Word: benchley
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...Hara's importance needs no such inflation. His "Gibbsville" region is a worthy addition to American social geography, and his odd, tormented personality contained enough fascinating quirks for several men. "John, I'm your friend," Robert Benchley once told him, "and all your friends know you're a son of a bitch." Almost from the moment the callow young reporter reached New York in 1928, he gained notoriety as a prodigious writer, a snob and a mean drunk. He kept blacklists of friends who had offended him. One such victim was Author Budd Schulberg...
Partly this is due to a shrewd adaptation. Peter Benchley's novel spent too much time on dry land, plodding around Irving Wallace country, reinvestigating such tired phenomena as the uneasy marriage, the adulterous wife, the snaky seducer. In the movie, most of this lallygagging is eliminated. Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) must still fight the town's mayor, who is fearful that closing the beaches after the first shark attacks will ruin his resort's economy. He still joins forces with Quint, the professional shark killer (Robert Shaw, employing an ornate accent of indeterminate origin...
...tank was that they were backing an adaptation of a proven commodity, a best-seller of numbing durability. There are over 5½ million copies of Jaws in print. Producer Richard (son of Darryl) Zanuck and his partner David Brown paid $175,000 for the movie rights and a Benchley script...
...began with the script. There were five in all. Benchley (grandson of Humorist Robert Benchley) says he "lost the ego problem" after completion of the second. He wrote a third draft, which was subsequently reworked by such diverse hands as Playwright Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope), Director John Milius (The Wind and the Lion) and Carl Gottlieb, an actor who had played improvisational comedy with the California-based troupe, The Committee, and who had a small role in the film. The last version was rejiggered nightly out on location...
...While Benchley was still trying to whip his screenplay into workable form, Production Designer Joe Alves was dispatched to the East to find a location for the fictional village of Amity. The Hamptons were considered and rejected as "too opulent" before Alves, en route to Nantucket, took a ferry to Martha's Vineyard instead. The island had handsome houses and stark, scrub-pine shore vistas. It boasted a handy harbor with the sort of 180° view of the horizon, all uninterrupted, that Spielberg was looking for. Alves thought the Vineyard was perfect for Jaws. The residents, however, were...