The main thrust may have ended up being a power struggle between Quint and Brody, or a psychological ego trip watching an initial adult-child relationship between Heston’s Brody and Hooper turn into an adult-adult relationship as Hooper learns from the master as the film unfolds. That kind of Brody would have changed the focus of the film entirely. A Brody who you knew right from the start was going to win because Heston always wins? A Brody without fear or uncertainty over his abilities? And what if they had decided to offer the part of Brody to Charlton Heston? It was, apparently, a close thing. Lee Marvin’s rejection was possibly the best thing to happen to Jaws because it meant that Zanuck and Brown were able to recommend Robert Shaw to Steven Spielberg, having just worked with Shaw on The Sting. Actually, maybe the job you ended up getting was better, more interesting, more money, working with great colleagues. Maybe it made you try harder in the next interview. But then we never would have seen Robert Shaw, and we would never have had the Indianapolis speech, or the lines that he soaked up from the Martha’s Vineyard locals and introduced into the scripts, or the sparks between him and Richard Dreyfuss that spilled onto the screen.įor Zanuck and Brown, Marvin’s rejection was like the job that you really, really wanted, where you spent days preparing for the interview only to be turned down with a ‘thank you for your interest but we will not be proceeding with your application at this time’. Lee Marvin as Quint would have been fantastic – probably. Quite often in life, an opportunity comes along that you think is right, but you come to realise (sometimes quickly, sometimes after a long time) that it is not right. Robert Duvall, Charlton Heston, Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Jeff Bridges, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Kline, Timothy Bottoms, Jan Michael Vincent, Sterling Hayden and Lee Marvin. How many actors do you think were in the frame for those parts at one time or another but did not end up with the assignment? It is at least 14 and probably a lot more. “Be Careful What You Wish For”įirst off, let’s look at the characters of Brody, Quint and Hooper. In that way, we can draw parallels between the making of Jaws and life itself, landing some curious but important correlations in the process. Jaws did not become the sensation that it was despite these challenges, but because of them.
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