On Screenwriting: JAWS (Guest Essay)

Still scary today... but not necessarily for the reasons you think

George MF Washington here… we write a lot about what has gone wrong in Hollywood here at the Continental Congress. And while red meat is fun to write, and sometimes even more fun to read, Man cannot live by anger and indignation alone… in order to fix things, we must be solution oriented.

And yes, we do actually want to fix things.

No matter how angry you may be at current Hollywood, remember how great you felt walking out of the theater post-credit roll two summers ago when you saw TOP GUN: MAVERICK. I want to feel that way again, and again, and again. And I know you do too.

Inspired by the reaction to our “When Hollywood Did it Right” series, we’ve decided that we need to spend more time thinking about how we can get Hollywood to see that movies like MAVERICK are the way forward to a more popular and profitable business model, and that flyover Americans are not its enemy… quite the opposite, in fact, we are rooting for Hollywood to find its way back to us.

Additionally, we believe that screenwriters are not born, they are made. Writing screenplays is a weird and unique skill… it’s not like writing a novel or an essay. It’s a specific and counter-intuitive form of writing that must be learned, which means that it must be taught. And we believe that one way to change things in Hollywood for the better is to help train and develop the next generation of, if not Conservative screenwriters, then at least a generation of screenwriters who do not hate half their potential audience, and who approach the art of screenwriting from the perspective of character and story first, rather than through the lens of relentless political messaging.

To that end, I want you to meet my close friend and former colleague Ben MF Franklin. Like me, his politics lean Right, yes there are a few of us here in Tinsletown, sprinkled throughout the business like raisins in a carrot cake (and about as popular, I might add). Ben has decades of experience developing aspiring writers into working screenwriters and I’ve asked him to come on board to do some basic filmmaking analysis from a screenwriting perspective.

Take it away, Ben:

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I have probably watched JAWS more times than any other film.  All of the many reasons why I’ve done so could fill a dozen essays, but the main reason I keep coming back to it again and again is that it just flat out works as a story.  Jaws gives us a straightforward plot that is tight and clean, and like a shark that must keep swimming or else die of suffocation, it constantly moves forward right up until the climactic scene at the end.  

Consider, if you will, this sample logline for a theoretical untitled horror film pitch - A mindless serial killer terrorizes a small New England town while the newly hired local police chief relentlessly battles to save the town’s residents and apprehend the killer.  Substitute the word “shark” for “serial killer” and you have the logline for JAWS.  

At its core, JAWS is a horror film.

But what keeps drawing me back to JAWS again-and-again is not the scares or the plot, though certainly those things are great, rather it is the characters within the story that makes the movie so damned rewatchable. 

The characters are, quite literally, scary good.

In order to deconstruct the reasons why these characters remain so rewatchable all these years later, let’s start with the basic minimum a screen story needs from its main character.  Any film’s protagonist must have an external conflict/arc if that film is going to work, obviously… John McClane needs to get out of Nakatomi Plaza alive… Daniel Kaffee needs to get Colonel Jessup to admit he ordered the Code Red without getting thrown out of the Navy… Dutch needs to kill the Predator.  But… if the main character also has an internal conflict/arc that ties into the character’s external goal, that will add another layer to your protagonist and elevate the story.  

Where most movies are happy (or lucky) to have just one character with both an external and internal conflict/arc, JAWS has three of them.   

Let’s take a look at them one-by-one.

Our lead character is Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), the newly hired local chief of police.  His external conflict is that he needs to kill the shark and restore safety and economic security to the town.  His internal conflict is that he is afraid of the ocean and, specifically, of drowning.  Over the course of the story, these two conflicts will intertwine and resolving the former will also help to resolve the latter in a way that ultimately elevates both resolutions.  

Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) is a shark expert from the Oceanographic Institute, recruited by Chief Brody to come to Amity and consult on their shark problem. His external conflict is his lifelong desire to see a Great White Shark up close.  His internal conflict is the need to prove he is not just some bespectacled researcher coasting on family money, but a serious shark expert worthy of professional respect.  

Finally, we have Quint (Robert Shaw), a local fisherman hired by Brody to lead the expedition to kill the shark. His external conflict is that by killing the shark and claiming the $10,000 bounty, he hopes to prove to the community that he is, in fact, the best fisherman on the island.  His internal conflict is overcoming the horror of having survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the vicious shark attacks that were visited upon his shipmates while they waited for rescue. (One can quibble with the exact source of Quint’s inner conflict, but what is not up for debate is that whatever the source, Quint has been driven nearly mad by it). 

The external and internal conflicts of the main characters having been established, what takes an average screenplay and turns it into classic like JAWS is often the mechanics by which we learn about those various conflicts both external and internal. And it is here where the screenwriter really earns his stripes.

For Chief Brody, the external conflict is straight forward and most of the scenes which involve the shark killing a victim reinforce that conflict.  Additionally, when Brody tries to close the beaches and is rebuffed by the Mayor and the townspeople who worry about their economic future, he is revealed as something of an outsider.  This status, of an outsider from New York City rather than an “islander” (a local who was born and raised on Amity Island), feeds into both his external and internal conflicts.  

But when it comes to the ways in which we learn about the Chief’s internal conflict, the screenplay (credited to Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb) uses some creative approaches to subtly add yet another dimension to Brody’s character.  

At the movie’s “Midpoint”, during a dinner scene with Brody’s wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary) and Matt Hooper, we learn through casual storytelling and dialogue that Chief Brody hates the water and has a fear of drowning.  Nevertheless, given that some local yokel fishermen caught a huge tiger shark earlier in the day, Hooper is able to talk Brody into going down to the dock to cut the shark open. Hooper’s hope is that the remains of the shark’s last victim may still be inside.  Once they’ve proved conclulsively that the victim is not inside the tiger shark, that the yokels have killed the wrong predator, Hooper convinces a now fully-inebriated Chief Brody to go out on his boat after dark so that they can check out the stretch of water where the shark has been killing people.  “He’s a night-feeder” Hooper remarks ominously.

Once out on the boat… drunk on an original cocktail of his own invention… a half bottle of red table wine poured over four fingers of whiskey on the rocks (call it the “The Great White”)… Brody waxes semi-poetic about the reasons why he left New York for this new life on Amity Island… “the crime rate in New York will kill you; kids can’t go anywhere, you have to walk them to school; but in Amity, one man can make a difference; in 25 years, there’s never been a shooting or a murder in this town.”

This will turn out to be more prophetic than even Brody knows because to catch the killer shark, we’re going to see him put those words to the test in a way that ultimately puts his own life at risk - can one man in Amity make a difference?  We’ll soon know.

But this scene on Hooper’s fancy boat does not come with flashing red lights that scream at the audience “pay attention, subtext and inner motivation are at play here.”  On the contrary, the scene plays a little bit like a joke. The chief is wielding a bottle of wine in one hand like a conductor’s baton, he’s wearing a bright orange life preserver cinched tight even though he’s standing on a boat, and his dialogue sounds a bit like a drunk complaining about his life (which he is). But it’s an extremely important step in establishing the inner conflict that he must overcome in order to achieve his external goal of killing the shark and saving the town. 

Let’s also think about what you do not hear or see in that scene.  You do not hear Matt Hooper ask Chief Brody “hey, why did you leave New York?”; “what did you dislike about being a cop in New York?”; or even “how does it compare to being police chief in Amity?” And we certainly don’t see flashbacks to some violent perp takedown from Brody’s police officer past.  Why is that?  Because that would be boring and expository.  It would be like placing a flashing red light on the scene and instructing the audience to notice it.  Rather, the subtle way the scene is written gives us all the necessary information without the scene feeling like an expository dump.  That is excellent storytelling and great character development.  

These various conflicts will become intertwined by the end of the story.  By the time the climax has rolled around, the shark has killed Quint and wrecked his boat; it has destroyed Hooper’s anti-shark cage and sent Hooper fleeing to the bottom of the ocean to hide (Hooper got to see a Great White up close and personal after all!), and it has stranded Chief Brody miles from land on a rapidly sinking ship.  At this point, Chief Brody comes face-to-face with the shark and all his conflicts and fears at the same time.  

But remember, '“in Amity, one man can make a difference.”  Brody manages to throw a scuba tank of compressed air into the shark’s mouth, escape out of the flooding cabin of the boat and position himself on top of the lookout mast.  As the shark swims towards him, Chief Brody takes aim with a rifle and, down to his last bullet, shoots the air tank… blowing it up, and destroying the shark with it.  

Killing the shark definitively (obviously) resolves Brody’s external conflict and, because he is forced to do it in the ocean with his paralyzing fear of water forefront in his mind and also literally physically all around him, he simultaneously overcomes his internal conflict.  And thus is Chief Brody’s character arc fully resolved.

But remember, JAWS has not one but three characters with fully realized external and internal arcs.  To be continued in Part Two with Matt Hooper’s arc. . . 

Ben MF Franklin

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Good lord, y’all… if you’re an aspiring screenwriter, there’s more quality “how to” information in this post than you’ll get in any single lecture from a screenwriting course at any major University in America.

My most critical takeaway is that character development, when done well, is extremely complex. “I’m gay” is not a character… neither is “I’m a woman”… those are character attributes, and while they can certainly contribute to a fully realized character, they are not enough in and of themselves… contra current Hollywood trends.

Boy, I tell ya… If Ben keeps this up, I’m gonna have to start putting his posts behind a paywall.

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