How Spielberg’s movie changes ‘horrified’ wife of novel writer Peter Benchley

June 20, 20253 Mins Read

A little over a year before Jaws opened in theaters and forever changed the next 50 years of cinema, it was a best-selling debut novel by author Peter Benchley.

Producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who had acquired the rights to Jaws before its publication, turned to Benchley for the first few drafts of the screenplay, but it was ultimately something that, according to his wife, Wendy Benchley, was “hard for him.”

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“That is a completely different kind of writing,” she tells Gold Derby ahead of the National Geographic documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.

The producers moved on from Benchley after three drafts, bringing on a series of writers — including the film’s one other credited scribe Carl Gottlieb — to shape the story of Chief Martin Brody and a man-eating shark into something the young director Steven Spielberg could eventually shoot.

Over the course of many rewrites, much of Benchley’s novel was jettisoned in favor of a leaner, meaner, more cinematic story. Readers familiar with the book know that Richard Dreyfuss‘ Matt Hooper has an affair with Ellen Brody (played in the film by Lorraine Gary), and Amity’s greedy mayor, Larry Vaughn, is the craven man he is partly because of his ties to the mafia. All of that and more was excised for the final script.

Universal Pictures/Everett Collection

The rest of the production is the stuff of movie history — all thoroughly explored in the Nat Geo doc, which airs July 10 before heading to Hulu and Disney+ — but before Jaws hits theaters, producers Brown and Zanuck set a screening for Peter and Wendy Benchley, who brought along friends — including Ron and Valerie Taylor, who shot the film’s live shark footage.

“David Brown and Richard Zanuck asked Peter and I to go to a private screening of Jaws along with many of our dive friends — Ron and Valerie Taylor, Stan Waterman — and we had no idea whether this movie was going to really work with people who knew the ocean and knew sharks,” she recalls in Jaws @ 50. “And at the end, they all got up and applauded and thought it was absolutely fabulous.”

What Benchley doesn’t share in the documentary is her own reaction. “I thought it was a big departure,” she tells Gold Derby. “I was completely sort of terrified, and, at times, sort of horrified.”

But considering that the movie she watched was literally Jaws, the differences between it and the novel couldn’t completely get in the way of what she had just experienced.

“Also I knew that it was thrilling and exciting and that Spielberg had put together this brilliant movie, and we were swept up,” she said. “We were excited, thrilled, happy. Life was suddenly open to us in ways that it had never been before. So it was, it was a life changing development, and I hope we are worthy of it.”

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Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story premieres July 10 on National Geographic and begins streaming July 11 on Disney+ and Hulu; it is also available as a bonus feature on Universal’s new 50th edition release of the film on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and digital.

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