JOHN CARPENTER'S UNMADE VERSION OF JAWS AUTHOR'S 'THE BEAST'

From Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, with a script from the director of Halloween, The Fog and The Thing. Sounds a box office winning combination, doesn't it?

That was the tantalising prospect awaiting audiences after horror director John Carpenter delivered a big screen script version of The Beast in 1992. The man who wrote the shark book and the man who gave us The Shape, before he was known as Michael Myers.

John Carpenter with Jamie Lee Curtis on the set of break-out hit Halloween (1978)

Jaws author Peter Benchley had a cameo in the movie as a reporter

In the John Carpenter film timeline that would put it between Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and In The Mouth of Madness (1994), both of which starred Sam Neill.

The book would go on to become a two-part mini series starring William Peterson, which was essentially Jaws but with a giant squid, and was released in 1996.

Carpenter's unproduced script now sits as part of The Peter Benchley collection at Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.

That collection consists of manuscripts, correspondence, printed material, audio, video, professional material, memorabilia, and other items, which naturally includes both the manuscript for Jaws the novel and drafts of Jaws the script.

Now there's a way to spend an afternoon, or 200.

Words by Dean Newman

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