All That Jaws: The Quint-essential Rock Opera

Mating mates: Just a theory I happen to agree with

Fogelfoot — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 21:28:07 +0000

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?

Reader Rocky asks following the So Long, Ben Gardner post:

So what happened to Ben Gardner’s assistant? He can be seen loading up Ben’s boat(Green hull)when Hooper arrives (You can see the top of his head and back in your posted photo of Hooper and Gardner on the dock) and he’s in the boat when Gardner’s soliloquizing “Wait’ll we get them silly bastards down on that rockpile…..”.
Did the shark eat him too?

Damn fine question. According to the book, Gardner’s mate is referred to by Brody as “Danny-what’s-his-name” and didn’t accompany Gardner on what would become his boss’s final hunt due to “something about a dentist’s appointment.” (In the book, it is Hendricks who finds Ben Gardner’s boat with Brody, not Hooper.)

In the movie, someone fitting the description of a Danny What’s-His-Name helps Gardner at the dock and accompanies him on the Yahoos’ shark hunt that nets the red herring Tiger.

But we never see Danny again in the movie. Was he so overshadowed by Ben that even his devourment meant nothing, too?

Danny and Quint’s similarly unheralded mate were always in the background while their bosses held forth.

No. I believe that, realizing they were to be cast into the chum buckets of history, Ben Gardner’s mate and Quint’s mate eloped to Provincetown and opened a sculpture studio.

“Carl and I were together for 20 years,” says Danny (whose last name happens to be Parker), sitting on a comfortable sun porch in Falmouth, within sight of Vineyard Sound. A smiling picture of his late partner, Carl, stands on a table by his side.

“Carl talked about Quint for the first few years,” Danny, now 65, says. “How he’d been there on St. Patty’s Day in Boston, the arm-wrestling competition in San Francisco, the time in Montauk. Little things like going to the store to get piano wire. Quint never acknowledged he was there, even though they shared a dog, Flicka.”

Carl died in 1994 at 80. He’d fallen into a kiln.

“No one remembers this, but ‘Flicka’ was also the name of Ben Gardner’s boat,” Danny says, his eyes misting. “Some time around July 10 of 1974, after it was all over, I met Carl on Kintner Beach. Flicka ran right up to me, and I couldn’t help but think of Pippet. But then I saw Carl. At the dentist, I’d had some bridge work done.

“‘You have a nice smile,’ he said.

“After all this talk of ‘Jaws,’ Carl said I had a nice smile.”

Previously: So Long, Ben Gardner

“Unfriendly Waters”: Occupy Amity Island Edition

Fogelfoot — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:52:51 +0000

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.

July 4: It’s not “The best Fourth of July we ever had” for the Estuary Victim

Fogelfoot — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:31:01 +0000

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.

July 2: So long, Ben Gardner

Fogelfoot — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 08:29:05 +0000

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.

July 1: So Long, Chrissie Watkins

Fogelfoot — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:05:23 +0000

“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

June 29: Icthyology Numerology

Fogelfoot — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:53:00 +0000

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.

Repeated viewings of “Jaws”—not that that is bad—reveal a tendency of the characters to get the date wrong. The movie opens with the death of Chrissie Watkins, and in Chief Brody’s official report the next day, in which the “Corner” tells him that Watkins died of a shark attack, we read that she was last seen (somewhere in “Vineyard Woods”) at 11:50 p.m. on July 1, 1974, and probably died at that time.

Fine.

On July 2—soon after Brody sees Chrissie’s remains— Brody does the right thing and orders Polly to print up some No Swimming signs, but Mayor Vaughn shuts him down, ordering the beaches open for business.

Later that day, with an agitated Brody watching the beach, both Alex Kintner and the good dog, Pippet, are eaten. Amateur shark hunters from as far away as New York and New Jersey converge on Amity Island, without the benefit of the summer deputies, who are only scheduled to arrive on July 4.

This means that not only did Kintner actually die on July 2, but also that fisherman managed to drive and ferry up to Amity at an amazing speed, and that word traveled lightning fast in that pre-Internet time.

But at a town meeting we read on a poster that Mrs. Kintner, Alex’ mom, is offering a $3,000 reward for the shark that killed Alex “on Sunday, June 29.”

But June 29 fell on a Saturday in 1974 [see how I know this]. The slap-happy Mrs. Kintner was probably delirious with grief and didn’t wind her watch.

Still, the yahoos kill a tiger shark—extremely rare for these waters—and in the heady relief of the demise of the predator up comes Mrs. Kintner, in full mourning regalia.

“I just found out that a girl was killed here last week,” (emphasis added) she tells Chief Brody, “and you knew about it.” Slap! Wince! “My boy is dead,” she adds unnecessarily. “I wanted you to know that.”

(At this point Brody should have said, “Who was your boy again?“)

So, according to the poster and the police report, Alex died two days before Chrissie did.

While I had to go frame by frame, pushing up my glasses as I did so, it was easy to see both the “July 1″ and the “June 29″ on the written materials.

Quint is a different matter because he uttered the wrong date. Brody determined that Quint was “certifiable,” what with his destruction of the Orca’s CB radio and his ravings about kiddie scissor classes, the battle of Waterloo, and electric toothbrushes. But it was in Quint’s Indianapolis Speech that he says the Hiroshima Bomb was delivered on June 29, 1945, meaning that Brody chartered the Orca 29 years and six days later.

The problem is that Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not delivered until late July or early August, 1945. In “All That Jaws,” therefore, we posit that Quint just likes to associate himself with maritime disasters.

It is not lost on us that two years after Alex Kintner, Chrissie Watkins, Quint, the Guy on the Rowboat, Ben Gardner, and Pippet died, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank with 29 men on board. It is whispered that when the witch of November came slashing, she was riding Pippet.

See also: “Herbie, Mate, please make me laugh.”

“Herbie, Mate, Please make me laugh”

Fogelfoot — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:18:24 +0000

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’.

Show Me the Way to Indianapolis

Shark coughs up Obama’s birth certificate

Fogelfoot — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 06:26:29 +0000

“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.

“Unfriendly Waters” at Taix

Fogelfoot — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 10:36:32 +0000

This is the song Phil Ochs would have sung had he been cast as Matt Hooper.

Recorded live at Taix in March, 2011.

“I just died in the book”

Fogelfoot — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:57:02 +0000

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.

The final song of “All That Jaws” is “Jesus H. Christ, Hooperstar”—an unabashed tribute to a certain Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Hooper rises from the deep and explains the myriad differences between book and movie, singing “Thank God I just died in the book.”

In Peter Benchley’s version, Hooper is the younger brother of a man Ellen Brody dated before she met working class slob Martin Brody. To Ellen, Hooper represents her lost youth and the upper-crusty privileges she gave up when she married Martin, who in the book doesn’t welcome this younger man from his wife’s past.

Well, the combination of the Chief’s irascibility and Ellen’s wistfulness leads to an incident that, in Benchley’s ancient mariner morality, requires Hooper to die.