by Nelson
After covering the movies, I figured the subject of Jaws was closed on DoubtFire. I still enjoy having daily philosophical discussions about it, but I try not to repeat myself and post about the same thing over and over – unless you count Ghostbusters, Batman, and G.I. Joe of course. But I’ve managed to come up with another way to write about Jaws without writing about the movies again.
I can write about the novelizations!
I love movie novelizations. I always have. They were like chances to see upcoming films early. I read stuff like Mortal Kombat, Terminator 3, and Freddy vs Jason weeks, sometimes months, before watching them on the big screen. These wondrous tomes helped me stave off the increasingly dangerous levels of excitement that threatened to tear me apart from the inside as the chance to see the movies – for real – got closer and closer.
The tie-in novelizations are almost always adapted from early screenplay drafts, so they pack in plot elements that may or may not have made the final cut. Sometimes the authors even get creative and expand on existing things in interesting ways, or, in the case of Jaws: The Revenge, they dream up stuff from scratch in a desperate attempt to make sense of the story. It’s always fun to find the treasures tucked away in the pages of these cheap paperbacks. The one for Halloween features a very different version of Michael Myers who sports a clown mask and comes with a completely unique origin that links him to an ancient Celtic curse over a decade before the movies introduced the Curse of Thorn. Mortal Kombat spends time fleshing out the friendship between Johnny Cage and the movie-exclusive Art Lean – which does a lot to make Johnny’s big showdown with Goro more personal and adds a little depth to MK’s shallowness.
I tended to be a little disappointed if a movie I was interested in was already a book. That meant there’d just be a reissue of the original novel in paperback form with the movie poster on the cover. A tie-in novelization, though? That was like a whole disc of DVD extras before DVD extras were a thing – deleted scenes, dropped plotlines, alternate dialogue, and even a chance to experience the action from your favorite character’s perspective. Did you know that the T-850 in Rise of the Machines only used its power cell to destroy the Terminatrix after calculating a 0% probability of completing its mission? Well, now you do. Pretty cool, huh?
Jaws was based on a book, so, no matter how many times it’s republished with different variations of Roger Kastel’s iconic poster art, you’re always going to get the same old Peter Benchley soap opera that happens to feature a shark. While that definitely includes a bunch of stuff that’s not in the Steven Spielberg film, it’s more of a “wow I’m really glad that didn’t make it to the screen” situation instead of something cool like reading the inner thoughts of Jason Voorhees. Ironically enough, when it comes to the Jaws books, it’s the sequels that outshine the original.
Hank Searls picked up the Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge adaptation duties and managed to do for those scripts what Spielberg and company did for Benchley’s book. His version of the The Revenge, in particular, firmly establishes that even a kooky story about a shark having a family feud with the Brody Clan can make for a surprisingly effective terror-at-sea story. Not only do the two novelizations tell two slightly different stories with better developed plots and characters, they also manage to successfully tie everything together into a nice little trilogy of events.
Searls’ Jaws 2 is based on a screenplay that was substantially rewritten before the movie finished shooting. A lot of the movie’s broad strokes are still there. The shark first appears when it kills two divers exploring the sunken Orca, and the divers leave behind photographic evidence of the encounter; the Brody brothers hit the ocean together for an ill-fated day of sailing, and Martin Brody is still reeling from his perilous experience with deep sea fishing. For the most part, the book tells a radically different story than the movie. There’s way more focus on Amity’s financial decline in the wake of its well-publicized shark problem (now called “The Trouble” by all the locals), and the whole “Brody is the only one who believes there’s another shark out there” angle is dropped entirely. This time, a local pharmacy develops the dead divers’ fishy photo. When the owner realizes what’s on it, he immediately concludes that Chief Brody lied about killing the first shark and decides to keep the picture a secret from everybody in a reckless effort to protect property values. For a solid 85-90% of the book, no one but the pharmacist and his wife have any idea that there’s a killer shark on the loose. The fish gobbles up innocent swimmers as quickly as they get in the water, but the pharmacy folks basically take on Mayor Vaughan’s former role as the real villains. They’re even worse than the mayor. He was in denial, but these two know that there’s danger, presume that it’s the same danger that crippled the town to begin with, and choose to keep it a secret from everyone – especially that no-good fish-story-telling chief of police.
The part where a half-crazed Martin fires a bunch of cyanide-tipped rounds at a school of bluefish on a public beach is sadly missing, and he doesn’t drunkenly lament being fired for the first time because he doesn’t lose his job in this version. There’s also a firmly established link between the second shark and its predecessor; the Jaws 2 beast is Bruce’s bigger and grouchier girlfriend. She’s pregnant; she’s unhappy about being a single mom, and she’s satisfying her inexplicable craving for human flesh even though she can’t stand the stuff when she’s not pregnant. Even though it’s a really minor touch, it creates cohesion between the first and second saga in a really cool way, and the whole mama shark thing winds up being a matter of significant consequence by the end of the story. Right before she bites into the power cable that sends her to a watery grave, Mama Jaws births a tiny great white that decides, right then and there, that these Brody folks have got to go. This gives us a concrete Killer Shark Family Tree. Jaws the First and Jaws the Second had a baby boy who grew up to become Jaws the Revenge. Sure, the idea of a shark following in its parents’ footsteps may seem a little hokey, but at least it’s an attempt to explain why these things keep popping up in a place where, scientifically speaking, they shouldn’t even want to be, and it tells us exactly why the shark in The Revenge is so pissed off. Well, sort of.
The fourth Jaws was pretty wild, and an aquatic version of Ancestry.com isn’t going to explain how a fish that lives in the ocean knows that Ellen Brody is headed to the Bahamas to stay with her surviving son, much less how he manages to follow her there. That’s just one of those things that insists on a supernatural explanation no matter who the shark’s parents are. So supernatural is what we get in the form of Papa Jacques, a witch doctor who gets angry at Michael Brody and curses him with a shark that just so happens to be the son of the sharks that Michael’s dad just so happened to kill 1000+ miles north of Papa J’s voodoo shack. It may be a little silly, but there’s only so much a writer can do. If nothing else, Papa Jacques drives home the fact that Jaws: The Revenge would have been a thousand times better if it had been set entirely in Amity. That would have completely eliminated the need to toss in any sort of ocean voodoo.
A lot of fans assume that the witch doctor business was an idea that got cut out of the final script, but that’s not the case. Searls came up with the idea on his own to try and explain why a fish would develop a weird case of omnipotence. It doesn’t totally work and sort of creates more questions than answers, but it’s neat. Sort of. The book isn’t limited by pesky things like budgets, so there’s a whole lot more action including a big shark vs drug smugglers scene that would have added a much needed level of excitement to a surprisingly boring killer shark flick. It even manages to work in a better explanation for The Chief’s death with the revelation that electrocuting a monstrous fish caused a chronic heart condition that ultimately killed the greatest hero Amity Island ever produced.
In a world where scripts leak onto the Internet sometimes years before the film’s release, movie novelizations aren’t really a thing anymore, and that’s a tragedy when you consider how many potential “it’s all because of a voodoo priest” plot twists we’ve been denied over the years.
Doubtfire 