sea again and made a little film called ‘Big Wednesday’. Everybody seems to know about the ‘anarchist’ bit, but where’s this ‘Zen’ part?

Part drama, part Arthurian legend, part autobiographical fantasy. A tale of three men who set out on a quest upon the sea, pitting themselves against the strength and power of the ocean - just no sharks this time.

It’s a story of surfing.

This is the Zen side of Milius. Yes, there’s a few ‘Animal House’ style high kinks with a house party and the inspired draft-dodging scene (interesting that he shot this considering his reverence for military service) but at the heart of the piece we find true friendship. It’s a gentle film about following your heart and realising that there will times when there’s no one else but you against the world.

Matt, Jack and Leroy are men who grow up together, then fracture and take different paths I life but eventually come back for the finale. The other real character of note is The Bear. A wise, grizzled surfer who knows what it takes to stare down death and not blink. His line “You’re always alone…” rings out as pure Milius.

I saw JAWS when I was around 7 years old. It was a revelation to me, it changed my life forever. When I saw ‘Big Wednesday’ and found out the same guy who’d written the USS Indianapolis speech had made this beautiful, heartfelt story about surfing and friends, I was blown away. There was so much I identified about it. If you’ve never seen it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When the chips are down and it hits you that this is it, you might not make it out alive, you realise in that split second that you can only really rely on yourself.

It was the same with ‘Conan’, ‘Dirty Harry’, ‘Dillinger’, ‘Jeremiah Johnson’, Captain Benjamin Willard and, of course, Quint.

In the USS Indianapolis speech there are the revelation about how the men formed into squares in to somehow stave off the attacks by the sharks, but you can tell from Quint’s delivery, he now recognises the futility of it, it’s every man for himself. For all the camaraderie of military life, for all the bonhomie and ‘Band of Brothers’ back slapping, it hit him like a train that in the end its just you and whatever’s coming to get you.

Just you and the Grim Reaper and no amount of sticking together was going to drag you away from those jaws.

So Quint left the world behind.

When Milius discusses how he wrote ‘Apocalypse Now’ he reaffirms this idea. He tells the story of being sent to college in Colorado so he was “away from the beach” but this only made him decide to rebel again, “to become a mountain man”, as he puts it. He’d sit reading ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad and marvel at the intensity of the novel. How the jungle came alive on the pages and how the only way the characters could conquer it was to go deeper into it. To accept it into their lives.

He recounts how he’d sit against a tree with his rifle but then found that he still wasn’t giving himself wholly, so he slept out in the open with just a knife but still he knew he wasn’t being honest, so he left the knife behind and finally found what he’d always suspected - that facing your fears was the most important thing in this world. Self reliance was key to success.

John Milius is a man who wrote to survive. He was convinced of his talent and much of the time he was right. He dedicated himself to the solitary discipline of storytelling and our cinematic world would be a far more barren place without his skill.

Asked to describe himself he said this:

“I may not be the strongest guy or the most well-armed but you can put me in a room with a pencil and a piece of paper and I can kill anybody”.

And he’d do it all by himself too.

Words by Tim Armitage

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