The mates of Ben Gardner and Quint are seen briefly, say nothing, and disappear. But not in the jaws of a Great White Shark; into the arms of each other. How else to get out from under the shadow cast by their masters? Continue reading
Like any American classic, “Unfriendly Waters” finds different meanings for each new generation. Occupy Amity Island protesters have embraced it for its theme of speaking truth to Amity’s corporate interests who would rather see the beaches open and making money, even at the expense of bathers who may be injured.
That poor Masshole in the Pond, Ted Grossman. Grossman—the stunt coordinator in “Jaws”—has a cameo as “Estuary Victim.”
It’s the 4th of July, and Amity Town Beach is on high alert. Chief Brody is the only sane man left on the island, and he tells his son, Michael, to take his birthday present, a 3-passenger sailboat, into the pond rather than out on the ocean.
“The pond’s for old ladies,” says Michael.
“Do it for the Old Man,” says Brody.
But the shark goes under the bridge and into the pond, just to get a whiff of a Brody.
It is not young Michael Brody who is the shark’s Independence Day meal, however. It is Grossman, a man whose only faults are that he has an affected Massachusetts accent and can’t mind his own business. He shouts nautical rope tips to Michael and his friends, becoming the first of two prospective knot teachers to die in the movie.
The shark ends up doing a favor for the Estuary Victim so as not to mortify his mother.
While in his rowboat, Grossman is barefoot. But when the shark upends the boat and bites off his leg, the severed limb that floats to the pond floor has a shoe on it. It is as if the shark dressed Grossman, ashamed of having left Chrissie Watkins so denuded.
Things happen fast on Amity Island. What else is there to do but get drunk and fool around?
Shortly after Chrissie’s partially denuded remains are found, Brody has Polly print up “Beaches Closed” signs, there is a town meeting at which Vaughn and the town merchants shoot Brody down and keep the beaches open, Alex Kintner and Pippet are killed, and thrill seekers from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey come to collect the $3,000 bounty Mrs. Kintner has placed on the shark’s head, snout, beak, whatever.
We think Ben Gardner died on July 2.
As stated before, the movie lists Alex’s death on June 29 and Chrissie’s on July 1 or 2, which can’t be right. Brody’s police report on Chrissie’s death states July 1, but she couldn’t have died after Alex. Someone will have to amend his report.
Who could have known that technology would one day exist that would allow someone like me to advance the film frame by frame?
Most likely Chrissie died in the late 20′s of June, and Alex died on June 29. That way Mrs. Kintner’s slap of Brody is justified (“I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong”/”No, she’s not”) as well as her statement that she “just found out a girl got killed here last week and you knew it.”
Anyway, Ben Gardner is played by the late Martha’s Vineyard native Craig Kingsbury, who was acknowledged as a special salty mariner consultant to Robert Shaw’s Quint. It is Gardner who greets Hooper at the dock with:
Hope you’re not going out with those nuts, are ya?
…but who himself is seen soliloquizing on the open water in the midst of those same nuts:
Wait’ll we get them silly bastards down on that rockpile: there’ll be some fun; they’ll wish their fathers had never met their mothers when they start taking their bottoms out and start slammin’ into them rocks, boy. Get away from there, ya goddamn fool, you! What’s the matter with you? You wanna swamp us, ya crazy son of a bitch?
After the chaos of the day, Hooper persuades Brody—who, after all, can do anything because he is Chief of Police—to cut open the tiger shark caught by local yahoos. The pair then head off by Hooperboat to a place somewhere between Cape Scott and South Beach because, as Hooper says (despite the fact that Alex Kintner and Pippet died in broad daylight), “he’s a night feeder.”
It is then they find Ben Gardner’s boat, a shark tooth wedged in the hull, and Ben Gardner’s eyeless skull.
It is the next morning when a shaken but galvanized Brody and Hooper confront Vaughn, who informs them that “tomorrow’s the Fourth of July; it’s gonna be the best summer we ever had.”
Just not for Ben Gardner.
“A Summer Girl goes swimming,” says Mayor Vaughn. “Swims out a little far…”
In the book “Jaws,” Chrissie Watkins is about 25, the date of Tom Cassidy, and a houseguest at the home of his friends. The couple decide to go for a moonlight swim, Tom stays behind on the beach, and Chrissie is eaten.
Tom wakes up and wonders where she went. He doesn’t know her well. Could she have run off with someone, maybe the couple that owns the house?
“For all I know,” Tom says, “she could be a little weird.”
In the movie, Chrissie is listed as a student, though she looks like Janis Joplin’s older sister. Tom Cassidy appears to meet her on the beach, because he asks her name.
Despite the other differences in the book and movie, Chrissie’s fate is the same: she is the shark’s first victim.
She died on July 1, 1974. Her crime? She just swam out a little far.
Previously on All That Jaws: June 29: Icthyology Numerology
If history is written by the victor, then we do not know whom to trust in the various official and unofficial written statements about the deaths of Chrissie Watkins and Alex Kintner. Continue reading
The All That Jaws land vehicle recently ran over an already-run-over skunk in the pleasant Atwater Village section of Los Angeles, and we couldn’t help but think of a certain Boatswain’s Mate, a baseball player from Cleveland named Herbie.
The skunk had been cut in half.
On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, bosun’s mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kind of top. Upended. Well… he’d been bitten in half below the waist. — Quint
While the lyrics to “Show Me the Way to Indianapolis” show a healthy respect and loyalty to the Indianapolis Speech, I enjoy that the sole liberty taken was that the youthful Quint originally approached Herbie to be cheered up after the sharks came crusin’.
See also: Fogelfoot
“Call Dave Axelrod in New York,” says Amity newspaper editor Meadows to his windswept assistant. “Tell him he owes me a favor.”
Born in New York, Dave Axelrod later moved west to attend the University of Chicago. He stayed in the city, eventually becoming a political columnist for the Chicago Tribune and an early strategist for Barack Obama. Today he is the president’s chief strategist.
What favor did Axelrod owe Meadows? We can only speculate. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that, a generation later, Obama kept the Gulf beaches open following the BP oil spill.
This is the song Phil Ochs would have sung had he been cast as Matt Hooper.
Recorded live at Taix in March, 2011.
Matt Hooper resurfaces at the end of the movie “Jaws,” having hidden in some underwater shrubbery when his anti-shark cage said goodbye and farewell. But in the book, Hooper had to die Continue reading
