Ep 714 - Jaws, by Peter Benchley

Summary

Overdue Podcast Episode Summary: "Ep 714 - Jaws, by Peter Benchley"

Release Date: August 4, 2025 | Host: Headgum’s Andrew and Craig

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1. Introduction to Overdue and Episode Focus

In this episode of Overdue, hosts Andrew and Craig delve into Peter Benchley’s seminal horror novel, "Jaws". The podcast centers on books that listeners have been meaning to read, exploring a wide array of genres from classic literature to obscure children's books. This episode juxtaposes the novel with its iconic film adaptation, unpacking the nuances and broader implications of both mediums.

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2. Overview of "Jaws": Book vs. Movie

Andrew begins by acknowledging the profound impact Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation had on popular culture, effectively overshadowing Benchley’s original novel. “We’re talking about Jaws 2, which is the sequel to the movie Jaws..." (02:01), sets the stage for a discussion on how the movie became a defining summer blockbuster, shaping cinematic trends for decades.

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3. Peter Benchley: Background and Motivation

The conversation shifts to Peter Benchley’s background. Andrew notes, “He’s the son of Nathaniel Benchley and grandson of Robert Benchley..." (06:34), highlighting the literary lineage that influenced Benchley’s writing career. Despite this legacy, Benchley sought to carve his own path, leading to the creation of "Jaws" as his attempt to sustain himself as a writer in 1971.

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4. Publication Journey and Adaptation into Film

Benchley’s journey from manuscript to bestseller is discussed in detail. Craig references a 1974 New York Times article, “And Then and Then and Them: The Making of a Best Seller,” which illustrates the publishing challenges and the editing process Benchley navigated. “There were like two hundred and something titles that they went through... finally, somebody says, let’s just call it Jaws” (16:15), highlights the deliberation over the book’s title and cover design, ultimately aligning it closely with the movie’s iconic imagery.

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5. Impact on Public Perception of Sharks

A significant portion of the discussion centers on how both Benchley’s novel and Spielberg’s film influenced public perception of sharks. Benchley later expressed regret over demonizing great white sharks, stating, “I could never demonize an animal... vitally necessary for the balance of nature..." (18:54). Andrew and Craig cite statistics showing minimal fatalities from shark attacks, challenging the exaggerated fear perpetuated by "Jaws". “There are like, two dozen shark attacks a year and, like, two fatalities every two years” (19:41), Andrew summarizes.

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6. Themes and Subplots in the Novel

Contrasting with the streamlined narrative of the film, Benchley’s novel weaves in complex subplots addressing political corruption, race relations, and economic pressures in the small seaside town of Amity. Craig explains, “The shark is causing the 70s... revealing all of the fault lines of this community” (52:55), illustrating how the novel serves as a microcosm for broader societal issues of the era. These elements, however, were largely omitted or simplified in Spielberg’s adaptation to maintain the film’s focus on the thriller aspect.

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7. Structural and Narrative Differences

The hosts delve into structural differences between the book and the movie. In the novel, characters such as Ellen Brody have more developed storylines, including a subplot about her marital strain and a brief lesbian relationship. Craig remarks, “But they are like subreddits organized around this sort of thing” (58:08), referencing the book’s exploration of personal relationships and community dynamics, which the film sidelines to concentrate on the central shark threat.

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8. Conclusion: Evaluating the Book and Movie

Andrew and Craig conclude by acknowledging that while the "Jaws" movie remains a cinematic masterpiece with its suspenseful storytelling and memorable score, the novel offers a richer, albeit more cluttered, exploration of character and societal themes. Craig states, “You could not have a bad time watching Jaws...” (79:28), recommending the movie as an essential viewing experience, while also appreciating the novel for its depth and complexity.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Andrew [18:54]: “I could never demonize an animal... vitally necessary for the balance of nature...”
• Craig [52:55]: “The shark is causing the 70s... revealing all of the fault lines of this community”
• Andrew [19:41]: “There are like, two dozen shark attacks a year and, like, two fatalities every two years”
• Craig [58:08]: “But they are like subreddits organized around this sort of thing”

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Overdue offers an insightful comparative analysis of Peter Benchley’s "Jaws" and its film adaptation, shedding light on the cultural and environmental ramifications of both. For fans of literature and cinema alike, Andrew and Craig provide a nuanced perspective that encourages a deeper appreciation of the source material behind one of the most influential horror stories of the 20th century.

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For those interested in exploring the intricate layers of "Jaws" beyond the blockbuster film, this episode is a must-listen. It not only revisits a classic tale of terror but also engages with its lasting impact on society’s view of nature and wildlife.

Transcript

[Andrew]

This is a Headgum podcast.

[Craig]

While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy.

[Andrew]

Away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.

[Craig]

Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.

[Andrew]

My name is Andrew. Just when you thought it was safe to listen to another podcast, this is that. That's a riff on the tagline for Joss too.

[Craig]

Oh, yeah. Oh, is that what it is?

[Andrew]

Not as successful. Yes.

[Craig]

I don't know much about the other Jaws's. Is one of them is bad?

[Andrew]

I was surprised to hear. Okay. I don't know if there's a relationship between the sharks in the subsequent Jaws movies.

[Craig]

Not a Grendel situation.

[Andrew]

I know. I don't know, like, maybe more of the original actors than I. Than I expected.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Popped up in the second movie.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Richard Dreyfuss was not there, but many of the other principals really their roles. And John Williams scored it. Most reviewers were just like, this is just Jaws again. But it was fairly successful. Well, there hadn't been the most successful movie sequel until Rocky 2 is what.

[Craig]

Wow.

[Andrew]

I saw.

[Craig]

Yeah, well, there hadn't been much like it before. People were just eager to have that feeling again. Welcome to our book podcast, where each week one of us reads a book and tells the other person about it. Chances are you know the title of this episode because of how podcasts work.

[Andrew]

So, yeah, we're Talking about Jaws 2, which is the sequel to the movie Jaws, which is the adaptation of the.

[Craig]

Book Jaws, which is what I read for this week's episode. Jaws, the novel. The 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, which of course would be adapted by Steven Spielberg, et al, a host of a bevy of screenwriters. I don't remember final credits on it.

[Andrew]

I have some names, but a lot of real 70s guys working on this movie.

[Craig]

Well, they were doing it in the 70s, so that makes sense. Wouldn't be a lot of 80s guys, would it be?

[Andrew]

I really. One thing I really, really do not like is thinking about how recent the 1950s were relative to the 70s.

[Craig]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew]

Because it's like as close to the 2000s. Like thinking about thinking about like 2004. That's not that long ago. That's how long ago the 50s was for people in this movie.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

And our. Just the way that our entire lives have been shaped by this like, nostalgic version of the 50s that didn't exist. That makes it feel like some weird fantasy world.

[Craig]

Uh huh. Oh, you're specifically mad about the 50s. You're not mad about the whole passage of time thing?

[Andrew]

Well no, I'm, I'm, I'm mad about both things. I'm just like. It's hard for me to think of like 2003 as being some like mythological time in history the way the 1950s are.

[Craig]

Anyway.

[Andrew]

I don't know, I don't like thinking about it anytime. The easiest way to short circuit my brain and make me upset is to do the thing where you're like, you know this, this, this came out 35 years ago and when it came out here was something that was 35 years old. You know that, you know that thing I don't like.

[Craig]

I get really weirded out when people do that. With video games in particular because of how much technological progress it seems like we made in like 10 years between the mid-80s and, and the mid-90s. And then we've basically just been playing Xbox 360 games for like 20 years.

[Andrew]

We basically just figured out how to make more triangles. Like we got, we got really good at making a certain kind of triangle in like 2004 and we've spent every year since then just being able to make like slightly more of them.

[Craig]

Yeah, it really weirds me out. But anyway, we're going to talk about this book Jaws that I've never read before. Had I guess knew that it was a novel.

[Andrew]

I'm not even sure if I did, if I knew that. But like it didn't surprise me to know it was a novel.

[Craig]

Yes, but I think it's, it's one of those novel adaptations that, and I'm, I'm sure you gathered some stuff on this Andrew that is like kind of hard to parse from the movie. Just given the collapsed timeline between once a books manuscript gets picked up by film producers and like the book is gonna get published and the movies being made at the same time, their legacies are intertwined. Like it's a shorter.

[Andrew]

Okay, that's what you mean when you say hard to part. It's just hard to separate.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah, like hard to parse like what the impact is on the other and like the legacy of this story is way more the movie than the book. Even though the book was successful, but it was very successful on its own very quickly. But then the movie came out so like the movie came out the same year as the paperback. Like I don't know how you can separate those two. Things and say, like, well, the novel was good at this.

[Andrew]

Yeah, well, it's. It's the movie that along with, like, Star Wars a couple of years later, helps define the modern summer blockbuster. Like before the movie Jaws in June, I think of 70. 75.

[Craig]

75. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

Um, like, the summer was not a good time to release movies.

[Craig]

No.

[Andrew]

I assume because everyone was outside swimming in water, getting eaten by sharks. But after, after a very successful, like, TV ad campaign for this movie and then, you know, replicated by George Lucas for Star wars in 77, like, the summer blockbuster is born. And we're still living with that.

[Craig]

Yeah, well, because it's a good time to have, like, at least back then, when there's only one summer blockbuster, then you have a few months of, like, what else are people gonna do? They go swim with the sharks and then they go inside and watch the same blockbuster over and over again. But let's talk about Benchley and the road to publication.

[Andrew]

Mr. Peter Benchley.

[Craig]

Yeah. Mr. Peter Benchley.

[Andrew]

1940, died in 2006.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

He's the son of Nathaniel Benchley and grandson of Robert Benchley, two authors who I did not do a lot of research on in and of themselves, but they were notable enough that the Benchley name recognition helped in part to sell this book. So when it was being shopped around.

[Craig]

He'S a bit of a Nepo Benchley. Like, let's just be honest, his brother.

[Andrew]

Nat Benchley, also a writer and actor, and he was one of the useless old cops on the wire.

[Craig]

Oh, sure. Okay. By. I think I saw, like, it was by age 21, Peter Benchley had a literary agent from the same firm that represented his dad.

[Andrew]

So.

[Craig]

So, like, you know, he.

[Andrew]

What a coincidence.

[Craig]

People were reading his stuff. They were probably reading it first because of his family, but then he was good enough to have them read it some more. So, like, you know, his first book.

[Andrew]

Is a nonfiction travel memoir based on, like, a year that he spent traveling at Time and a Ticket. Time and a Ticket. Time and a Ticket comes out in 1964.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

He works at the Washington Post and at Newsweek after this. He was, by his description, a fairly low level speechwriter for Lyndon. Lyndon Johnson. Now, if had he. Had he done that just a few decades later, he would be able to dine out on it on a. In a political podcast for years and years and years. But because it was the 60s and not now, once Lyndon Johnson had left power, he started, eventually started just like freelancing for a bit. And he decides in 1971 to make, quote, one final attempt to stay alive as a writer.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

The result of that attempt is this book.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Jaws is published in 1974, turned into a movie in the summer of 75 by a 27 year old Steven Spielberg. Spielberg. Talk about him real quick. He got to start directing TV episodes and TV movies. And then his first theatrical film comes out in 74, the year before Jaws. It's called the Sugar Land Express.

[Craig]

That's a. It's much more of a. What's the one that Lucas made before Star Wars?

[Andrew]

Oh, what's it? American. Something American. American. American.

[Craig]

American babies. American. I find American vibes. American Graffiti.

[Andrew]

American Graffiti.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I was pretty close.

[Craig]

I don't know that it's not.

[Andrew]

I think if I, if I had said American baby on a quiz, I would have gotten half a point, maybe.

[Craig]

But it's my understanding that that movie is like, it's interesting, but it is not the, like, it does not meet the kind of blockbuster template that becomes what Spielberg does for like the next 20 years.

[Andrew]

One of those things that becomes more interesting in retrospect once his like, style becomes widely recognized and aped. In Jaws, you see a lot of the things that Spielberg movies would do over and over again. Just like a combination of like distinctive cinematography, including lots of people like looking at stuff. The Spielberg look, man, he loves people looking at stuff and like character moments and, and also like technology. Technology and effects.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I think Jurassic park is the other big, big one that, that melds all.

[Craig]

Those things, all of them together.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And that one actually just quickly, that one has an interesting like similar id. Ego, super ego, kind of triad of characters with like that it's not. That's a messy comparison, but like three characters who are all approaching the same problem with like very distinct viewpoints.

[Andrew]

And one of them just really wants to be eaten by the monster.

[Craig]

Yeah. And one of them kind of has like, is a little horny. To be eaten by the monster is kind of. It's a really good way to set up your, your monster movie. But yeah, he doesn't really make a monster movie like Jaws again until Jurassic Park. Not that. Not the same way.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So Jaws is Spielberg's first blockbuster hit. Sets the stage for the rest of his career. A BBC piece from 2004 I found says what Spielberg thought of the book, which was that he quote, found most of the characters unlikable and wanted the shark to win.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

Benchley wrote initial screenplay treatments of the, of the film. Carl Gottlieb, Howard Sackler And John Milius also wrote a lot of it. I believe Scott Lieb is the only one who's credited with. With Benchley.

[Craig]

But did you see the note that they made? Their. One factor in letting Benchley take the initial drafts may have been because there was a looming writers strike. And so that's. I don't know how true that is, but that is an interesting. Like, we got to let the guy take some stabs at it, but he lets go. I. I think the. I am interested in where this book came from, so if there's anything else in the movie.

[Andrew]

Oh, I'll get there. Yeah. I'm just. I'm just doing. I'm. I'm doing a lot of table settings. There's a. Just. Things are very intertwined as you. Hard to parse with this book in this movie. I do not know that parse is the word I would have picked or continue to pick. But that's fine.

[Craig]

Keep using it. It's fine.

[Andrew]

Other notable titles In Benchley's catalog, 1976 is the Deep. 1979's the Island.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

1982'S Girl of the Sea of Cortez. And then he spends the later years of his life as a conservationalist and wrote nonfiction books about how cool sharks and the ocean are. 2001's Shark Trouble is a typical example. But he did.

[Craig]

Don't forget Shark Life.

[Andrew]

Shark Shark, Shark Wife, Shark Life.

[Craig]

Wendy Benchley, shark Wife.

[Andrew]

But, yeah, he did field some. He felt some kind of bad about. About the way that Jaws gave great white sharks a bad rap. We're going to talk a lot. I've got a lot of stuff.

[Craig]

Okay, you got stuff on that. Okay, great.

[Andrew]

But to talk about the genesis of Jaws, like, he is.

[Craig]

He.

[Andrew]

Benchley is having a meeting with, like, an agent about book ideas. And one of Benchley's ideas is like, I have this nonfiction thing about pirates. And then also just like, what if a shark was menacing?

[Craig]

So he grew up.

[Andrew]

That's the end of the end of the idea.

[Craig]

Grew up summering in Nantucket with his family, and he got fascinated just by sharks and sea creatures there. His own telling in both the intro to the novel that I have, the addition that I have, and in the excerpt of, I think, Shark Trouble that's in the back, he talks a lot about how, like, he was so well read on sharks relative to the average human in 1971 or whatever, that any meeting he had with publishers or agents or editors, they're like, I mean, this book might be tough, but, dude, Knows his sharks. I think we should trust him. We've got the shark boy here. No Lava Girl in sight, but shark boy is here.

[Andrew]

Okay. So, yeah, he. He does not have any, like, chapters of this book or anything written at this point. He's just, like, having lunch with his agent and he's like, what if. What if there was a big shark and it was really eating a lot of people and making them really, really scared? And his agent's like, cool, why don't you write a page of that and we'll see if we can. We can shop it around. So he, you know, he writes a few chapters of this. There's like a bidding war over the. Over. Over the. The book. They're. They're selling the movie rights. Like he. It sounds like the editing process was pretty. I'm not going to say nightmarish because there wasn't a lot of fighting. It's just like, Benchley needed a lot. It sounds like from. From people who are. Who were reading this book as it was being worked on. There just kind of was like, okay, I'll do it.

[Craig]

There's a 1974 New York Times article called and Then and Then and Them the Making of a Bestseller. That starts off by like, oh, it's interesting how publishing is a business and how it's very, like, yeah, it's very.

[Andrew]

Let's talk about Benchley. Let's talk about Jaws, and let's kind of wrap it up in, like, this is. This kind of success is what keeps publishing afloat. Yes, because not every book sells, like.

[Craig]

But it has a.

[Andrew]

Here's. Here's like, the unlikely journey of one of one blockbuster mega.

[Craig]

Yeah, it's an interesting piece. It's very long and has a lot of, like.

[Andrew]

There's a lot of bad OCR stuff happening in it because it's one of those old digitized New York Times articles. So, like, maybe. I don't know if this is a Times Machine thing or if it's some other site.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

But they usually have a little, like, actual image of the story that's been. That's been put in. I would recommend probably reading the image rather than reading the OCR text because there's just a lot of gobbly. Good.

[Craig]

It has a lot of back and forth with the editor, Tom Congdon, who is really responsible for, you know, elevating the work, I guess, or just driving.

[Andrew]

Shepherding it through the process.

[Craig]

Yeah, the initial draft was funnier, or at least maybe not funnier, but was.

[Andrew]

Trying to be funny because I think His, I think his grandfather had been like a humorous guy. So I think, I think Benchley also styled himself as something. There's something of a, of a cut.

[Craig]

Up a whole subplot of this book about the main cop's wife, Brody's wife Ellen. And there's a whole like sexcapade thing going on that she gets into. That apparently is all because Tom Congdon wanted it to be there. He, like, didn't think there was a marital sex scene, like a sex scene between Brody and his wife. And Kangen was like, I don't think that belongs in this book. I don't make it about the other.

[Andrew]

I don't want to have marital.

[Craig]

Make it, make it an affair.

[Andrew]

And it's like that the Lord. That the Lord would approve of. No, we have to do something more scandalous.

[Craig]

Did you see the stuff about how they didn't know what the. What to call it until they were.

[Andrew]

Yeah, there were like two, like 200 and something titles that they went through one with that Benchley suggested early on was called A Stillness in the Water, which Congdon says sounded like a Francois Sega novel about a young woman who goes to the Riviera to forget an unhappy love affair. So I thought that was just like a. Funny to get right after we, we did.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But yes, they go through a million titles. Like the word Jaws appears in a much longer one at one point and they're like, yeah, I don't know about this. And then final. Finally somebody says, let's just call it Jaws. And there's a similar sort of brouhaha with the, with the COVID And the first edition cover ends up looking a lot like the movie poster with like the shark at the bottom and then a little like swimmer a lady. And then just. Yeah, yeah. And then just the big word Jaws across the top. Like, the composition of the original book cover was very similar, but apparently they went through a bunch of different versions, including one where like from the perspective of inside the shark's mouth, like looking at the town. Looking at the town. And apparently people looked at that cover and were like, that's kind of, that's kind of. The New York Times piece claims that people were talking about vagina dentata with this. Which is a strange place to take it.

[Craig]

It's very strange.

[Andrew]

But I think the, the COVID they ended up with is fine.

[Craig]

The flip side is the one where they were like, let's not put a shark on it at all. And people are like, they're gonna think it's a dentist book. You can't just write Jaws on a book with no shark on it.

[Andrew]

That was a big thing with the name is like, how do we convey shark?

[Craig]

Gotta put shark on it with this.

[Andrew]

How do we make it sound like it's not. How do we make it sound like it's about sharks but not like a stodgy nonfiction book about sharks.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So, yeah, I think they figured out the exact, like, combination of name and image that makes it work.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

So one of the. One of the big debates surrounding the book and movie Jaws.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Is whether they had, unquestionably, they made people more scared of water and the sharks. Like, I don't think there's any dispute about that.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

I don't think they created that out of nowhere, but I do think that people saw this movie and got more scared of shark.

[Craig]

Can I read?

[Andrew]

Of which there are, like. There are like, two dozen shark attacks a year and, like, two fatalities every two years. I think I read.

[Craig]

Can I read the Benchley quote real quick?

[Andrew]

Please do. Yeah. Because it sounds like that edition came with a lot of, like, front and after matter. Like, I'm really sorry about what I said about sharks. He said, I didn't mean it.

[Craig]

Well, he talks about how he went on to, like, learn about sharks even more. With knowledge accumulated from dozens of expeditions and hundreds of dives and countless encounters with sharks of many kinds, came the realization that I could never write Jaws today. I could never. This is, I think, from the 30th anniversary edition. I could never demonize an animal, especially not an animal that is much older and much more successful in its habitat than man is, has been, or ever will be. An animal that is vitally necessary for the balance of nature in the sea, and an animal that we may, if we don't change our destructive behaviors, extinguish from the face of the earth. So, yeah, he. He feels bad. I think there's, like, some articles that are, like. And did he really care that much about what people thought about sharks? Yeah, he devoted his whole life to it.

[Andrew]

He's like, not his whole life.

[Craig]

The rest of his life.

[Andrew]

The first part of. The first part of his life was spent working up to demonizing sharks, but then he decided that he was going to repent.

[Craig]

Yeah, a little bit.

[Andrew]

Like, the second half of it. His life. But, yeah. So there. There is a lot of debate as to whether Jaws actually had an effect on shark populations. Like, this is the big. The big thing. It's not just, like, public. It's not just PR for sharks is like, did yahoos going out and killing sharks as a result of reading this book or seeing this movie actually have a big effect on shark populations? There is, like, I don't know that there's a ton of evidence for it. There's a lot of, like, correlation does not equal causation going on, for sure. Like, shark populations had been in decline before the. The book in the movie came out. Paul Cox, the chief executive of the Shark Trust, talking to the Guardian, did a shark right. Said that it's, quote, giving the film far too much credit to say that it had an effect. Had a direct effect on shark populations. He says the cases of shark population decline are very clearly fisheries overfishing.

[Craig]

Mm. Which is gonna accelerate over the course of the 20th century anyway.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[Andrew]

So it, you know, there's some. There's some question as to whether Benchley bought into the population stuff specifically. Like, I know he felt bad for. For the bad PR that he gave to sharks. Spielberg definitely thinks that the movie, like, affected shark populations. This is a quote for BBC. That's one of the things I still fear not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport FisherMe happened after 1975. I truly and to this day regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book in the film.

[Craig]

Oh, wow, Stephen.

[Andrew]

This is from 2022 Smithsonian Magazine article. It writes, Jaws spearheaded a collective testosterone rush among fishers in the east coast of the United States, leading thousands to hunt sharks for sport. As George Burgess, former director of the Florida Program for Shark research, told the BBC in 2015, in the years following the film's release, the number of large sharks in the waters east of North America declined by about 50%. So that is. That is the hard number. The question is, like, whether.

[Craig]

Whether that's all.

[Andrew]

Whether you can.

[Craig]

With harpoons or not.

[Andrew]

Yeah, just like dudes trying to shove air tanks in the shark's mouth so you can explode them. Talking about the. The PR for the sharks. This is from a BBC piece called How Jaws Misrepresented the Great White. There's a lot of stuff out there about Jaws that you can read. Well, it's a huge mov. It's a huge.

[Craig]

We're not going to get to all. We're just going to get to the surface of the ocean here. Go for it.

[Andrew]

Oliver Crimmin.

[Craig]

What? Oliver Crimmin in the BBC.

[Andrew]

Oliver Crimmin. Oliver Crimmin. Who? Craig is the fish curator at the Natural History Museum in London. Of course he is and had been for four decades.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

He says Jaws was a turning point for great white sharks. I actually saw a big change happen in the public and scientific perception of sharks when Peter Benchley's book Jaws was published and then subsequently made into a film. In reality, some large shark species do attack humans. About 10 people a year are killed, usually by a great white bull and tiger sharks. Rarely, though, are the victims actually eaten. Often they die from trauma. When they attack us, they are not interested in eating us. They want us to leave the area.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Prior to targeting a human, they show aggressive postures as a warning. And when that message is ignored, they take action. The statistics appear supportive. The US averages 19 shark attacks each year, but only one fatality every two years.

[Craig]

Years. Okay. Okay.

[Andrew]

And then just. Just correcting the record for the poor great white shark. Real quick before we go to break.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

The. The movie. I don't know if the book gives any, like, hard. Gives any, like, splat stats for the.

[Craig]

Shark.

[Andrew]

But in the movie. In the movie, it's said to be between, what, 20 to 25ft long.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

The longest great white shark Specimen recorded is 19.1ft. Typically, they range from 11 to 13.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

They can live for up to 70 years. Male sharks take 26 years to reach sexual maturity. Same. And female sharks, up to 33 years. For these reasons, decline in their population has landed them on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's list of vulnerable species. So they are on the. You know, they are on that.

[Craig]

Endangered.

[Andrew]

They're not endangered, but they're on that road to being endangered. And they don't, you know, it's an animal that did not. They do not do well in captivity. There is no known aquarium with a live great white shark specimen.

[Craig]

Huh. I'm just thinking they're, like, important predators. They really are.

[Andrew]

They help keep stuff under control.

[Craig]

I'm thinking about how the age of 26, 27 is also when baseball players, like, typically reach their peak.

[Andrew]

Just like sharks, baby sharks.

[Craig]

The other thing I don't think we.

[Andrew]

Mentioned, just, just like, I'm just like a shark. I am always moving, and I am reaching sexual maturity at the end age of 26 years.

[Craig]

The part of Benchley's inspiration was a story from, I think, the 60s about a guy named Frank Mundus, who is, in part, the inspiration for the character Quint, who caught a great white off the shore of Montauk, which was a big deal. And then also Benchley had watched this movie called Blue Water. White Death where a guy named Peter Gimble tried to like, you know, capture the great white shark on film, like in a way that hadn't been done before. That involves going in the water in a cage and all this stuff. So, like, this is the first big popular fictional account of something that was, you know, no pun intended, bubbling in the water a little bit. But yeah, this is the defining great white shark story.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And it's not, it's not like fabricated out of whole cloth, but it does PR as normal. Something that does not really happen a lot.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

Like it make, it makes people more scared of it than they need to be.

[Craig]

No. And folks should not be scared that. We are going to take a quick break. We will be back soon. Don't worry. We're not going to get eaten by a shark.

[Andrew]

Yeah, we're going to go out in the water, but it's going to be fine.

[Craig]

Yeah, we'll be right back.

[Andrew]

Craig, you hear him swimming up behind you? It's Squarespace, the website that this podcast is brought to you by this week. Squarespace isn't a shark that's going to eat your butt though. Squarespace is a website that helps you make websites. And if you, for example, wrote a really famous book about sharks that made everybody really negative about sharks and you wanted to try and correct this is.

[Craig]

Yes, I want to correct the recipe.

[Andrew]

Atone for what you had done. You could make a really cool shark website with Squarespace.

[Craig]

Tell me how. I would use all of the wonderful tools from Squarespace to be like an advocate for sharks.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

All right, Andrew, while we were on break, you told me you had one more Benchley tale you wanted to tell. It became a shark tale.

[Andrew]

In 1994, Peter Benchley hosted the first Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Which is. Which must have been. It must have given him a lot of conflicting feelings.

[Craig]

He did do. Because of like, the spots on sharks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

But, yeah. And then I was like, well, we could have done a Shark Week thing for our intro instead of talking about the tagline from the movie Jaws 2, which is what I did. But then I remembered that for the Booth Tarkington episode, we called it Tark Week. And like, are we gonna, you know, repeat ourselves? It's just hard. It's tough. It's tough stuff.

[Craig]

It's hard to know when to do a sequel like Jaws 3D.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Jaws 3D is what is.

[Craig]

Sorry. Whoops.

[Andrew]

So while I am spiraling about that, I would like you to tell me about the book Jaws. And I'm. This is going to be one of those episodes where there's like a famous adaptation and most of the time spent talking about the book is going to be talking about it. Like, in relation to the adaptation.

[Craig]

I think that's weird.

[Andrew]

We both watched the film.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

In the run up to this in the US it is available on Netflix right now. So go watch it.

[Craig]

Oh, Honestly, it's the 50th anniversary. People are screening it in theaters all over the place. Like, go to a movie theater and watch it. Like, if I didn't have a 2 year old and I wasn't trying to watch it specifically for this recording, I would be like, trying to wait until the screenings were happening and. Or like, you know, I'm sure. Cool.

[Andrew]

Yeah. I had seen it before. It had been a long time I'm not ever sure.

[Craig]

I watched it all in a row. I think I've seen it on. I'd seen bits and pieces on TV before.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I had. I've seen it. It's been a long time. Everybody in this movie. Everybody in this movie has such a weird energy about.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And I think it really helped. Like there's so many little moments in it. Like that scene where Richard Dreyfuss has come over to the, to the house and is like sitting with the chief and his wife.

[Craig]

Uh huh.

[Andrew]

And Roy Scheider is pulling, is pouring wine and he just like wordlessly pulls himself a full like pint glass full of wine and then pours both of them a wine glass.

[Craig]

Yep. Huh.

[Andrew]

And it goes like in a modern blockbuster, I think, like when that is happening, like the wine glass is in full focus and then Richard Dreyfus like looks at him and says like, oh, tough day. Or like some dumb button thing that like really draws attention to it. And then this, it just kind of happens. And we're not quietly. Like there are gestures, but it's like mostly unremarked upon.

[Craig]

Yeah. We're not a film podcast. But I do need people to go back and watch early Spielberg if they haven't in a while. Just because a. The. The like the bar for quality is pretty high. Like all of the early ones are like pretty high quality. And there's just stuff in there that modern movies don't do. There's stuff in the beginning of ET like oners of the Family or of Close Encounters even too of the family just like talking over each other. And it's kind of this like medium shot where the sound is all overlapping. He's just.

[Andrew]

And it's. Yeah.

[Craig]

And for somebody who does do like really explosive camera work, he's also really interested in just like, I don't know, the camera's just kind of here for a little bit and I don't need to jumble it all up. I'm gonna save that for when the shark shows up.

[Andrew]

You know, it's so, it's so strange because again, again, we're not a movie podcast. We're not just talking about the way watching the movie Jaws made me me feel. And like, I don't watch a lot of movies and part of it is.

[Craig]

Because you really don't watch movies. No.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Of like comic book movie effect. But like movies are longer now than they've ever been. Like on average than they've ever been. Especially. It's like summer blockbusters is they are regularly straining up against that three hour mark that when Lord of the Rings hit it, like, you know, 20, whatever years ago, people were skeptical.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

People were like, are we people? Are people going to sit for that? Especially are they going to sit for the DVD that's got like 40 extra minutes on top of that. But now movies just kind of do that, but it still feels like they don't. They don't have. There's not as much, like, air around stuff. Like, there's just no weird, quiet little subtle moments. Like the stuff that you. That you see in this movie when Spielberg just like lets a couple of actors exchange a weird look or something. Like, Richard Dreyfuss's energy in this movie in particular is so like, it bounces back and forth between, like college boy and slimy guy and like fish expert. And I never know what he's gonna start doing.

[Craig]

It is worth noting that modern day Richard Dreyfuss is nothing but a slimy boy.

[Andrew]

Oh, he's turned into. He's gone full slime.

[Craig]

Yeah, he's full slimer. Do not engage. Stay away.

[Andrew]

It's too bad. It's too bad. He's another artist who seems to have, like, misunderstood the point of a lot of the art that he made in his life.

[Craig]

So. But anyway, the book.

[Andrew]

Anyway, the book. I enjoy the movie a lot. You should go watch the movie. Anyway, the book. This is a book podcast where each week one of us reads a book that we've never read before and tells the other person about it.

[Craig]

The thing we said, the thing I said earlier to Andrew is it is hard to parse this book from the success of the film. And I think a lot of people who might pick up this book going, hey, I like to read books. I like that movie Jaws. You're gonna go, there's a lot of stuff in this book that's not in the movie. And that's typical, right?

[Andrew]

Like usually. Yeah, that's like a wicked situation. Yeah, there's just like, on average, more butt stuff in a book than there is in a film.

[Craig]

There's. There are whole. There's a whole plot line for.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah, see? More butt stuff.

[Craig]

There's a whole plot line for Ellen Brody, the main Brody, the main cop's wife in this novel that is completely excised from the. From the script.

[Andrew]

Right? Because the script, the movie is made by a bunch of 70s guys. And it's like, what is this woman character doing in here? Can we just minimize her to some, like, fretting presence off to the side.

[Craig]

And yet I don't really know why it's in the novel other than Peter Benchley's trying to write a novel. So he's got like. He's like, well, I should probably put a subplot in it. Like, I don't think it's a good plot. And so I can see why Stevie Spielberg goes, don't need it. But, like, let's sum it up top level. There's a cop in a small town on Long Island. It's called Amity. Shark eats person. Cop goes, no, thanks. But he can't arrest the shark, so what's he going to do? There's a lot more in this novel about the political pressures that prevent him from keeping people safe. It's a. I know. I'm sure you haven't read it just because I know you haven't read as many plays as I have. Andrew, you kind of make a face sometimes when I talk about plays. Okay, I'm not judging you. I'm just saying.

[Andrew]

I was just like, the faces that I make are supposed to be private between you and me, because they don't land. They don't land on the audio track.

[Craig]

Anyway, I'm just recognizing I'm play sicko over here. Folks who may be familiar with the Henrik Ibsen play Enemy of the people, where Dr. Stockton is, you know, trying to convince people that the baths are. The public baths are making people sick. Things like that. There's political reasons. He becomes a pariah. That's not quite where Jaws goes. Neither the movie nor the film, but there is an element to both, and it's greater in the novel of a guy who recognizes a danger, and he, you know, runs into bureaucracy and corruption and government that prevents him from. From doing the. The moral thing. Benchley, in the introduction, likes to reference the fact that Fidel Castro liked this book because it showed the corruption of capitalism and how it created danger. We'll talk about that.

[Andrew]

I just think that the. The relationship with the government is interesting because it's not like you can envision some kind of version of this where the government is in the nanny state position and they're, like, trying to make people do stuff that they don't want to do. But in this one, it's the chief of police who's like, hey, as a. As a member of the. Of the government in this town, I should be focused on protecting the people.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And the mayor is like, what if. What if people just were allowed to do whatever they want as long as they made money for Somebody in the.

[Craig]

Year 2020, a lot of people were talking about the mayor from Jaws whenever folks were upset about COVID lockdowns. There's an element to that.

[Andrew]

I do want every single suit jacket that the mayor from Jaws.

[Craig]

He looks, though, very good.

[Andrew]

That cool one with all, like, the anchors all over it, man. I do want it.

[Craig]

The other thing about this novel is that it is very early 70s in the sense that, like, trusting government is low because of all the Nixon things.

[Andrew]

The Nixon of it all.

[Craig]

The Nixon of it all.

[Andrew]

And the Vietnam of it all.

[Craig]

The Vietnam of it all. We're entering an era where, like, I guess this relates to the Ellen Brody stuff, but, like, you know, divorce is going to become. Is going to, like, start to be on the rise as women, I guess, have greater economic mobility.

[Andrew]

Yeah, a lot of, you know, like, conservative reactionary backlash to, like, women's lib. Civil rights, that kind of stuff.

[Craig]

Yes, we're in that. There's some interest, some weird race stuff in this book that I think the.

[Andrew]

Movie mostly skirts around it by having almost exclusively white people in this town.

[Craig]

Well, which, to be fair, it's like a rich seaside town in Long Island. Like, I get why it might be a little lily white. And you could do that on purpose to say something. This book is a little clunky about race relations, though it does acknowledge that we are coming out of, you know, we're like, you know, the civil rights era of the 60s. And now we have some characters who might be concerned about some things. But it is strange. It never lands. Well, the book, I just think they're.

[Andrew]

Just think there's an opportunity to be like, shark, don't care what color your skin is.

[Craig]

That's not what it. That's not what it's about, though. It's because the other thing is that we're in this era of the early 70s where there's, like, a lot of economic hardship, inflation is going up, there's high unemployment. And so the trials and tribulations of a small seaside town that is, like, smaller than the other, you know, the Hamptons and whatnot. And it's a thousand people in the winter and 10,000 people in the summer. And so the three months of summer really matter for the economic stability of this community that is, like, driven home to you throughout the whole book and that.

[Andrew]

And I also assume, like, as in the film, there's also tension between those thousand people who stay in the winter and the chief of police, who is kind of an outsider, who's not really an Islander.

[Craig]

Well, that's actually not what is part of the book. The, the really Brody is from here. He is a townie and the 10 interesting.

[Andrew]

I think the movie version is. Is.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

More interesting than that.

[Craig]

Yeah, he is a bit of a townie. And the tension actually is that in the book is that his wife Ellen comes from the summer wealthy people. And so they meet, they marry and then you know, within a few years of them being together, she is no longer a member of the summer community and she's kind of a begrudgingly accepted member of the year round community.

[Andrew]

So like watching a guild. I'm watching A Gilded Age. I know all about.

[Craig]

Yes, yes.

[Andrew]

I know all about how this affects the community.

[Craig]

Yes, of course. No, you're right. No, Brody is not. Because I think in the movie, right. He like just arrived. He's very.

[Andrew]

He's like, he's been there for like a year.

[Craig]

That is not.

[Andrew]

And it's not like. And a year for these people is like. Is nothing like you're either a lifelong islander or you're. You're nothing.

[Craig]

No, the main thing.

[Andrew]

And that's part. And that's part of the, the pushback that he gets is like you're not from around here. You don't know how to deal with the shark problem.

[Craig]

The pushback that the Brody in the novel gets is partially because the novel takes more time with the shark attacks. The. In the film, the like order of events, not surprisingly, is way more condensed. July 4th happens very quickly in the movie. There's much more of a run up to whether or not the beaches are going to be open in July 4th. In the book, after the first lady gets eaten by a shark. I want to read that quote in just a second.

[Andrew]

Not. Not like the. Not like the first lady.

[Craig]

Not the first lady. Not Lady Birch or whatever. But no, it's much more that he quickly becomes a pariah for and a scapegoat when people do get by the shark and it comes out that he could have closed the beaches, but the people who prevented him from doing it are making him take the blame.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

So he is. It's not that he is not from the community, but he is ostracized by his decision making or by the decisions he was forced to make by people in power. So yes, the book opens in Fish Vision, Andrew.

[Andrew]

The book opens like the original cover.

[Craig]

Kind of like the film Snakes on a Plane where you get to see the perspective. It's not quite a POV shot, but it is. The great fish moved silently through the night water propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. The thing that Benchley loves to do when he's writing about the fish is remind you that it is millions of years old as a species, that it is motivated by nothing other than hunger and an interest in eating things. The thing you mentioned, I think, before the break about, like, sharks would maybe, when seeing a human, would, like, maybe, like, do some threatening behavior or things.

[Andrew]

Like that, so just kind of, like, warn you off.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Instead, it's. It's not coming at you because it thinks people are like a tasty little snack in.

[Craig]

In this book, generally, the shark is just a big, dumb monster that will come at you because it. It comes at things. Now, later in the novel and again later in the movie, I think, too, there is an element of, like, wow, this fish. This fish is, like.

[Andrew]

Has decided to hate specific people.

[Craig]

This. And this fish is, like, leveled up a little bit. Like, it knows a little. A few more skills than your average fish. But by and large, the novel is like, yo, this is a big, ancient fish who loves to. Who loves to chomp. That's what it's here to do. And we do, of course, get this kind of opening gambit where a lady and a man, you know, leave a party and they go down to the beach, and she wants to go skinny dipping, and he passes out on the beach. And while she's in the water, this is just what happens to her. It's. It bites her leg. She kind of realizes that her leg is maybe missing or, you know, who knows what's happening? Pain and panic struck together. The woman threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror. The fish had moved away. It swallowed the woman's limb without chewing. Bones and meat passed down the massive gullet in a single spasm. Now the fish turned again, homing on the stream of blood flushing from the woman's femoral artery, a beacon as clear and true as a lighthouse on a cloudless night. This time, the fish attacked from below. It hurtled up under the woman, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly. The fish with the woman's body in its mouth smashed down on the water with a thunderous, thunderous splash, spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence in a gaudy shower.

[Andrew]

Whoa.

[Craig]

Benchley's very keen on this fish and what this fish can do.

[Andrew]

Yeah, this fish is a machine that smashes people into sticky jelly.

[Craig]

Yep. Nuh. Huh.

[Andrew]

Basically.

[Craig]

So Brody does try to close the beaches right away, and he is overruled by Mayor Larry Vaughn and the town's selectman. And so this happens in like a very like, brief scene in the film.

[Andrew]

It only really get like the one scene with the selectmen all being like.

[Craig]

These good old boys on that weird ferry with the car. Right. Like.

[Andrew]

Yeah, well, there's like. Like that the. Also the. Like the town hall meeting that the old grizzled sea captain interrupts with his chalkboard scrape. One thing about watching this movie, if you've never watched it before, is just noticing how thoroughly pop culture sort of absorbed. Absorbed it and is like continuously referencing it.

[Craig]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew]

It's like people. People love to just like, drop a casual Jaws thing into all kinds of contexts.

[Craig]

Yes, but no. In the book, he tries to close the beaches. He's overruled by the mayor. He also has a conversation with the newspaper man, Harry Meadows. There is a character named Harry in the novel. In the movie, I think that might be the mayor, actually. No, it's Larry Vaughn. No, I don't think Harry is even in the movie, actually.

[Andrew]

There's a newspaper guy who's from the local paper and trying to report the news about the shark attack while also burying the news about the shark attack. I don't know that he gets a name.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

Or if it's just in the credits or what. That character does kind of exist somewhere in the background of the film.

[Craig]

Yeah. He's depicted as much more of an integral character here. He is friends. He. He, Brody and the mayor are purportedly friends, though the mayor has become more distant. And Brody and Harry Meadows kind of have an understanding that they have a responsibility to control narratives around bad things that happen in the town of Amity. Amity. You know, it's had a few rough years. Something like a shark attack would really tank the economy if people didn't come. That would be very bad. So Meadows is of the opinion they should keep it undercover. Later, when the New York Times shows up after two other people get eaten on the same day, a little boy and an old man both get eaten.

[Andrew]

Okay, That's a lot of people. That's a lot more people than get eaten.

[Craig]

Yeah. Yes. They. There's a reference to like, some other crime that happened in the town that the. They've kind of covered up and don't want anybody to know about, which is part of the weird race relations of the book where there is like, there was a case where a black gardener was accused of raping several white women. And like, you're like, Benchley, what are you saying? I think you're saying that this is very complicated and people would react strangely to it. That's my charitable reading of what you're saying, Peter Benchley. But they're, they're. Meadows is very like, we, we kind of bury these awkward or problematic stories about Amity because we can't risk people come, you know, not coming here.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

The thing that Brody keys into is that whenever the mayor is talking about why the beaches need to be open, he's like, sweating profusely. Like he has a very specific personal vested interest in the town opening for the season. That is not at all in the film. I'll give you the top level summary here. It's that he has real estate deals with mafiosos.

[Andrew]

What? Yeah, sure.

[Craig]

He went into business with a prominent mafia guy and he leveraged a bunch of like, cheap real estate deals. And if those don't get booked this summer, like, he is gonna get got for ruining this deal for some mafia men.

[Andrew]

Another thing I could see why the people doing the movie would be like, yeah, this, this kind of complicated. This, this movie is supposed to be about big shark eat guys. Like, it's not supposed to be about mafia stuff.

[Craig]

I think the quote that Spielberg gave to Benchley was that it's gonna be an adventure movie. Like, we're right. And there's parts of the. The shark sequence in the movie where the music from John Williams gets very triumphant and they haven't done anything, but it is like.

[Andrew]

Right.

[Craig]

It's so fun to hunt a shark. And that, that feeling is not present in the novel.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Like the whole, like almost the whole second half of the movie is just like three guys on a boat doing shark stuff.

[Craig]

Let me. Yeah, I want to.

[Andrew]

These other car, all these other characters fade. And then also at the end, you don't go back to the town and do any Damon denouement stuff. It's just.

[Craig]

It's just them, like, floating away. Now that is part of the novel too.

[Andrew]

Richard Dreyfus, like, swimming back to land.

[Craig]

The end of the novel is just Brody swimming back to land. Spoiler alert. So couple of things. They do still have the thing where, like, some other guy got eaten. There's that boat with that guy that got eaten in the movie. Andrew. Yes, that is specifically in the book because they sent him out there to hunt for the shark. And so when that guy gets eaten, Brody gets blamed for that in addition to. Gets being. Getting blamed for the kid that got eaten. So now, like, you know, women are screaming at him in the streets basically because they are. They are widowed or their child has been eaten by a shark. The New York Times is in town. He is suspecting something is wrong with the mayor. A mobster kills his cat for closing the beaches.

[Andrew]

This is. Guys, a lot of extra stuff. That's not shark.

[Craig]

Yeah, it's really weird. There's also. The town is kind of languishing without any tourists. There's a guy. I can't. I don't think he's one of the selectmen. I think he's a different business guy. And he gives a little speech about how he's concerned he's going to cause a race riot in the town of Amity because. Because there is not enough money coming in. He only has enough money to hire one delivery boy. And the two applicants are black and white. And if he hires the black boy, then all the white people will get mad. And if he hires the white boy, then all the black people will get mad. And this is not resolved. This is just presented as like.

[Andrew]

No, it's just like another thing that's in there. This book sounds like. That just sounds like there's a lot of stuff that's in there.

[Craig]

The shark is causing the 70s, Andrew. That's like kind of what the novel is doing is that this, like there's this feeling that there is this monster out there that you cannot control, that you cannot understand, that is just menacing you and is. It is revealing all of the fault lines of this community like that.

[Andrew]

Right. Then they find like the, The. The. The imprint of shark teeth on the door at the Watergate Hotel or whatever.

[Craig]

Yes. I think it is worth noting maybe with this.

[Andrew]

With this specific Gerald Ford, like, trips over a shark. And it just makes the 70s, I think.

[Craig]

You know, there were some reviews that were pretty kind to the novel. There were plenty of reviews that were like, yeah, the fish stuff is cool, but everything else is pretty sketchy. Like, everything else is a little underdrawn and a little slap dash.

[Andrew]

And according to the New York Times thing about the publication of the book, like from the very, very first chapters that he handed in, that Benchley handed in, editors were like, shark stuff's really cool. All these people, I don't care.

[Craig]

Yep, yep.

[Andrew]

And it just. It seems like that was not totally resolved successfully in edits.

[Craig]

So we've got Brody and he's dealing with the town. Then we introduce Matt Hooper. Hooper is the character who is portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss in the film. Hooper is an ichthyologist, whatever we call a shark boy. He's. I think it's an ichth. It's something like. It begins with ichth. He's a shark man. He studies sharks. And in the novel, he's hired by the newspaper man to come in and help them learn about the shark. And the fun thing about Matt Hooper is that his older brother used to date Brody's wife when she was a little girl, like in high school. And so when she meets Matt Hooper, it's like a little blast from the past. And he's younger, but. But he always kind of like, thought she was cool and cute because his older brother dated her, right? And they have like, a little connection scene where they talk about the past. And Ellen Brody is really like, it's not a great plot. She is not well served. And I don't know how it relates to the there's a monster out there ruining your life part of the book. Not every subplot has to, like, map neatly to the book central themes, I suppose. But it is. It is a strange one.

[Andrew]

It's just like a book. It's a book called Jaws. Like, where's the Jaws?

[Craig]

You know, it's like, this is the part where I'm like, stephen, did Stephen King exist yet? Because it feels like it's like we're doing a little bit of a Stephen King thing where, like, people are. People in this community all have their own little problems that are, like, pushing them into very bad behavior.

[Andrew]

It would only be a Stephen King book if one of the characters was a writer and they talked all the time about how hard it was to be a writer.

[Craig]

So she is doing classic depressed housewife mode where now that her kids are largely in school and she's kind of, you know, she volunteers, but other than that, she's not raising her. You know, her kids are gone for several hours of the day, and her relationship with Brody is fine, but it's not amazing. And she feels ostracized from the community that she grew up in and from the one that she's in. And here's this little boy, shark boy who's here, and she's like, huh, he thinks I'm neat. That's kind of fun. When you said there's a scene where Richard Dreyfuss comes over and they all drink wine together and talk about sharks in the book, there's a scene where she organizes a whole dinner party where Hooper comes over and Brody gets super drunk and is a jerk to everybody. And she also invites this, like, young artist that works at the local antique shop who's supposed to be a single gal for Hooper to talk to. But then later, it's a plot point that she's a lesbian, so Hooper could never have bedded her at a motel. That's a plot point. And it's important that you know that I say out loud again so that when she decides that she is going to sleep with Matt Hooper to spice up her life as the Spice Girls say, every boy and every girl, she, like, meets him at a restaurant, and instead of there being a sex scene, Andrew. They meet at some restaurant and, like, fantasize about what it would be like to meet someone in a motel and, like, talk about what they would do.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

Which is kind of fun and kind of kinky.

[Andrew]

I like it fine. Yeah.

[Craig]

And then they're like.

[Andrew]

They're like subreddits organized around this sort of thing.

[Craig]

Yeah. And then it ends with kind of a fade to black of, like. And then they went to a motel and boned.

[Andrew]

Oh, good.

[Craig]

But she said that. But. But she claimed that she was at the hospital all day, and Hooper didn't really have a good explanation for where he was. So when you get to the part.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

When you get to the end of the story or the latter part of the story where it's the three men on a boat, and in the movie, it's this very, like, male camaraderie. Like, we are finding our connections to each other as we pursue this beast.

[Andrew]

Yeah. We're like three different people from three different walks of life, and this shark is all. Is bringing us together while we look at. Well, we compared the scars that we have gotten from various fish.

[Craig]

The novel is like, Brody wants to kill Matt Hooper and is like, what if the shark ate him? I think I would be happy. And Quint is like, I hate these guys. They're idiots.

[Andrew]

You get a lot of that from. From him in the movie.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

A lot of. I hate these guys. They're idiots. But.

[Craig]

But it is.

[Andrew]

It is. It is very. It's very funny that all this, like, wife affair, like, tension stuff gets boiled down in the movie to, like, I don't know, between two and four shots where you really think that Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are gonna kiss.

[Craig]

Yep, yep.

[Andrew]

I think the most prominent one is there at the end when they're on, like, the. The mast of The. The sunken orca. The ship.

[Craig]

Yep. Huh.

[Andrew]

And they're just very happy to see each other. They don't kiss, but you could imagine.

[Craig]

You could imagine they would. No. This book also takes a lot longer for them to get to the July 4th weekend. There is a much longer July 4th movie.

[Andrew]

It's not even important that it is July 4th. It's just important that July 4th be, like, a thing that's happening soon.

[Craig]

Huge part of the novel that is July 4th. And there's a, like a protracted scene where they decide that after a week of no sightings from the shark, they will open the beaches for July 4th. They will have boats in the water. They will have people patrolling the beaches. And there's a scene where there's a TV news crew that is interviewing Brody in the. Now in the movie, I think it's funny that Peter Benchley does play the reporter for the TV news crew. That is. That is a fun little Easter egg. There are also tourists from Queensborough, New York, doing, hey, I came here up here to see the shark. I can't believe it. Where. Show my kid the shark.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

I did listen to an audiobook version of it and the guy did the voice. And then I checked the written novel and the voice is in the writing. Some real goofy stuff.

[Andrew]

Hey, I'm shark in here.

[Craig]

It is some real a came here to see dumb sharks into water, like, kind of stuff. And there's a little boy who has dared to swim into the water for $10. Of course he does it because all little boys want $10.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And Brody has to save him as the shark tries to eat him. It's all caught on film. There's some, like. There's some, like, Hunger Games esque. Like, the newsman is like, hey, get that shot again of the boy running from the shark. Like, you know, the media is part of the problem kind of commentary. And then they close the beaches again and they decide to hire this weird shark hunter named Quint. They literally look him up and there's no first name. His name is just Quint. There is not a, like, town hall.

[Andrew]

The first names are for college boys.

[Craig]

The town hall meeting in Jaws.

[Andrew]

Real salt. Real salt of the earth. Sea captains don't need more than one.

[Craig]

That is true. I had not seen Jaws in a long time. I watched Close Encounters last year. And there is a kind of an interesting resonance between the town hall scene in Jaws and a similar one in Close Encounters where everyone, like, is like, hey, we're all experiencing alien stuff. And the Government's like, no, it's fine. And this one is similar. Like, we have questions about the shark, and the mayor's like, I don't think so until Quint speaks up. But the book, you know, they. They hire Quint. He demands that somebody who knows about boats join them. So that's how Hooper joins them. Even though Brody at this point wants to kill Hooper.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

He doesn't know anything specifically. He just assumes, based on some comments and some, like, questions about timeline. They go out on the boat and, yeah, the boat dynamic does not. They don't sing sea shanties together. They don't kind of get drunk and then get attacked by the shark together. It's a lot more acrimonious on the boat than it is in the film.

[Andrew]

In the film, it's a little weird that it's not more acrimonious. In a couple of points, there's a whole middle section of the boat part that is. That is only possible because the old grizzled captain, like, told us, told a story about getting eaten by sharks in the ocean during World War II. And it seems like it makes. It gives him a little bit of a death wish. And so he just is, like, doing nonsensical stuff for a bit in a way, that raises the danger level a lot. And then that raised danger level is the backdrop for the last act of the movie.

[Craig]

The other thing that's interesting about the.

[Andrew]

Novel is they, like, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider, don't. In the next scene, they're all putting the shark cage together. There seems to be no hard feelings about the fact that the captain smashed the radio and burns out the motor of the ship because he won't listen to anybody's advice.

[Craig]

The thing that struck me about the novel is, structurally, they go home at the end of every day.

[Andrew]

Oh, really? They're not just, like, out on the water? No, they go. Until they take the shark down.

[Craig]

They go out there for, like, four or five days, and every day they, like, go out and they're like, okay, here's where we found the shark. Like, the shark stuff is very interesting. Like, they're. They see the shark, it, like, pops out of the water and smiles at them. They try to throw harpoons at it, but, like, it's not one trip that just goes on and on and on. It's actually like they. They talk about whether or not they should do it overnight. And Quint is like, no, we need to. Like, if we. If we chummed all night, it would just be confusing, and we would never know where the shark was. Like, we. We have to go home, and then we'll come back. Which does kind of create this, like, weird rhythm of them every morning deciding to go out and risk their lives. There is a scene where the mayor shows up at Ellen's door, and he's leaving town because I guess he thinks the mob is going to try to kill him. And he's like, hey, Ellen, I think we would have made a good couple. You know, you were from a good family. I think we would have. You know, we would have done well by this town. And then he leaves, and she's like, I don't think so. That's a strange thing. He looked like a ghost. And then the next time Brody comes home, she, like, kisses him, and that's the end of her whole deal. Which is like, I guess maybe I shouldn't have gone off and slept with that guy. I love my husband. Good story, though. And then day three on the boat. Hooper's like, hey, I brought this cage, and I brought this, quote, bang stick. Which is. I think in the movie, he's gonna try to stab the shark with, like, poison, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

In the book, he wants to use effectively. What is a stick? That is a gun. Like, you put a. You put a shotgun shell in it, and then the goal is that you put the stick, like, in the shark's head and then press the trigger.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And when they're debating whether or not to bring the cage on the boat, Hooper makes a comment about Brody's wife where Brody starts choking him. And then he's like, fine, whatever.

[Andrew]

Bring your cage, your enemy. Your enemy is the shark. Everybody keep your eyes on the prize.

[Craig]

Nope.

[Andrew]

This book is called Jaws. It's about a shark.

[Craig]

So they take the cage out there, and after Quint can't harpoon the shark successfully, they do put the cage in the water. And Hooper gets in, which does happen in the film. But I was listening to the audiobook. I want to give the narrator credit, so I want to find who the narrator was. I believe it was the Eric Steele audiobook. Hooper gets killed. Hooper gets eaten by the shark. The shark comes into the cage and busts open the cage and bites Hooper in half. And I was in my car with my mouth agape at the loss of Hooper.

[Andrew]

Of Richard Dreyfuss.

[Craig]

Yes, it was really stunning.

[Andrew]

It just seems like to have the whole affair storyline in there at all just, like, muddles. What? How I'm supposed to feel about the shark eating this guy? Like it does. It does. Like Spielberg says. It doesn't make me want to be like, yeah, get him.

[Craig]

Yes, there is an. There's another thing in the novel. The woman who works at the post office, I think is the one who keeps telling everybody, she who will listen, that the, the shark is punishment from God.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

And I don't. The novel doesn't really resolve that, but it does talk about it a lot.

[Andrew]

How could you, like, how could you possibly. How could you resolve that? Does somebody come down from the mount with stone tablets that say that the shark was or was not.

[Craig]

Fair point, fair point. Like how it is just presented there as like, these characters cannot compreh why this shark is doing what it's doing. They're searching for answers. One lady at the post office is like, I have the answer. And maybe these characters are being punished for sins of some kind. Right. Maybe.

[Andrew]

I mean, I would, I would take that about as seriously as I take anything that I hear from other people at the post.

[Craig]

That's a good point.

[Andrew]

Which is like, not very.

[Craig]

So after Hooper gets eaten, Quint is like tripling down on his, like, we gotta kill this shark.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Brody initially is kind of horrified, but something about Quint's single mindedness is like, oh, I gotta get on this boat. So there is like an early morning scene between him and Ellen where he's like, no, I do have to get on this boat. And she's like, no, please don't do it. And he's like, no, I gotta get on the boat. And they do go in on the boat and Quint harpoons the shark a bunch with the barrels. And this is like a key part of the, of the movie also where you need to get a barrel with a harpoon attached into the shark and then all the barrels will make the shark like float in addition, you know, so that you can maybe shoot him or do something else to him.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And then in the secondary effect, like the shooting of the movie Jaws was pretty like troubled because of this animatronic shark.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

And the barrel thing is one of the smart, one of the several smart tricks that the movie does to like make, to make the shark be present in a scene without actually having to use a robot shark, the big, big, unwieldy mechanical shark.

[Craig]

Yeah, it's really. And it's like the storytelling in the book is very clear too. Like they get the barrels on the shark. You understand immediately that it is impressive that the shark can go underwater with the barrels attached.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Right. Because there's just like big barrels full of air. Right? Like.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Yeah. The goal is meant to reduce the sharks mobility.

[Craig]

Yep. And that the shark can handle it anyway is kind of like scary, you know. Ultimately Quint gets the shark with a whole lot of harpoons and wounds it. But a rope from one of the harpoons wraps around his foot and carries him into the ocean. So he does not make it either. And the shark has messed up the boat, has broken up the boat and Brody is left kind of floating in the water when the shark just kind of dies. There's no, there's no like what? Yeah, the shark just succumbs to climactically confrontation.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

I guess the, the. The tension. There is tension to the. Like it has continuously been wounded by Quint and yet the shark keeps coming. And then the shark just kind of like runs out of gas. Right as Brody thinks it's gonna eat him and that it. It's effective because the other two men have also been definitively killed. So like the danger to Brody is real. It does not have the panache of let's put some O2 canisters in the mouth of the shark.

[Andrew]

No, when, you know when. When you watch him blow. Blow up that shark. Even me watching by myself in my basement a movie that I have already seen before, I'm like, yeah, get him. You got him. It makes you. It's one of those big like people stand up in the theater and applaud moments.

[Craig]

No, Brody doesn't actually like, like do anything to the shark at the end. He just endures.

[Andrew]

No, you gotta explode him. You gotta explode that shark. Everything about the movie I like better.

[Craig]

I know.

[Andrew]

I think the movie better.

[Craig]

I don't even know I said. I think I said to you earlier. I don't know if the book is good. I enjoyed reading it because a thriller about a killer shark is inherently interesting.

[Andrew]

Yeah. It just sounds like there's a lot of stuff in. There is not. That was not killer shark.

[Craig]

There's a lot more in here that is not killer shark.

[Andrew]

And the movie wisely sans most of that stuff off.

[Craig]

Yep, yep, yep, yep. The. The stuff with the like the mafia stuff is very underwritten. The fact that a mafioso mook kills Brody's kids cat is like really weird. And nobody deals with it ever. We get this like bizarre thing right before. I think it's the day before Brody goes out with Quint. The last day where like the. I. It's supposed to be the end of the Harry Meadows story. The. The newspaper man who has Been like an on again, off again friend of Brody. His final gesture is that he publishes two articles. You know, this is a book that presumes. And it's a world that I would love to live in that, like, newspapers affect the world.

[Andrew]

Yeah. You put something in a newspaper, everybody reads it, everybody assumes it's true. Everybody absorbs it, and then they change their behavior in response to the new information.

[Craig]

And, like, narratively, it's a very clean device. I wish this is the way the world worked.

[Andrew]

This is my. This is my least favorite. Okay. Henry and Suze and I are watching a lot of Pixar movies. Surely that's always been my least favorite thing about the movie Coco, which I think otherwise, it's a wonderful movie.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

One of the. One of the better, like, latter day Pixar films.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

But the end of the movie, everybody finds out a new, like, new facts come to light about everybody's hero that makes him actually the villain. And everybody's attitude toward this hero changes on a dime and they all, like, cast him down and don't love him anymore.

[Craig]

And there's no exploration of like. But what about the people who would be like, no, I don't believe it?

[Andrew]

Yeah. No. Well, and it's because it's a kid's movie mostly. And it's also from a time that I think at the, like, the tail end of the. Everybody's gonna change their behavior in response to new facts.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Thing.

[Craig]

You're right. You're right.

[Andrew]

It's just. It's tough. Even at the time, it was like, I don't know about this. And especially now, it's like, I really don't know about this.

[Craig]

Yeah. So there's this thing with Harry Meadows where he publishes two articles. One about the hero Tom, the hero Matt Hooper, who sacrificed himself for the town of Amity. You know, we all should treasure what he gave to us. And then the other article is about Brody and this character, you know, this cop who we all know and love. And a lot of us got mad at him because he closed all the beaches and because he let that kid get eaten. But actually he's going out on the boat all the time. He's trying to kill this shark for us. Even though he hates the water, he's scared of the water. My newspaper means that we should all care for this man. And that there is, like, a little beat from Brody of like, okay, thanks. Thanks, buddy. And what I do think is interesting is that the novel does end, though, on the, like, Quint is dead also Shark is dead. Now Brody is just floating. You could envision a version where the newspaper, like, stories are the end of the novel and it feels way more pat. I appreciate the. I don't know what's gonna happen to this guy. He is like, floating back to shore after some awful trauma stuff. Which is a thing that these. Some of these early Spielberg movies do a lot too, where, like, you get to the end of it and the characters have gone through something truly life changing and you. The end of the movie is the. Is asking you to envision what could possibly be next for them.

[Andrew]

Yeah, right. And then in Jaw and Draws the film, it's like, well, now you can watch three more.

[Craig]

Yeah, well, these bad boys survives in.

[Andrew]

The movie even though he's not in the second movie.

[Craig]

Well, well. Because I think he's too busy doing Close Encounters. Same character, I'm sure.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Makes a big mashed potato sculpture every act.

[Andrew]

That's the thing that they don't tell you about acting is like every actor in every movie is just playing the same character. They don't tell you this, but they don't tell you.

[Craig]

They don't tell you Lyndon Johnson wanted to tell you, but they wouldn't let him.

[Andrew]

It's just like how Walter White and Breaking Bad is. Is Hal from Malcolm in the Middle. They're the same guy.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

And they just can't tell you.

[Craig]

And how Andy's mom is in all the other Pixar movies. What is Andy's mom? What is that theory? That's a theory, right?

[Andrew]

I don't. I do not.

[Craig]

Isn't Andy's mom in other things?

[Andrew]

I do not know what you're talking about. Don't Google it. Right now, we gotta wrap up this podcast about the Jaws. And as. As in the book, I feel like here at the end, you're getting distracted by things that aren't a big shark and it's making things longer than they need to be.

[Craig]

That is fair. That is fair. The novel is not as good as the movie. The novel is shaggy. The novel is strange. I do think the movies both of those things too.

[Andrew]

It's just like more entertaining lead, so it seems like.

[Craig]

I think the fish stuff is co. I also generally found the character of Brody pretty interesting. I think he's like an interesting cop character to have in this context. I don't know that. You know, I like a lot of cop characters in every book, but he is like, I don't know, a guy just trying to do the right thing and actually trying to do the right thing, which is not always a given.

[Andrew]

He's what, he's what people. He's what like people who defend cops with a bad apples defense? He's what people imagine a good apple to be.

[Craig]

Yes. Yes. Huh. And the other thing that this book has with like both him and a couple other characters, but Brody in particular, Benchley does have a strong interest in like characters being aware of what would be in their best interest. And maybe they don't always act in it, but they know that they're not acting in it. And that is like a very like when he takes the time to explore that it is an interesting read of human character but often he is being a little more slapdash about it. So.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

So that's the, that's the novel Jaws relative to the movie Jaws. You could not have a bad time watching Jaws in my opinion.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it's pretty good.

[Craig]

I think you'd have an okay time reading the novel Jaws, but you should probably watch the movie first. So go check it out maybe in the theater new year near you.

[Andrew]

You heard it here first. Go watch the 50 year old movie Jaws on Netflix.

[Craig]

I would also say it's just kind of neat to watch a movie that like and like hear what the sound is. Like all of the stuff from that era like just has a different recording quality to it that is fun to me personally. If you the listener have thoughts on sharks or thoughts on the movie Jaws or Spielberg movies, send us an email. Overduepodmail.com hit us up on social media Verdupod thanks to Lauren Emily Attacks all shrink Rosalynn Liesel 2 Blue Keys Allie Plenty of people reaching out in the past week on social media. We spend most of our time on bluesky and Instagram at Overdue Pod. Thanks to Nick Lauren just who composed our theme music. Andrew if folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?

[Andrew]

Overdue Podcast.com is the Internet website. Up there we have links to the books we have read, the ones we are going to read. Our August schedule is not up there yet, but it should be soon because we have finalized it. Craig, I think I made you read this last week so I won't make you read the whole thing again.

[Craig]

Okay?

[Andrew]

But patreon.com overdupod is the other link that you need to know about. You can give us money to directly support us, help buy books, help buy equipment and help buy other things that we need to make the show happen, including childcare and many other odds and ends. And you get bonus episodes early you get access to our newsletter, Dusty Bookshelves, which we really do need to write the August edition of. I'm looking at the calendar right now.

[Craig]

I've got half of both of my sections written already.

[Andrew]

Wow.

[Craig]

But I gotta. I gotta. We're gonna do more work.

[Andrew]

We're gonna need a bigger boat to hold all the words that you're writing for the newsletter.

[Craig]

Nobody says bigger boat in the novel.

[Andrew]

I don't know. Other stuff. The Silly Merlin, our long read project that we're working on right now, Episode two, went up a couple of weeks ago. You could be listening to it right now. You could be, but you're not. Why aren't you? Patreon.com overduepod Next week I'm reading Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. We will just see how that goes.

[Craig]

People believe that Andy's mom is actually Emily, Jesse's former owner. The girl who discards Jesse in Toy Story.

[Andrew]

I don't think. Not everybody needs to be somebody though. It does. That does sort of answer one of the questions, which is, how does Andy know what Jesse and Bullseye are called?

[Craig]

Yep. Huh.

[Andrew]

The other. I mean, the alternate explanation is just that the old Woody's Roundup cartoon had some cultural footprint and people would just that stuff through osmosis. But anyway, not everybody's been watching all the Toy Story movies over and over again like I have. Until we talk to you next week, please try not to get eaten by a shark. Especially because they don't really do that that much. And also try to be happy. That was a headgum podcast. What do you think makes the perfect snack? Hmm. It's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient. Could you be more specific? When it's cravinient.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Like a fresh, freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right down the street at am, pm. Or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at a.m. pM.

[Craig]

I'm seeing a pattern here.

[Andrew]

Well, yeah, we're talking about what I crave, which is anything from am, pm. What more could you want? Stop by AMPM where the snacks and drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient. That's cravenience. Am, PM Too much good stuff.