PETER BENCHLEY, the author who created Jaws, and with it the phenomenon of the Hollywood “summer blockbuster”, died at his home in New Jersey at the weekend, it was announced yesterday.
Ironically the writer who turned a bloodthirsty shark into Steven Spielberg’s 1975 horror movie villain spent much of the rest of his life as a conservationist.
Mr Benchley, who died at the age of 65 from complications of pulmonary fibrosis, became obsessed with sharks during his childhood on the island of Nantucket, off Massachusetts. Later, in 1964, his interest was rekindled when he read a story about a Long Island fisherman who caught a 4,550lb (2,068kg) great white. “I thought to myself, ‘What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn’t go away?’ That was the seed idea of Jaws,” he wrote on his website.
The author did not pursue the idea until 1971. By the time the book was published in early 1974, he had already earned more than $1million (£573,900), including $575,000 for the paperback rights and from sales to book clubs and the film’s producers.
Mr Spielberg’s adaptation of Jaws changed Hollywood. “Jaws is the movie that revolutionised the way that studios did business,” Tom Shone, the author of Blockbuster, said. “After Jaws, it was found that you could run a studio on the back of one big monster hit. Studios realised that the bulk of their time and effort should go into rearing these big cash cows. That makes them sound incredibly greedy, but it was survival. Most studios were inches from bankruptcy.”
Advertisement
As for why Jaws was so popular, Mr Shone put it down to the “high-spirited and entertaining” direction of Spielberg. “It has more sense of humour than any of the other movies (of the 1970s) — even comedies,” he said. “Although it seemed so fresh and revolutionary, it was more of a harking back to the early days of Hollywood than a leap forward.”
Jaws also established the studio formula that has continued with King Kong: take a successful director and put him or her in charge of what would otherwise be a B-movie script.
Unlike Peter Jackson with King Kong, Spielberg earned box-office kudos for making the star of his movie a non- human being. “Before Jaws the way you gave a movie meat was to put a big name in it,” Mr Shone said. “But Spielberg knew that this was no good, because you knew who was going to survive to the final frame.”
Mr Benchley later expressed regret for portraying sharks as creatures that target human beings. Thanks to the book and Spielberg’s film, which remains one of the ten highest-grossing movies after being adjusted for inflation, millions of beachgoers thought twice before venturing into the ocean.