Jaws, page to screen
Jaws is the standard example of an adaptation improved by subtraction, because nearly every element the 1975 film removed from Peter Benchley's 1974 novel was an element working against the story. The book is a novel about a resort town in economic trouble, a strained marriage, an affair, and organised money leaning on a mayor, with a shark in it. Steven Spielberg's film keeps the town for its first hour, throws out the affair and the mafia entirely, and gives its whole third act to 3 men on a boat. The novel sold in the millions on the strength of its premise. The film found the story inside the premise.
Jaws: the book and movie differences, in short
The book and movie differences in Jaws are almost entirely deletions. The book is Peter Benchley's novel of 1974, a story about a resort town under commercial pressure, containing an affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, organised money leaning on the mayor, and a shark. The film is Steven Spielberg's of 1975, 124 minutes, with a screenplay credited to Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. It keeps the town, the closed beaches and the hunt, and it removes the affair and the criminal pressure completely. The central difference is that the novel keeps returning to land while the film goes to sea for its last act and stays there, which turns 3 men who dislike each other into a crew.
What the novel does with Amity that the film refuses
Amity in the novel is a class system before it is a hunting ground. Benchley spends substantial time on the resentment between the year-round residents and the summer people, on Chief Martin Brody's sense of being outranked in his own town, and on Ellen Brody's history in the summer set she married out of. Mayor Larry Vaughn wants the beaches open because men with organised-crime interests hold property in Amity and will not tolerate a bad season. The pressure on him is criminal, not merely political.
Two consequences follow, and both are fatal on screen. The novel's people are difficult to like: Brody is prickly and jealous, Matt Hooper is a rich younger man who condescends to him, and Ellen sleeps with Hooper in the middle of the crisis. And the shark, for long stretches, is a plot device rather than a presence, because the book keeps returning to the land to service its subplots.
What the film does instead: 3 men and a boat
Three men and a boat is the film's replacement for all of it. Screenwriting credit went to Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, and the structure they arrived at is 2 halves: a town that will not close its beaches, then a voyage that does not return to shore until it is over. Roy Scheider's Brody is a decent man out of his depth, Richard Dreyfuss's Hooper is an enthusiast rather than a rival, and Robert Shaw's Quint is expanded into the figure the novel only gestures at.
Benchley cuts between the hunt and the town, so the sea is one location among several and the men aboard dislike each other on principle.
Spielberg leaves the land behind for the last act and never goes back, so the Orca becomes the only place in the world and the 3 men have to become allies.
The film's most quoted scene, the night-time account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, exists nowhere in the novel. Its authorship has been disputed for 5 decades, with Howard Sackler, John Milius and Shaw himself all named as contributors, and its function is exact: it converts Quint from a hired obsessive into a man with a reason, and it does so in a cabin, in one take of talk, with no shark on screen.
The change that mattered most: cutting the affair
Cutting the affair is the decision that makes every other improvement possible. In the novel, Hooper and Ellen Brody spend an afternoon together, Brody suspects it, and the last third of the book carries a husband who wants the other man dead. Remove that, and Hooper stops being a rival; and once Hooper is not a rival, he does not have to die.
Three fates change accordingly. Benchley's Hooper is killed in the shark cage. Benchley's Quint goes down entangled in his own harpoon line in the manner of Ahab, and the shark itself dies of accumulated wounds and simply sinks beside the boat, exhausted, with Brody swimming back to shore. The film kills Quint on the deck of the sinking Orca, keeps Hooper alive to surface afterwards, and destroys the shark with a compressed-air tank and a rifle shot. A novel that ends with nature winning by attrition becomes a film that ends with a frightened man doing something.
How faithful is the 1975 film to Benchley's novel?
The 1975 film is unfaithful on plot and character and faithful on theme, which is why the word does poor work in this case. Go axis by axis. On plot it deletes 2 subplots, moves the whole third act onto the water, and changes how the shark dies, from exhaustion and accumulated wounds in the novel to a compressed-air tank and a rifle shot in the film. On character it reverses Hooper, a rival who dies in the book and an ally who lives on screen, and it gives Quint a history the novel does not supply. On voice it drops the passages written from the shark's point of view and withholds the animal instead. On theme it keeps the book's actual subject, a town that will trade lives for a season. Fidelity measured as event-matching scores the film badly. Fidelity measured as what the story is about scores it near the top, and both readings are correct.
Where the film lands on plot, character, voice and theme
The film lands a long way from the novel on plot and character and close to it on theme, which is the profile of a successful adaptation rather than a loose one.
| Axis | The novel, 1974 | The film, 1975 | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plot | Affair, mafia pressure, hunt intercut with the town, shark dies of its wounds | Both subplots deleted, unbroken sea voyage, shark destroyed by an air tank | |
| Character | Brody jealous, Hooper a rival who dies, Quint thinly drawn | Brody sympathetic, Hooper an ally who lives, Quint given a history | |
| Voice | Roving third person, including passages from the shark's point of view | No narration, the animal withheld and indicated by water, barrels and score | |
| Theme | A town that will trade lives for a season, and a man outranked in it | The same trade, kept intact, with the private grievances stripped out |
The answer flips only for a reader interested in the novel as social fiction. Benchley's Amity is a sharper portrait of a coastal economy than the film has time for, and the mayor's obligations to people who are not on the page are more plausible than a purely electoral motive. Everything else favours the film: 124 minutes, 3 Academy Awards, and the highest-grossing release of its era until Star Wars arrived in 1977. The rare thing about Jaws is not that the adaptation was unfaithful. It is that a novelist co-wrote the screenplay that cut his own subplots out.