The steamy JAWS book affair between Hooper and Ellen that never made it to screen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that…if you’re basing your movie on a book, you can’t just shoot the book.

Stands to reason with something like ‘Harry Potter’ - those are some big old books. ‘Forrest Gump’ is another movie that made a very smart move to not just lift everything off the page and put it up on screen. In all honesty, Gump isn’t a very pleasant sort in the novel. Not Tom Hanks territory at all.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ has been adapted for the screen a number of times and with each version you get a different slant on the story, otherwise what’s the point? You need to make the story your own as a filmmaker - no matter the familiarity of the source material.

Steven Spielberg is famous for saying that after reading Peter Benchley’s novel, although he did see the massive cinematic potential, he found himself rooting for the shark because the characters were so unlikeable.

In the book version of JAWS, it wasn’t just some of the characters that didn’t fit into Spielberg’s vision of what the movie version should be - it was quite a bit of the storyline too.

Mayor Vaughn being in hock to the Mob was one major plot point that was swiftly jettisoned. This one does kind of work though. We all know in the movie Vaughn wants to keep the beaches open as “Amity’s a summer town, we need summer dollars…” and it seems fairly logical. He’s the mayor, he’s thinking about the town - he’s a good guy. See, he’s a bit slimy but he’s doing the right thing. But the book does put more meat on the bones on his reasoning by bing implicit about the Mob links. Vaughn has a few nice beach front properties and the Mob have a share of it. Vaughn wants to keep the beaches open - if he doesn’t, tourists will stay away and no one will rent the houses for the summer. Revenue will be down and then he won’t be able to keep his underworld bosses happy. Then again, does a film about a killer shark need a subplot about a Mayor with ties to the Mob? Does it add to the spine of the story? Can’t we just have the Mayor being a bit shady but not worry too much about the specifics?

Well of course we can.

And now we come to possibly the most famous section of the book that was removed from the film’s script. The affair between Matt Hooper and Ellen Brody.

Spielberg brought in Carl Gottlieb to assist in hammering the story into shape so they had a direct through-line for the story.

Spielberg wanted an A-Z tale of adventure, not a twisty-turny, overly wordy TV movie. He knew that to make a real summer thriller, spending time on illicit meals and bed-based liaisons between two of the characters was going to divert attention away from the real action.

In the novel, Ellen is a woman who feels adrift in her marriage. She and Martin are a quietly bickering couple (unlike the loved-up pair we see in the movie) and the course of true love is certainly not running smoothly for the Brody Bunch.

Ellen is portrayed in the novel as a social climber who’s starting to worry that maybe marrying the local cop wasn’t such a good idea. She hears about her friends going to nice parties and living the version of life she wants and her eyes begin to wander. We are told that prior to marrying Brody she’d dated Hooper’s older brother David, so there’s a vague hint that she’s also trying to work her way through the Hooper family as well as up the social ladder. She isn’t written as the maternal kind-hearted woman we see Lorraine Gary play in the film.

And then, after bumping into him while at shopping she invites him to dinner at the Brody hoome. The Matt Hooper that walks in is certainly not Richard Dreyfuss. He’s tall, tanned, and Martin takes an almost immediate dislike to him. There’s no sign of Dreyfuss’s sports jacket, shirt and hastily tied tie paired with scruffy jeans when this Hooper swaggers in the door. And there’s no bottle of red and bottle of white.

If somebody was going to do the unthinkable and make a JAWS reboot, and follow the book, this Hooper would’ve been played by Armie Hammer or Chris Evans. In the novel he’s wearing ‘bell-bottomed blue jeans, Weejun loafer with no socks, and a red Lacoste shirt with an alligator on the breast. It was the uniform of the young and rich in Amity’

The story moves along and we see Brody as more of an absent and at times, cruel, husband (calling Ellen ‘a corpse’ when she is so sleepy she can’t have sex with him) and so Ellen moves closer towards Hooper.

They meet for a lunch date and its here that, at least as a modern reader, you might start to question some of the language use. Just after ordering their meal Hooper starts bragging about how he’s very rich (which obviously attracts this social climber version of Ellen) and when Ellen asks about his brother David and whether he too is just as wealthy, Matt says that he is and that it’ll help his brother deal with however many wives he might be, then describing David’s second wife as “a meatball”.

Really, it’s pretty awful and crass and the thought of having this Hooper as a hero in the movie is almost untenable. But of course if we look at the ending of the book against the finale of the film, Hooper is killed by the shark. Perhaps this is Benchley’s revenge on this wholly unlikable character - if so, it kind of works. As the meal progresses there’s even more unpalatable comments from Hooper about how his grandfather “owned most of Denver” and that he was “the landlord of the red light district”. Again, Ellen doesn’t bat an eyelid, other than to comment that it must’ve been a good way for Grandpa Hooper to make lots of money. Matt Hooper counters with the comment that his Grandfather liked to take a lot of his rent “in trade”.

Excerpt from Peter Benchley's JAWS showing Ellen Brody's lust for Hooper and insecurity about him finding her just as desirable

Still nothing in the way of thinking that this is odd or distasteful from Ellen, in fact, it only seems to encourage her even more. She says that being a prostitute is meant to be “every school girl’s fantasy”.

Quite obviously we are now on very questionable ground in the writing. How does this attract Ellen?

But it doesn’t stop there as the conversation goes on to include rape, racism and then a scene where Ellen recalls her time in bed with Hooper.

In graphic - and very unromantic - detail.

There’s a possibility that an affair might have been included in the movie - or perhaps alluded to. We kind of see a tiny bit of Ellen’s flirtatious nature when comes to dinner and she’s giggly at his comments about the Aurora and how he “loves sharks” but that about it.

And the movie would’ve suffered for it, how could Scheider’s Brody have really have worked with Hooper on the Orca after finding out about the affair?

After Brody confronts and attacks Hooper about what he’d been up to last Wednesday, he then worries about whether his suspicions about Ellen and Hooper are true. He can’t decide what to do - should he confront her? Leave her? Or should he ‘beat her’?

It’s horrible to read and it does nothing for the story. We have a lead character - a hero for want of a better word - who considers one of the best ways to deal with a problem in his marriage is to physically assault his wife.

It’s a shame that this section of the book is so ugly because knowing they’re in there has actually stopped me from picking it up again to read. There’s nothing romantic in Ellen and Hooper’s affair, it’s cruel and callous all the way through. Hooper would’ve probably slept with anyone but Ellen just happened to be there and they sort of had a history and Ellen puts the happiness and security of her children’s life (let’s forget about Brody for the minute as he’s not exactly blameless here) at risk.

In the movie we have a couple who work together to raise their family, they are playful and understanding of one another and in this month where some of us might be celebrating Valentine’s Day, surely that’s what we should be aiming for - not a grubby affair.

Words by Tim Armitage

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