Watching Amity And My Jaws Honeymoon
One of the beats of Steven Spielberg’s seminal classic Jaws (1975) is the off-story and off-frame buzz of arriving tourists visiting the island of Amity for the 4th July holiday weekend. I always wanted to be one of many characters in Jaws – the Kintner boy (he had cool ’70s Spielberg kid hair and a fairly grisly death), one of the Brody sons (this only-child always wanted Jaws 2’s Mike Brody as my older brother) or perhaps a summer vacation intern for Polly, the police station’s admin god. Heck, I even wanted to get told off by local gossip and pearl-clutching Republican, Mrs Taft. But the least I could be was one of those lilo-clutching tourists in a part of the world that still has very real Great White Shark warnings posted about to this day.
So, when I managed to coerce my own Ellen Brody to dedicate part of our American honeymoon to becoming Amity tourists (it took a few Quint beers), it made a total Spielberg kid sense we somehow document our trip with a mini-movie and put ourselves – very loosely - in an Amity sequel.
As soon as you are aboard a ferry from Hyannis to Oak Bluffs on the Vineyard, you actually soon realise you are in a Jaws film already. The docks, boardwalks, streets, shacks, the ferry tannoys and beaches are almost untouched by time. And it is all this I wanted Watching Amity to depict.
Martha’s Vineyard is not a big island. You can drive across and around it in an easy day. However, set aside time for summer traffic, chilled speed limits, very narrow streets, busy parking, and diligent traffic cops staggering all vehicles. Start at the other side of the island and the Chilmark village of Menemsha – the home of Quint’s shack and where Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw first set off to a jaunty John Williams sea-faring cue.
Many a movie is married to a location, town, or street. Since Jaws and that fateful movie summer of 1975, Cape Cod’s Martha’s Vineyard instantly became a key support character – as vital to the verisimilitude as those islanders, car ferries, fenced dunes, and coyly edited jump cuts. Watching Amity is a small vacation testament to that legacy. It is impossible to not park up with your camera and wander towards those South Beach dunes without putting yourself in an anxious Chief Brody tracking shot as the lifeguards, metal shark signs, volleyball matches, cool-boxes and sand jeeps all make the real Amity come alive. And it was never anything other than a great privilege to be able to do so.
You can keep your Universal Studios tourist pageants, exploding boats and unflattering memento photographs for twenty dollars each. Edgartown is the real Jaws experience. Edgartown is where Brody struts into the path of some Independence Day pageantry and where local auditions for extras were held, where the Chappaquiddick Ferry is still operating in the same place, and where the crew and production was often based during the 1974 shoot. Edgartown has not changed either. Due to lens tricks and projection ratios the whole of Amity in Watching Amity feels tighter and more condensed than the movie suggested. Yet, it is still the quiet white-board haven of Cape Cod Americana and Spielberg folklore.
Whilst Watching Amity proves, Jaws was shot on nearly as many different Vineyard beaches as the franchise had sequels. However, another pleasing tic of the real Edgartown’s role as Amity is just how geographically correct the locations are versus how they are depicted. When Scheider’s Brody marches out of the police station towards the hardware store, the route he takes is the same urgent path down and through Edgartown. With some help from existing audio cues and images, Watching Amity hopes to not just be a slide show of contemporary location-hunt photos, but to echo and homage Verna Field’s cuts, that sense of dark comedy, that sense of summer and all with that vital, local realism of both Jaws and its ever-valid brother, Jaws 2. To this Spielberg kid and this mini-doc, Jaws is not just the triumphant triumverate of Shaw, Scheider and Dreyfuss. It is the collective of layered conversations, slithers of local audio, the gossipy Mrs Taft, toddlers singing making sandcastles, screaming kids, stoner radio hits and the very idea of an Americana vacation.
We could have pushed our recreated moments a bit more. But, guess what – screaming ‘shark!!’ on a Cape Cod beach in-front of tourists, kids and kind cops is not actually a good idea. Neither is going into the water. There are shark warnings and I really did not want to be the first person to visit Amity Island and be killed by a shark for real.
So whether you are a Hooper, a Brody or a total Quint, Watching Amity wants to convey how Martha’s Vineyard is not only one of the most apt destinations for Eighties kids and their VHS memories of 4:3 scares, bath-time hand fins and sneaking back into the lounge when watching Jaws was not yet allowed. It is also a quietly beautiful gem in the crown of Cape Cod. Maybe those Presidents, future movie moguls and plastic sharks were onto something. With a bit of planning, some early starts, a decent map and some shark bait, you too can be one of Amity’s summer tourists. Just maybe avoid all bonfire parties, marching bands, bad hats, and any pearl-clutching women called Mrs Taft.
Mark O’Connell is the author of Watching Skies – Star Wars, Spielberg and Us.
Martha’s Vineyard is normally open for all tourists at all times.
