What if Jaws hadn't been made in 1975?

1975 was the year of, amongst others, Dog Day Afternoon, The Eiger Sanction, The Man Who Would be King and Rollerball. A time of anti-heroes, big literary adaptations starring Harry Palmer and James Bond and movies set in weirdly 1970s looking dystopian futures where people were crazy for, of all things, roller skating...

There was another huge movie - of course - but what do we think would have happened if that one hadn’t happened? What if Peter Benchley had never written the book or if Spielberg hadn’t picked up that ‘big block of paper’ and decided against what he thought was some weird movie about a dentist?

We’d have no DUH-DUM, DUH-DUM, DUH-DUM playing in our heads when we went swimming, no one would ever mutter “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” when shit got a bit too real and where would Mr Spielberg even be now? Would 1941 have been a smash hit? Would he have bothered with Close Encounters and if he did, who would have been his star? Not Richard Dreyfus, that’s for certain. My God, I’ve just had a terrible thought! Would he even have hung out with George Lucas in Hawaii, reassuring his buddy that Star Wars was gonna be a global phenomenon?

“George, just chill would ya? I was the same with Jaws, thought everyone’d hate the damn thing but look what happened? You’re gonna be fine!” And then, when it turned out Lucas had changed cinema forever and devoured Jaws’s box office record into the bargain, he relaxed.

But with no Jaws would there have even been Star Wars? Would Lucas have been given the impetus he needed to realise his space saga? And if Star Wars had never happened, would the two friends have started building sandcastles and talking about George’s latest idea? Something to do with a whip-wielding archaeologist?

It’s like ripples in a pond dude… (and we all know what happens in ponds)

So, this parallel universe where THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME wasn’t made might exist (in a crazy Dr Strange Multiverse type way) but thankfully we don’t have to live there, we know Jaws came out, we’ve watched it over and over and loved it every time. But let’s just indulge our imaginations a bit and consider the idea - just for a while.

So, we’ve accepted that in this ‘other universe’ the worldwide monster hit of ‘75 didn’t take place and time just carried on. As we’ve already considered, other movies might not have got made because of this one event but if we spend time wondering about the space-time-continuum we’ll fall down the Back to the Future rabbit hole and the fabric of time and space will unravel and then there’ll probably be no such thing as Krispy Kreme donuts of something! I don’t know, my head hurts! Let just get back to the idea and see what happens when we turn up in our alternate 2022.

Right, so here we are and wouldn’t you know it, someone just wrote the exact same book about a killer Great White that has ‘staked a claim in the waters off Amity Island’. There was a huge bidding war with Universal managing to scoop up the rights. How would that pan out? What would happen? Well before we go any further I think that we’d need to cast your actors.

Chief Martin Brody

I reckon someone like Chris Pratt would be top of a lot of lists for Brody. He’s good at Everyman roles and he’s a sort of an action guy without being too serious about it. He can be funny too and not afraid to look stupid. He fills cinemas too - when his name’s on a poster, the movie makes tons of money - he’s a bankable commodity and that’s what you need these days when budgets are upwards of $200million.

Casting a big star in the lead would be a major deviation from what Spielberg did of course. He went for character actors, relative unknowns and quite a few non-actors. But that’s a risky strategy, producers of our Alternate Universe 21st Century Jaws would want recognisable faces on the screen to guarantee a big crowd on opening weekend.

No doubt about it, star power would win out.

Right then, Pratt’s in, who’s next?

Matt Hooper

Well, you’d want someone who could deliver the ‘science bits’ effectively. Hooper was King Nerd. A hero for every kid who never quite fitted in but actually knew more than all the popular kids. he anchored the real Jaws and made it accessible to a bigger audience. Maybe Seth Rogen would fit here, or perhaps Dev Patel. Rebecca Hall or Phoebe Waller-Bridge are also good options. Great actors who could easily deal with the role. With Hooper you could be more quirky with its casting. Dreyfus wasn’t exactly a major player when he got the part, having done a few movies but no substantial time on screen. He got one line in The Graduate (“Shall I get the cops?”), played a stagehand in Valley of the Dolls, popped up in Catch-22 and Dillinger and then got cast by George Lucas in American Graffiti - which made Lucas suggest him for the role of Hooper.

In the real Jaws, Hooper does lots of the heavy lifting in terms of exposition and laying out just how much of a threat the beast is. Dreyfus had a scatter-gun delivery, his dialogue spat out like his was sprinkling cocaine on his cornflakes… but he was funny too, you believed in him totally, this guy really knew sharks.

How would someone approach the role in Alternate Universe Jaws then? I reckon Phoebe Waller-Bridge would be excellent. She could still be English and give the part lots of her sly Fleabag wit and Hooper would be a different type of foil for Quint. She’d easily be able to outgun the shark hunter with her knowledge and may be seen as a threat to Brody’s solid family dynamic back in Amity. How would the two male leads deal with a woman oceanographer, telling them how they need to approach the situation? In the real movie, Quint’s able to brush Dreyfus’s Hooper aside but could our other Quint manage that? Robert Shaw played Quint as a misogynist and a foul mouth - and brilliantly so - but would that work against our new Hooper? Phoebe’s Hooper would probably just laugh at him.

Quint

So, what of the character that is for many the prime role in the Jaws story? Who the hell would you get to play the snarling old sea bastard? As difficult as it might be, we need to forget Robert Shaw, accept that he never got the part because Jaws didn’t exist in 1975. So who do we choose for the Alternate Universe? Idris Elba? Or what about Michael Sheen?

Sheen always delves deep into a character and he’s got the stage chops too - just like Shaw. Sheen might’ve taken roles in things like the Twilight films and Underworld recently, but it’s his turns in Frost/Nixon, The Damn United, his incredible portrayal of Tony Blair in The Deal and as serial killer Martin Whitley in ‘The Prodigal Son’ where I think he’s outstanding. He talked about examining the psychology of different roles and how he went about “going into this kind of heart of darkness”. And when you hear that phrase immediately Joseph Conrad’s novel comes to mind, and Coppola’s trippy war epic, Apocalypse Now.

Could the Alternate Universe Jaws really go off on a tangent and view the source material through the Conrad prism? The shark would become Colonel Kurtz, sharing the role of ‘the prize’ at the end of the river/deep below the waves. Heart of Darkness concerned itself with the idea that basically the world over, people were all the same. It didn’t matter if you came from London or Paris or New York or live in middle of a jungle. In the final analysis, our lives boiled down to one simple idea - we all wanted to live happily.

But Quint was never the happy-go-lucky type - not really. He had ghosts haunting him and his life was not easy. The Alternate Universe Jaws demons this time around aren’t sharks though - they are humans. Instead of a spooky late night tale of sailors being “bitten in half below the waist”, he’d recount how he was driven from his home, forced to live on the Orca and watched as his world was torn to sheds by the feeding frenzy of the stock brokers and hedge fund managers, invading from the city and rampaging through Amity.

“They circle at first, waiting for that perfect moment. No one notices to start with, they say hi, how you doing? But then they strike. Without warning, buying up the headland, building their clapboard fortresses, cruising town in their damn Range Rovers. But they smile at you as they do it all. You ever seen one of those perfect, whiter than bleach smiles? I mean up close? You look too long and you realise you’re staring death in the face. Thing is, people aren’t smart enough to see, they’re dumb and they get sucked in by it all. Those rows of teeth, so straight and true, crammed into those wide mouths like White Thassos headstones in a billionaires’ boneyard. But people don’t notice the blood behind the money, the ripping and tearing, how these ‘people’ are slitting this town’s guts out and feeding it back to them…”

Idris would growl through it pretty well and in Luther he’s got that big, ambling gate - there’s a real menace and simmering power. But he’s a thinker too, talking things through, working them out and piecing everything together. He’d play Quint as a muscular ‘don’t-fuck-with-me’ Navy vet. A man who witnessed one too many horrors during his time in the forces and now just wants peace and quiet. Maybe he’s been forced into the role of sport boat captain, having to take the rich city folk out to hunt for swordfish or Marlin so he can pay the bills.

Alternate Universe Quint would like nothing more than to feed the rich weekenders to the sharks

“they infect the island like a plague. Swaggering off the ferry, swarming down Main Street, pushing all the prices up. Same time they complain their damn lattes cost a buck and a half more than last month. Give me the sharks any time!”

Bruce

So what of the movie’s real star? Well, I think we all know exactly what route the studios would go down, those three capital letters that are now everywhere in movies and have turned the end credits into epic marathons of resilience, endurance and fortitude.

CGI.

With Alternate Universe Jaws, maybe we’d get a smidge of practical stuff (a fin perhaps or some blood bubbling to the surface) but really, dealing with practical effects take time. And if they go wrong, oh my GOD, they take even more time. Everything slows down, the movie takes ages to finish, everyone starts going crazy and agents begin to demand their clients be released - and studios really don’t like that.

But you can’t blame them really. Thing is, all that waiting about for stuff to work was what the real 1975 Jaws thrived on (even if it didn’t know it at the time) - delays caused by malfunctioning monsters…

Spielberg’s naive wish to film on the ocean was an unintended stroke of genius - and something that would inform his filmmaking forever.

“I was naive about the ocean, basically. I was pretty naive about Mother Nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank. But had I to do it all over again I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”

The constant delays caused by on-set problems helped refine the story to such a degree that it changed it entirely. It was one of the most fortunate disasters in cinematic history.

“…The shark not working was a godsend…it made me rewrite the whole script without the shark….the film was more effective…”

Would that happen with this new, Alternate Universe 21st Century Jaws? Would months be spent picking apart the characters, trying to work out their backstories and motivations? Would they have even filmed it in Martha’s Vinyard or would there be a few bits of location shooting with drones and underwater and then do all the rest either in a big tank or just create it all on a computer somewhere?

The Score

John Williams’ music is one of the great joys in life. Pick any movie he’s ever done and it’ll be perfection. He’s never messed up. He’s a genius, a once-in-a-lifetime talent who knows exactly what he’s doing. It might sound a bit savage but I don’t believe there’s a single composer who’s working today that comes anywhere close to him. Yes, there are some good, talented people but, in his league? Nope, not even close.

Music in modern movies is more about atmospheric sounds, it’s lost touch with melody and my belief is because the time constraints are so incredibly tight.

Listen to the soundtrack for Captain America by Alan Silvestri (a good composer for sure and he’s done some sterling work in the past) and then turn it off. Now, hum the main theme. The one that signifies Cap is on screen doing something heroic. Tricky isn’t it.

Now, listen to the soundtrack for Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film set in a similar period with a similar tone to it and a mixture of great story telling and action/adventure. Right, hum the main theme. Easy right?

The Raiders March is one of the greatest pieces of film music of all time. But for Williams, writing a single theme wasn’t enough. Indy had a theme, Marion had one, the Ark even had a theme! And then you get to the music for the fight next to the Flying Wing and the Truck Chase (plus all the other bits) - it’s incredible.

It’s the same with every single movie he’s ever worked on. He writes eternally memorable tunes and motifs like its the easiest thing in the world. He claims to spend hours on “those little bits of musical grammar” but maybe that’s the point. Alongside the fact that he’s a total genius, he’s always been given the time to do the job he’s being paid for.

The Jaws soundtrack was a total force of nature. The two note motif for the shark was like nothing anyone had ever heard before - with the possible exception of Bernard Herrmann’s slicing strings in Psycho. It signified the shark was there and prepared the audience for action but when it didn’t happen, you still wondered if the shark would appear from the shadows and eat someone. But then you came to expect it, it drove the action and almost became part of the film’s dialogue. When someone says Jaws, lots of people will think of “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” or that eerie DUUH DUM… DUUH DUM… thing. It’s as if the shark is speaking. One of the best stories about it ever was when Williams played the idea he had on the piano for Spielberg. The director initially thought Williams was joking but then slowly started to recognise the magic of what he was hearing.

Alternate Universe Jaws would have lots of screeching and stomping, there’d be loud crashes and bangs, but music? I very much doubt it. You certainly wouldn’t get the Erich Korngold inspired fun when the three men are chasing the shark out or the magical theme of all the tourists arriving for the 4th July. It’d just be lots of generic ‘action music’ and probably a song slapped in the middle for no apparent reason.

The Plot

First scene: Chrissie Watkins is savagely attacked (even more so than in the real movie) and we see the shark - illuminated by a full moon probably - leap out of the water and rip her head off.

The next day we meet Brody and he’d be fixing his truck - with his shirt off. Ellen would be unnaturally slim in full make up (even though its 8:30am and dressed in a crop top and Daisy Dukes. They might not even have kids.

A bit of basic blah blah blah about closing the beaches, a Zoom meeting with the Town Council and then Quint would send an email saying he’d do the job for $100,000, not a penny less. No nails down the blackboard, no poetic “I’ll find him for three, but I’ll catch him and kill him for ten. For that you get the head, the tail - the whole damn thing,” it takes too much time to write good dialogue, move on!

All the deaths are as before, except that it’s not just Alec Kintner who dies, the shark flops up on the beach, eats Mrs Kintner too and then swallows Harry (of ‘some bad hat’ fame) too. Pippet is shown to ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY survive (which she does in the real movie anyway) and the shark also makes a surprise kill when he chomps the two kids with the cardboard fin. Serves them right for wasting police time.

He chews up ‘Pond Guy’ into mincemeat and all the kids in Michael’s boat as well, other than Michael who the shark spares but stares at before swimming away.

Hooper would have his/her entrance now and they’d get around to the Tiger Shark bit almost immediately - who needs lots of stuff where people just talk all the time - jeez! Skip to the action already.

The three leads meet up in a coffee shop (lots of product placement opportunities here) and off they go to sea to deal with Bruce.

From now on it’s all basically the same but just MUCH BIGGER. The shark is revealed to actually be a Megalodon and so now is not a piddling 25 feet and 3 tons, more like 35 metres and 20 tons. Teeth the size of Scottish Claymores and big red eyes like serving platters.

Brody has a Gatling gun strapped across his back and a pair of .44 Magnums whilst Quint has a full size whaling harpoon fixed on the stern of the Orca. For they are REAL MEN and real men have BIG GUNS! It is in no way a compensatory measure for some unspoken bit of self-loathing.

Both men fire explosive charges at the shark but big Bruce just chews them up and spits them out. Hooper gets in the cage and the cage is flattened by the shark. Hooper is now presumed dead.

Quint is eaten but fights his way out through Bruce’s gills only to be eaten again. But he pulls one of the shark’s teeth out and he stabs the beast multiple times in the mouth as he is swallowed. And that just leaves Brody.

It’s basically the same scene but Brody has his Gatling gun and he’s firing away with it until he’s out of ammo. Then he starts on in with the Magnums until he knows he’s down to his last bullet (even though by now he’s fired at least 30 rounds and he’s not once reloaded) and on his final shot he hits the shark square in his eye and even though Bruce didn’t so much look at a tank of compressed air - let alone eat one - he still blows up. But this time the explosion is near nuclear in size.

Because, Hollywood!

Then Hooper pops up again and he and Brody paddle back to shore.

Reception

The movie is globally panned by critics but the opening weekend is still very strong. However, the numbers quickly tail off as people realise Fast & Furious 25 is coming out soon and this time it’s got Transformers in it! And there’s rumoured to be either a Marvel or DC crossover plot!AWESOME!!

Eventually, Jaws sinks beneath the waves, spiralling down into the inky depths where it finally comes to rest on the sea bed along with all the other forgettable dreck that came out that year.

A film about a big shark with lots of flashy effects that everyone said was INCREDIBLE! AMAZING! OUT OF THIS WORLD!!! It’s forgotten, like it never happened.

So, after all the excitement and the hurried shooting schedules, with demands by studios to give all the roles to the biggest stars and to ‘not worry too much about the plot - it’s just a damn movie about a big shark that eats people’ (and with music so generic it sounds like every other subpar action movie you’ve ever had to drag yourself through in your life) all that’s left of it is just another title to skip over on your streaming site of choice.

Words by Tim Armitage

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