As it was the sequel to what was then the biggest moneymaker of all time, it’s no surprise that many people involved with the making of Jaws 2 were worried. Worried about living up to the first, worried that audiences wouldn’t be receptive to the new story and characters, worried about the ballooning budget putting them in a position where it couldn’t actually be a success, etc.
So I doubt anyone would be shocked to discover that it wasn’t a smooth production. It stretched out for nearly a year, saw original director John Hancock fired, and left star Roy Scheider so frustrated that he ultimately came to blows with new director Jeannot Szwarc.
What IS surprising is that, despite all that, the movie is pretty good! Not up to the heights of the original, of course (few films are), but a solid adventure with some exciting sequences, improved shark effects, and (despite his reluctance to be there at all) a winning performance by Scheider, who found himself without Richard Dreyfuss or Robert Shaw around to pick up some of the slack.
And if you read the novelization, you’ll walk away with even more appreciation for what Szwarc brought to the table when he was hired to fix things. Going by this version, the original story was dour, far too light on action, and turned Brody into a passive protagonist who doesn’t even consider the possibility that another shark has turned up in Amity until nearly ¾ of the way through the narrative.
As noted before, older novelizations tend to diverge from their big-screen counterparts because the technology wasn’t there for authors to be brought up to speed when things changed during production. It was 1978, so author Hank Searls couldn’t be emailed a PDF to reflect some script changes, nor could he quickly alter a Google doc before sending it off to the printer.
In fact, Universal gave the author even less time than he might have been afforded for any other movie, as they opted to publish the book nearly two months before Jaws 2’s theatrical release to whet the public’s appetite for the sequel.
But this one goes beyond the usual amounts of diversions and extensions. In fact, of all the books I’ve read for this column to date, I’d say it’s far and away the one that diverges the most from the version of the movie we saw on screen.
Ironically, even though it’s a novelization, it feels more like an original novel that was optioned for adaptation and changed quite a bit, something we see all the time. It’s possible (even likely) that Searls was inventing some of his own scenes and character actions that weren’t in the draft(s) he was working from, but barring a Dean Koontz-style “I don’t like this script so I’m just going to mostly ignore it and write an original” approach*, we can assume this is more or less what we could have seen in theaters if the script wasn’t rewritten.
The basic plot is the same: It’s a few years later (two in the book, four in the movie), and another shark has arrived in Amity. After a few scattered attacks it sets its sights on a group of teenagers who are sailing off the island’s coast, prompting Brody to get back out on the water and save the town once again. However, when it comes to the details, it would be a much shorter column if I simply listed the things in the novel that DO match the movie itself.
Basically, and tellingly, the shark scenes are all identical. The opening attack on the divers at the Orca wreck, the jet skier and subsequent explosion, the shark scaring another diver into a case of the bends, and the repeated attacks on our stranded group of teens all pretty much match the finished product.
According to screenwriter Carl Gottlieb in The Jaws 2 Log, the advanced preparations for these effects scenes meant they were more or less stuck with them as is when it came time to rethink the movie. And one can assume that the spiraling costs for the film left him or Szwarc unable to add any new ones, which was presumably frustrating. But looking at it now, these scenes are the only proof that Searls wasn’t just going off his own imagination the entire time, as nothing else really matches up to the movie.
The novelization (which was based on Howard Sackler and Dorothy Tristan’s older draft, before Gottlieb was hired to give it an overhaul after Hancock was fired) focuses heavily on Moscotti, a mafia boss who is bankrolling a casino that is primed to pump some much-needed income into Amity, which is still reeling from “The Trouble” caused by the shark two years prior. Naturally, Mayor Vaughn and some of the other town officials are very much pro-casino and want to ensure it succeeds, making it the new “we can’t close the beaches!”
Brody is mostly indifferent about the casino, but he ends up drawing the ire of his bosses anyway. One day, he spots a man named Jepps shooting at seals from the beach, a federal offense. And the guy’s a jerk, so Brody has no problem throwing the book at him out of spite.
But at this point in the story, he’s also trying to understand how the water skiers’ boat exploded, so Brody lands on the possibility that Jepps hit its gas tank when firing at the seals, and thus puts Jepps on the hook for manslaughter as well. However, he needs to prove it, so he meets a ballistics expert who is a bit flirty with him. When the results come in he has to find a way to bury them since they prove him wrong… it’s basically a police procedural with occasional shark mentions.
It’s an odd thing to spend so much of the story on, since we know damn well it was Bruce Jr. who caused the explosion, but Searls (and presumably the original screenwriters) at least come up with a fun payoff for the whole thing. Eventually, Moscotti is involved with this because Jepps knows some other investors who will pull out of the casino in retaliation for the town’s chief putting him in jail, and it’s inferred that the mob is going to have Brody killed to make the whole thing go away.
But in an amusing little twist, Moscotti actually sides with the Brody family because Ellen Brody is now a Cub Scout den mother who pulled some strings to let Moscotti’s young son into the program despite not being a native islander (he’s just staying there for the season for casino purposes). So he feels he owes them for letting his son play with other kids all summer, and decides to whack Jepps instead! And then Jepps’ corpse is eaten by the shark!
Therefore it all kind of works out for Brody, who is oblivious to all of this anyway. Honestly everything else about this version of the story is inferior to the finished film, but I would have kind of loved to see this stuff play out assuming they got a good actor to play Moscotti, as one thing the movie lacks is another veteran actor for Scheider to bounce off of like he did with Shaw in the original.
Also, as any Jaws student probably knows, Scheider didn’t want to do the movie at all but was basically forced into it as penance for dropping out of The Deer Hunter, with Universal telling him they’d forgive him for that and the rest of his contract if he agreed to star in this sequel.
So it’s kind of ironic that this somewhat depressing version of the story feels somewhat inspired by Michael Cimino’s Oscar winner, with the primary characters all trying to continue their working-class lives while suffering from the events that happened before (Vietnam, in that case).
But otherwise… well, we hate to agree with executives, but it seems they made the right call to give the story a major retooling. As I noted earlier, it takes forever for Brody even to entertain the idea of there being another shark around. When he first considers it (on page 221 of the 297-page book), he actually shrugs it off as far-fetched.
One of the things that works so well in the movie is that we know Brody is right all along and feel so bad for him being unable to prove it, making him a very sympathetic and almost tragic hero (that bit where his younger son helps him pick bullet shells out of the sand guts me every time I watch). But here, he’s just so laser-focused on Jepps, who we know to be innocent of the water skiers’ deaths; it makes him look mostly like a jerk until the very end when he finally snaps into action.
To be fair, they never fully fixed this part of the story either; it takes far too long for Brody to show up on the scene with the stranded teens, but at least he spends the majority of the movie fighting the good fight instead of just being petty. He also has a few scenes with Meadows, the town newspaperman played by Gottlieb himself in the first movie.
Since Meadows does not appear in the film, if Searls was sticking to the script he had, it seems the screenwriter apparently wrote his own character out of the film as part of his overhaul (incidentally, his rewrite work on the first film reduced the character’s screentime, so I guess he didn’t have much of an ego).
Also absent from the movie is a subplot about the seal that Jepps shot. Dubbing the little fella as “evidence,” Brody takes him home to patch him up and keeps him in the garage, much to the delight of his sons, who name him Sammy. We occasionally even get the seal’s POV on things, as he longs to be back with his mother but is also a bit worried about returning to the water. In fact, the book gives us a few ocean dwellers’ thoughts; sections from the perspective of a dolphin and the mother seal are also offered, not to mention a few from the shark itself.
Searls even gives us an explanation for how sharks are impregnated and chalks up the main shark’s feeding frenzy to her need to care for the ravenous baby sharks inside her, some of whom are said to kill their siblings in the womb. It’s doubtful anything like this was ever in the script (how would a shark’s thoughts be filmed?), but I am curious if the seal element was dropped early on due to the logistics. We all know they had enough trouble with the mechanical shark – would they really want to add a seal into the mix?
The author also occasionally seems to be writing a sequel to Peter Benchley’s book instead of Steven Spielberg’s movie. For one thing, Mayor Vaughn has absolutely no love for Brody here, which seems like a holdover from the novel as opposed to the 1975 film, where Vaughn eventually makes peace with the fact that Brody was right. The various asides about townsfolk worried about their finances—a frequent element of Benchley’s novel that’s more or less MIA in the film—are also brought back here.
In the weirdest example, Brody reflects on Hooper’s affair with Ellen, something the movie definitely skipped over and should have no business in the novelization of the second movie. The mafia elements, while well established here with the subplot of a new casino, also seem like holdovers from Benchley’s version of the story (since it happens again here, it’s a bit odd that if the two books were filmed as is, we’d have scenes in both movies where mafia stooges menace the young Brody children).
Despite being a well-publicized version of earlier drafts, one thing that’s NOT in here is the character of “Sideburns,” who turned out to be Quint’s son. Over the course of the film’s development, he apparently became Bob (the teen with the hat who is often seen with Larry Vaughn’s son, who also saw his character changed quite a bit), but Searls’ novel doesn’t have a character with either of these names. Instead, he has Andy (the curly blonde-haired guy who is tight with Brody’s son Mike) more or less fill in “Bob’s” role in the story.
Normally, it’d be clear where these discrepancies came from, but for whatever reason, the original John Hancock version is always glossed over when it comes to supplemental material about Jaws 2. Hancock is almost always mentioned by name, so it’s not like they’re trying to hide it. Still, it’s always, essentially, “Hancock didn’t work out, and Szwarc saved the day“ without really even mentioning, let alone going into any detail, about how the story itself became completely different as a result. So this novelization is the only real insight into what we could have gotten if the execs didn’t get cold feet about this approach, but it doesn’t always match up to what we’ve learned about older versions of the story, either.
Ultimately, it’s not that it’s a bad novel on its own (with the mafia stuff and other things I mentioned, it might even be preferable to anyone out there who felt that Benchley’s original novel was superior to Spielberg’s take), just noticeably less exciting and “summer blockbuster-ready“ than what came to theaters.
Even the finished film has a big lull in the middle without any shark action, but it feels even more drawn out here since the hero isn’t thinking about a shark at all (naturally, there is no equivalent of the scene where Brody shoots at some innocent bluefish).
That said, it’s probably a good thing that Searls (who also adapted 1987’s Jaws The Revenge) didn’t write one for Jaws 3-D, because if he wrote a more boring version of that snoozefest when we wouldn’t even have the 3D visuals to laugh at, it might put readers into a coma.
*This is what Koontz did when he was commissioned to novelize Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of the film as it gives a completely different motive for the film’s events, which are only covered in the book’s final quarter or so.
For more horror movie novelizations, check out our ongoing From The Screen to the Page.
