Latest news with #Benchley
Atlantic
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
What Jaws Got Wrong
In a cramped, $50-a-month room above a New Jersey furnace-supply company, Peter Benchley set to work on what he once said, half-jokingly, might be 'a Ulysses for the 1970s.' A novel resulted from these efforts, one Benchley considered titling The Edge of Gloom or Infinite Evil before deciding on the less dramatic but more fitting Jaws. Its plot is exquisite in its simplicity. A shark menaces Amity, a fictional, gentrifying East Coast fishing village. Chaos ensues: People are eaten. Working-class residents battle with an upper-class outsider regarding the best way to kill the shark. The fish eventually dies in an orgy of blood. And the political sympathies of the novel are clear—it sides with the townspeople, and against the arrogant, credentialed expert who tries to solve Amity's shark problem. In June 1975, 50 years ago this month, the movie version of Jaws was released in theaters and became the first-ever summer blockbuster. Though the film retains Benchley's basic storyline—shark eats people; shark dies a bloody death—it turns the book's politics upside down. Benchley wrote the first drafts of the screenplay adaptation, but the script was thoroughly revised by his co-writer, Carl Gottlieb, and the result led the novelist to send an ornery letter to one of the film's producers, detailing his qualms with the film's plot and the characterization of its protagonists. Although Benchley didn't explicitly mention disapproving of how the film handles class, the movie's differences from its source material are hard to miss. In the novel, Benchley portrays Amity as a community trying to maintain its dignity in the face of shark-induced uncertainty and the people who live there as mostly noble, if unpolished. But the film, directed by Steven Spielberg, shows little patience for Amity's fishermen and small-business owners, a perspective that at points seems to devolve into contempt. The differences in the political orientations of the two works become especially clear when you compare the portrayals of three main characters: Brody (played in the film by Roy Scheider), the top cop trying to save Amity; Quint (a wizened Robert Shaw), the local fisherman paid handsomely to help him; and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a hotshot shark scientist who—unlike the other two men—is highly educated and independently wealthy. In the novel, Brody—'strong, simple, kind'—is Amity-born, Amity-bred. The paycheck-to-paycheck Brody family operates on a strict budget, living on coupons and discounted meat. His class anxieties are a through line in the novel, as revealed in his constant conflict with Hooper, who is rapacious and sleazy. The tension between these two men is not just socioeconomic but also educational. 'What do you know about ecology, Brody?' Hooper says at one point. 'I bet all it means to you is someone telling you you can't burn leaves in your back yard.' Hooper is similarly dismissive of Quint, balking when Brody suggests hiring the experienced but terse and anti-environmentalist fisherman to help find the shark. 'You're joking,' he sneers. 'You'd really do business with this guy?' The film, however, dispenses with these frictions. In the movie, Hooper is far more genial than in the novel, and is largely depicted as in the right. Brody is a recent transplant from New York City, living a seemingly idyllic life in Amity with a home on the water. Although he is not college educated, his primary virtue is that he defers to people who are. And he becomes a foil for Amity's working people, who in the film are largely portrayed as unpleasant or obtuse, or at best well meaning but shortsighted. Quint, charmingly weathered, comes off more favorably than the other townspeople, but his folk wisdom is far less exalted than Hooper's scientific knowledge. The film features an indelible town-hall scene in which Brody pushes for a beach shutdown, nearly causing the townspeople, worried about losing their livelihood, to riot. The chief's promise to 'bring in some experts' does little to calm the locals, who are apparently immune to reason. In a different scene, a knuckleheaded islander uses his wife's holiday roast as shark bait, nearly killing himself in the process. In yet another one, a crowd of camo-clad and rain-slickered townies pile into dinghies, off on a shark hunt rendered as a bacchanal of idiocy. They overload their boats, slopping chum everywhere and throwing explosives in the water in their bumbling bid to kill the big fish. The ostensible reason for their fervor is the $3,000 bounty on the shark's head, because they, being down on their luck, could use it. Instead of portraying this as the act of financial desperation that it is, the movie makes the working stiffs the butt of its joke. None of these scenes appears in the book. The film also omits several plotlines from Benchley's novel that humanize Amity's working class, including one where a local teenager gets fired from his job at a tourist spot and decides to sell drugs to make up for his lost wages so he can pay for college. He seems to determine that a brief life of crime is preferable to a long one of clawing in a world where a degree is more and more essential. 'That's quite a choice, isn't it?' the young man tells his date as he considers what to do. 'College or jail.' (Missing, too, from the film: any mention of Amity's Black community, which gets a fairly nuanced portrayal in the book.) Movies take liberties with their source material all the time. But the differences between these two works matter because they anticipated a fight that has arguably defined American politics since at least 2016, between a technocratic managerialism that champions college education and a nostalgic workerism that aims to defend and restore stable blue-collar employment and tends to resent members of the highly educated class. Jaws was released just as critics and political theorists were examining the growing impact of degreed experts on the United States' economy and culture. The author Barbara Ehrenreich, who in 1977 coined the term professional-managerial class with her then-husband, observed that whereas professional-class jobs represented an estimated less than 1 percent of American employment before 1930, they came to comprise about a quarter of all workers by the 1970s, a proportion that has swelled in the decades since. If there is a lesson latent in Jaws, it is that the film was too bullish by half about the new credentialed class. Many of the great quagmires of the 21st century—the global War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic—unfolded in no small part because of mistakes or negligence by highly educated people in positions of power. Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between book and film more apparent than in the latter's treatment of Jaws 's violent conclusion. In the book, Hooper's faith in his own brilliance and expensive technological devices predestines him to be eaten by the shark. Quint—with rather little help from the police chief—vanquishes the great white but is killed in the process. The image Benchley leaves us with is one of the townie dying for the town, Quint vanishing into the sucking blue, his arms spread like Christ. Only Brody is left alive. And if he acquits himself admirably throughout the ordeal, his reprieve is not a function of his own heroism, but of Quint's. Benchley also considered calling his book The Survivor —and as Brody swims to shore, one gets the sense that in the end, he is more witness than protagonist, a man whose last job is to tell the people of Amity of their fisherman's bravery and the out-of-town college boy's foolishness. Compare this with the movie's ending. Quint, the film's only poor main character, is also the only main character to die. He tries and fails to kill the shark, in no small part because he underestimates his quarry, and then is swallowed whole. Brody, who blows up the shark by shooting at a scuba tank that has become lodged in its mouth, saves the town. The film winds to a close with the police chief and the biologist, the two out-of-towners, triumphantly swimming to shore as the sun rises on a new Amity, replacing Benchley's original paean to the virtuous American worker with the film's implicit antipopulism. The film's final message is clear enough. Quint, the dead avatar for the town's fishing-village past, must give way to the urban transplants with their polished middle-class morality and impressive degrees. Progress dictates that the experts, and those who listen to them, win the day. Benchley, however, seems to have sensed the trouble that lay ahead as the country transitioned to quasi-mandatory higher education. His vision is clear in another grisly image that the book furnished us with but that failed to make it to the screen: a dying shark, gutted and thrown back into the sea, its mouth opening and closing as it feeds unwittingly on its own entrails.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Jaws' and the two musical notes that changed Hollywood forever
'Da, duh.' Two simple notes – E and F – have become synonymous with tension, fear and sharks, representing the primal dread of being stalked by a predator. And they largely have 'Jaws' to thank. Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film – along with its spooky score composed by John Williams – convinced generations of swimmers to think twice before going in the water. As a scholar of media history and popular culture, I decided to take a deeper dive into the staying power of these two notes and learned about how they're influenced by 19th-century classical music, Mickey Mouse and Alfred Hitchcock. YouTube video not showing up for me In 1964, fisherman Frank Mundus killed a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island. After hearing the story, freelance journalist Peter Benchley began pitching a novel based on three men's attempt to capture a man-eating shark, basing the character of Quint off of Mundus. Doubleday commissioned Benchley to write the novel, and in 1973, Universal Studios producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film rights to the novel before it was published. The 26-year-old Spielberg was signed on to be the director. Tapping into both mythical and real fears regarding great white sharks – including an infamous set of shark attacks along the Jersey Shore in 1916 – Benchley's 1974 novel became a bestseller. The book was a key part of Universal's marketing campaign, which began several months before the film's release. Starting in the fall of 1974, Zanuck, Brown and Benchley appeared on a number of radio and television programs to simultaneously promote the release of the paperback edition of the novel and the upcoming film. The marketing also included a national television advertising campaign that featured emerging composer Williams' two-note theme. The plan was for a summer release, which, at the time, was reserved for films with less than stellar reviews. Films at the time typically were released market by market, preceded by local reviews. However, Universal's decision to release the film in hundreds of theaters across the country on June 20, 1975, led to huge up-front profits, sparking a 14-week run as the No. 1 film in the U.S. Many consider 'Jaws' the first true summer blockbuster. It catapulted Spielberg to fame and kicked off the director's long collaboration with Williams, who would go on to earn the second-highest number of Academy Award nominations in history – 54 – behind only Walt Disney's 59. Though it's now considered one of the greatest scores in film history, when Williams proposed the two-note theme, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke. But Williams had been inspired by 19th and 20th century composers, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and especially Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, 'From the New World.' In the 'Jaws' theme, you can hear echoes of the end of Dvorak's symphony, as well as the sounds of another character-driven musical piece, Sergei Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf.' 'Peter and the Wolf' and the score from 'Jaws' are both prime examples of leitmotifs, or a musical piece that represents a place or character. The varying pace of the ostinato – a musical motif that repeats itself – elicits intensifying degrees of emotion and fear. This became more integral as Spielberg and the technical team struggled with the malfunctioning pneumatic sharks that they'd nicknamed 'Bruce,' after Spielberg's lawyer. As a result, the shark does not appear until the 81-minute mark of the 124-minute film. But its presence is felt through Williams' theme, which some music scholars have theorized evoke the shark's heartbeat. Williams also has Disney to thank for revolutionizing character-driven music in film. The two don't just share a brimming trophy case. They also understood how music can heighten emotion and magnify action for audiences. Although his career started in the silent film era, Disney became a titan of film, and later media, by leveraging sound to establish one of the greatest stars in media history, Mickey Mouse. When Disney saw 'The Jazz Singer' in 1927, he knew that sound would be the future of film. On Nov. 18, 1928, 'Steamboat Willie' premiered at Universal's Colony Theater in New York City as Disney's first animated film to incorporate synchronized sound. Unlike previous attempts to bring sound to film by having record players concurrently play or deploying live musicians to perform in the theater, Disney used technology that recorded sound directly on the film reel. It wasn't the first animated film with synchronized sound, but it was a technical improvement to previous attempts at it, and 'Steamboat Willie' became an international hit, launching Mickey's – and Disney's – career. The use of music or sound to match the rhythm of the characters on screen became known as 'Mickey Mousing.' 'King Kong' in 1933 would deftly deploy Mickey Mousing in a live action film, with music mimicking the giant gorilla's movements. For example, in one scene, Kong carries away Ann Darrow, who's played by actress Fay Wray. Composer Max Steiner uses lighter tones to convey Kong's curiosity as he holds Ann, followed by ominous, faster, tones as Ann escapes and Kong chases after her. In doing so, Steiner encourages viewers to both fear and connect with the beast throughout the film, helping them suspend disbelief and enter a world of fantasy. Mickey Mousing declined in popularity after World War II. Many filmmakers saw it as juvenile and too simplistic for the evolving and advancing film industry. In spite of this criticism, the technique was still used to score some iconic scenes, like the playing of violins in the shower as Marion Crane is stabbed in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho.' Spielberg idolized Hitchcock. A young Spielberg was even kicked off the Universal lot after sneaking on to watch the production of Hitchcock's 1966 film 'Torn Curtain.' Although Hitchcock and Spielberg never met, 'Jaws' clearly exhibits the influence of Hitchcock, the 'Master of Suspense.' And maybe that's why Spielberg initially overcame his doubts about using something so simple to represent tension in the thriller. The use of the two-note motif helps overcome the production issues Spielberg faced directing the first feature length movie to be filmed on the ocean. The malfunctioning animatronic shark forced Spielberg to leverage Williams' minimalist theme to represent the shark's ominous presence in spite of the limited appearances by the eponymous predatory star. As Williams continued his legendary career, he would deploy a similar sonic motif for certain 'Star Wars' characters. Each time Darth Vader appeared, the 'Imperial March' was played to set the tone for the leader of the dark side. As movie budgets creep closer to a half-billion dollars, the 'Jaws' theme – and the way those two notes manipulate tension – is a reminder that in film, sometimes less can be more. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder Read more: How the sounds of 'Succession' shred the grandeur and respect the characters so desperately try to project 'Jaws' portrayed sharks as monsters 50 years ago, but it also inspired a generation of shark scientists From 'Jaws' to 'Schindler's List,' John Williams has infused movie scores with adventure and emotion Jared Bahir Browsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Jaws' and the two musical notes that changed Hollywood forever
'Da, duh.' Two simple notes – E and F – have become synonymous with tension, fear and sharks, representing the primal dread of being stalked by a predator. And they largely have 'Jaws' to thank. Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film – along with its spooky score composed by John Williams – convinced generations of swimmers to think twice before going in the water. As a scholar of media history and popular culture, I decided to take a deeper dive into the staying power of these two notes and learned about how they're influenced by 19th-century classical music, Mickey Mouse and Alfred Hitchcock. YouTube video not showing up for me In 1964, fisherman Frank Mundus killed a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island. After hearing the story, freelance journalist Peter Benchley began pitching a novel based on three men's attempt to capture a man-eating shark, basing the character of Quint off of Mundus. Doubleday commissioned Benchley to write the novel, and in 1973, Universal Studios producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film rights to the novel before it was published. The 26-year-old Spielberg was signed on to be the director. Tapping into both mythical and real fears regarding great white sharks – including an infamous set of shark attacks along the Jersey Shore in 1916 – Benchley's 1974 novel became a bestseller. The book was a key part of Universal's marketing campaign, which began several months before the film's release. Starting in the fall of 1974, Zanuck, Brown and Benchley appeared on a number of radio and television programs to simultaneously promote the release of the paperback edition of the novel and the upcoming film. The marketing also included a national television advertising campaign that featured emerging composer Williams' two-note theme. The plan was for a summer release, which, at the time, was reserved for films with less than stellar reviews. Films at the time typically were released market by market, preceded by local reviews. However, Universal's decision to release the film in hundreds of theaters across the country on June 20, 1975, led to huge up-front profits, sparking a 14-week run as the No. 1 film in the U.S. Many consider 'Jaws' the first true summer blockbuster. It catapulted Spielberg to fame and kicked off the director's long collaboration with Williams, who would go on to earn the second-highest number of Academy Award nominations in history – 54 – behind only Walt Disney's 59. Though it's now considered one of the greatest scores in film history, when Williams proposed the two-note theme, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke. But Williams had been inspired by 19th and 20th century composers, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and especially Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, 'From the New World.' In the 'Jaws' theme, you can hear echoes of the end of Dvorak's symphony, as well as the sounds of another character-driven musical piece, Sergei Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf.' 'Peter and the Wolf' and the score from 'Jaws' are both prime examples of leitmotifs, or a musical piece that represents a place or character. The varying pace of the ostinato – a musical motif that repeats itself – elicits intensifying degrees of emotion and fear. This became more integral as Spielberg and the technical team struggled with the malfunctioning pneumatic sharks that they'd nicknamed 'Bruce,' after Spielberg's lawyer. As a result, the shark does not appear until the 81-minute mark of the 124-minute film. But its presence is felt through Williams' theme, which some music scholars have theorized evoke the shark's heartbeat. Williams also has Disney to thank for revolutionizing character-driven music in film. The two don't just share a brimming trophy case. They also understood how music can heighten emotion and magnify action for audiences. Although his career started in the silent film era, Disney became a titan of film, and later media, by leveraging sound to establish one of the greatest stars in media history, Mickey Mouse. When Disney saw 'The Jazz Singer' in 1927, he knew that sound would be the future of film. On Nov. 18, 1928, 'Steamboat Willie' premiered at Universal's Colony Theater in New York City as Disney's first animated film to incorporate synchronized sound. Unlike previous attempts to bring sound to film by having record players concurrently play or deploying live musicians to perform in the theater, Disney used technology that recorded sound directly on the film reel. It wasn't the first animated film with synchronized sound, but it was a technical improvement to previous attempts at it, and 'Steamboat Willie' became an international hit, launching Mickey's – and Disney's – career. The use of music or sound to match the rhythm of the characters on screen became known as 'Mickey Mousing.' 'King Kong' in 1933 would deftly deploy Mickey Mousing in a live action film, with music mimicking the giant gorilla's movements. For example, in one scene, Kong carries away Ann Darrow, who's played by actress Fay Wray. Composer Max Steiner uses lighter tones to convey Kong's curiosity as he holds Ann, followed by ominous, faster, tones as Ann escapes and Kong chases after her. In doing so, Steiner encourages viewers to both fear and connect with the beast throughout the film, helping them suspend disbelief and enter a world of fantasy. Mickey Mousing declined in popularity after World War II. Many filmmakers saw it as juvenile and too simplistic for the evolving and advancing film industry. In spite of this criticism, the technique was still used to score some iconic scenes, like the playing of violins in the shower as Marion Crane is stabbed in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho.' Spielberg idolized Hitchcock. A young Spielberg was even kicked off the Universal lot after sneaking on to watch the production of Hitchcock's 1966 film 'Torn Curtain.' Although Hitchcock and Spielberg never met, 'Jaws' clearly exhibits the influence of Hitchcock, the 'Master of Suspense.' And maybe that's why Spielberg initially overcame his doubts about using something so simple to represent tension in the thriller. The use of the two-note motif helps overcome the production issues Spielberg faced directing the first feature length movie to be filmed on the ocean. The malfunctioning animatronic shark forced Spielberg to leverage Williams' minimalist theme to represent the shark's ominous presence in spite of the limited appearances by the eponymous predatory star. As Williams continued his legendary career, he would deploy a similar sonic motif for certain 'Star Wars' characters. Each time Darth Vader appeared, the 'Imperial March' was played to set the tone for the leader of the dark side. As movie budgets creep closer to a half-billion dollars, the 'Jaws' theme – and the way those two notes manipulate tension – is a reminder that in film, sometimes less can be more. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder Read more: How the sounds of 'Succession' shred the grandeur and respect the characters so desperately try to project 'Jaws' portrayed sharks as monsters 50 years ago, but it also inspired a generation of shark scientists From 'Jaws' to 'Schindler's List,' John Williams has infused movie scores with adventure and emotion Jared Bahir Browsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
