Script To Screen: “Jaws”

It’s the movie that forever changed the business, the first true blockbuster of the modern era: Jaws (1975), screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, novel by Benchley.

IMDb plot summary: When a gigantic great white shark begins to menace the small island community of Amity, a police chief, a marine scientist and grizzled fisherman set out to stop it.

The scene: One of the most memorable opening incidents in movie history.

Here is the scene from the movie:

There’s a lot more dialogue in the film version than the script (e.g., “I can swim … I just can’t walk … or undress myself”), presumably improvised on set. Interesting to note in an earlier draft, there was no scripted dialogue in this scene. Also, compare the shark attack scene from an earlier draft to the one attributed to the final draft, excerpted above:

There’s also an additional cut to Tommy on the beach during the middle of the shark attack, which adds to the tension — Why doesn’t he hear her?!!! — and contributes some dramatic irony.

By the way, the alternate title of the script: “Stillness in the Water”.

Do you remember the first time you saw Jaws?

One of the best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script to Screen posts, go here.