The movie's power is not diluted by a series of increasingly dim sequels (in which neither director nor novelist had a hand). The production was ably chronicled by Gottlieb in his book The Jaws Log, recently republished. Some sex was added to that brew, but was cut, to advantage, from the screenplay upon which Benchley collaborated with Carl Gottlieb for the movie to be directed by Spielberg.

It befits a novel whose clipped prose hardly survives out of context, but rattles along between the covers. Partly drawing upon childhood memories of Nantucket, and resisting any urge to Melville-style digressions, he found that he had tapped into a widespread primeval fear of the deep.Ĭuriously, he was stuck for a title, at first thinking of Silence in the Water, and was hardly helped by his father's chortling alternative of Who's That Noshin' On My Laig? Another idea, The Jaws of Leviathan, seemed little better - until, stripped back, it was suitably nasty, brutish and short. In 1971, he was asked by Tom Congdon, an editor at the publishers Doubleday, if he had anything in mind for a book, and he pitched this as a 'long story' he produced a hundred pages, and, with a $1000 advance, he reworked it steadily, holing up to do so, during the winter, in a room above the Pennington Furnace Supply Co in Pennington, New Jersey, and, by summer, in an old turkey coop at Stonnington, Connecticut. This jelled in his mind with a piece which he himself had written about life in a similar resort, and he began to wonder about the effect a shark would have upon such residents. All the while he was haunted by a magazine article which he had read about a 2,064kg great white shark caught by a fisherman off Long Island in 1964. On return to America, after six months reserve in the Marine Corps, he spent six months at the Washington Post and was then television editor at Newsweek for three years between 19, followed by a stint as a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson at the White House.Īfter this, as a freelance writer now married and with children to feed, he was able to turn his hand to anything.

This gap year was described in Time and a Ticket (1964) which, despite his later fame, has never appeared in Britain. Brought up in the city, Peter Benchley was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and then, true to family tradition, at Harvard, where he studied English and, on graduating in 1961, travelled the world. His father, Nathaniel, served in the Pacific before returning to continue a diverse journalistic career bolstered by a reputation as a man about town. He was born in New York, where his grandfather Robert was a New Yorker, writer and denizen of the Algonquin.

The deep peter benchley movie