From the Angry Seas

Summer's Here and the Time is Right

Be careful out there!

Megalodon by Robin Brown (1981): The Hungry End is Waiting for Your Life

Finally found this glorious cover art for the paperback of Megalodon (authored by someone named Robin Brown, Playboy Press Dec 1982), a book I immediately bought when it first appeared on bookstore shelves. I was 12 and I did a book report on it for 7th grade English; I can still see the moue of distaste my teacher had when I presented the book to her. Lo these many years later and my copy long gone I can still remember thinking it was pretty crappy even then, replete with a tawdry and totally out of place sex scene and ridiculous scenes of the enormous Carcharodon megalodon eating various deep-sea equipment and hapless marine biologists. I recall nothing else, don't even think I liked it at all despite being a Jaws/shark maniac, but you can read a synopsis from Publisher's Weekly. But still, you gotta love that art (you can see the artist's clever signature in the rocks to the left of the monster's jaws, Les Katz)—so much better than the original hardcover!

On Vacation

On vacation out of town, of course I've got my huge book list, and here are just some of the paperbacks I hope to acquire - so wish me luck guys. See you in about two weeks!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Benchley Paperbacks: The Legacy of Jaws Lives On

June 20th, 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. This post is part of Radiation-Scarred Review's 2010 SHARKATHALON, which celebrates this milestone with blog posts around the web.
None of these quintessential '70s paperback bestsellers by Jaws author Peter Benchley could be classified as horror, but in the wake of the success of his first novel it's interesting to see how that single cover image dictated how his books would be marketed for pretty much his entire career. After my less-than-stellar experience reading Jaws, I have to say I have never read anything else by Benchley. According to Amazon, none of these titles are even in print any longer. Still, check out these awesome vintage covers and ponder their eerie if not down right ripoff similarity to Jaws.

The Deep (1976) is probably the most famous of Benchley's post Jaws works. I think it's about undersea treasure. It was made into a so-so '77 movie with Robert Shaw, Nick Nolte, and Jacqueline Bisset's nipples.

Love this cover for The Island (1979), a book I'm going to assume is about pirates who simply tattoo jolly rogers onto their hands so everybody knows who they are. Wasn't this made into a movie too? I really can't recall. Please, somebody Google.

And finally, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (1982). Even almost 10 years later Benchley is being sold on Jaws, but I guess that's to be expected. I don't know anything about this except I recall my mom reading it when it came out and enjoying it a lot. According to Wikipedia it's more of a sea fable than a suspense novel and is widely regarded as Benchley's best work.

The paperback artwork on these is pretty cool, I really dig the deep blues of them all, the ocean surfaces that seem so placid and calming but that are about to be disrupted by unseen powers from below, and that ever-present word: JAWS. I have strong memories of these books on supermarket checkout racks and on my mom's nightstand as well as at the homes of various relatives throughout the late 1970s. Summertime trips were incomplete without an accompanying cheap paperback novel; what better way to cool off at the blistering beach than with one of Benchley's chilling tales of high-seas menace and adventure? Why you're still going to the beach during the late 1970s after Jaws, though, I have no idea.

The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb (1975): The Making of Jaws

June 20th, 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. This post is part of Radiation-Scarred Review's 2010 SHARKATHALON, which celebrates this milestone with blog posts around the web.

The Jaws Log, a paperback-original making-of detailing the famously tortured production of Jaws in 1974, came out just after the film hit theaters. Written by co-screenwriter and actor Carl Gottlieb (he's the reporter Meadows in the film), it's a great little book about the horrors and scattered joys of film-making, but it also is a bit of not-so-subtle hucksterism designed to sell the movie by using some carefully chosen words. Witness the back cover copy:

"The brilliant director who refused to compromise with authenticity!" "The jaws of danger and horror became all too real!" "The writer who saw his fiction turning into fact!" This sounds like Spielberg was ready to serve up his cast a smorgasbord. In fact, that's exactly what I thought when I spotted this book at neighborhood friend's house when I was about seven or eight. It was sitting on a kitchen counter and I was afraid to pick it up because of the gory shark's maw on the cover. Incredible.

Also scattered throughout are misleading photos of Bruce the mechanical shark identified as a real great white - purportedly to confuse moviegoers. Guess I can't blame Gottlieb or whoever was involved with writing text for the photos; in 1975 people weren't quite as savvy about great white sharks as they are today, what with Air Jaws and Shark Week and now Expedition Great White. People are so shark-jaded these days.

If you can't track down a vintage paperback copy of Jaws Log, it is fortunately back in print!

Jaws: The Reader's Digest Illustrations (1974)

Ugh, Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I can't really imagine a more anti-book concept. Four seemingly random bestselling novels are "condensed" so that they can be stuffed into one volume so folks who don't care about reading can decorate their mustard-yellow and pea-soup-green living rooms. Everyone knew some family who "collected" them, could have been your own. It was always a depressing sight to walk into someone's home and see these books; these weren't people really interested in reading or collecting books per se. Reader's Digest Condensed Books were just another knick-knack taking up space on shelves.

They were one step up from junk mail and so were most of the authors published (do you remember such musty-crusty authors of yesteryear as Taylor Caldwell, Howard Fast, Conrad Victor, Victoria Holt, Helen MacInnes, or Morris West?). They devalue everything I, and countless others, love about books as objects. To me these things are exemplars of the horror of middle-brow American taste throughout a sizable chunk of the 20th century.

And then add the artistic crime of tampering with an author's intent for his work by removing anything that wouldn't upset the sensibility of your average viewer of "Hee Haw" or "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," and you get the literary equivalent of Spam and Kraft Singles on white bread with mayonnaise and yellow mustard. Plus these things (along with National Geographic mags) were the bane of the used booksellers' existence; no one would buy them secondhand and I can only imagine the landfills they're choking up now.

All that said, aren't these illustrations (by Stanley Galli) for the 1974 Reader's Digest version of Jaws pretty cool? Yeah, I thought so too. I saw it once when I was a kid, was blown away by it, and I literally only found it again last week on eBay. So wonderful to see how the story was imagined before the movie.
For the literal-minded who still can't quite keep all those characters straight (why, Dostoevsky's publishers should have thought of this!):

A nerve-wracking scene in the novel in which nobody gets eaten; probably the inspiration for the two old guys who get the pier pulled out from under them when they try to bait the shark with a Sunday roast.

Poor Alex Kintner's mom. Here she looks the right age; in the movie she looks like his grandmother, right?

Hooper and Ellen Brody have a fling in the novel (she'd dated his older brother in college). At a dinner party, Brody watches warily but never catches on. Makes for some tension on the Orca later, as if hunting a 25-foot man-eating great white shark weren't aggravating enough.
Hooper never makes it back from his little shark-cage foray. He's pretty douchey in the book so nobody's really sorry to see him go. His last thought is something like, Oh my god, those jaws are going to reach me, but you won't find that line here.
And the climax. Awesome. Except Quint doesn't get eaten and the shark just sorta dies quietly. You can bet Quint's immortal line "I can see your cock, you bastard!" was tastefully deleted.

And finally: Brody finds the way to go home.

Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974): The Amity Island Horror

June 20th, 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. This post is part of Radiation-Scarred Review's week-long 2010 SHARKATHALON, which celebrates this pop culture milestone with blog posts around the web.

Simply: Peter Benchley's bestselling novel Jaws is not a good book. Robert Shaw, Quint in the movie and a playwright and novelist himself, famously called it "a piece of shit written by a committee." On his first reading of it, Spielberg said the characters were so unlikable that he was rooting for the shark. It's tepid and ridiculous, even restrained, with tawdry aspects of The Godfather and Peyton Place thrown in - themselves no great shakes as literature - and millions who saw the film first were probably vastly disappointed upon reading it. It was a huge bestseller a year before the movie came out but I can't believe anybody thought afterward, "Well, it wasn't as good as the book!" Virtually every single thing that makes the movie great is absent from the novel.

Original UK hardcover 1974 - fantastic!

1970s UK paperbacks

What is in the book that made it to the movie? The characters' names, the opening attack, the Kintner attack (he's even younger here), Quint's obsessive irascibility (but no USS Indianapolis), Matt Hooper's youthful enthusiasm (which comes across as douchebaggery in the novel), Vaughn's sleazy cowardice, and Brody's ambivalence about the sea. That's about it. I don't think there's one bit of dialogue that survives, although I love the bit when Hooper excitedly goes off on a tangent about megalodon:

"Can you imagine what a 100-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?"
"I don't want to," said Brody.
"It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives."

God, "mouth full of butcher knives"! Hell yeah. Quint's line "I see your cock, you bastard!" when the shark leaps fully out of the water and exposes its claspers, man, I can totally see Shaw belting that one out. The reporter Meadows (Carl Gottlieb, co-screenwriter, in the movie) has a larger role which works believably; he's Brody's only ally in Amity. The way the shark - excuse me, the great fish, as Benchley under-whelmingly refers to it - dies is perhaps the lamest climax ever. Quint's death is also unspectacular, drowning when his foot catches in the barrel rope speared to the shark.

But at least the paperback edition did give us one of the most iconic pop culture images of all time - used first for the book, and then the movie poster - thanks to artist Roger Kastel. Also, I read Jaws - or at least skimmed through it looking for the shark attack scenes - when I was probably 10 or 11 and it was the first time I'd ever seen the word fuck in a book. Huh, I recall thinking, I thought the older kids in my neighborhood invented that one.

Jaws 2 by Hank Searls (1978): The Haunting of Amity Island

June 20th, 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. This post is part of Radiation-Scarred Review's 2010 SHARKATHALON, which celebrates this milestone with blog posts around the web.

Somewhere I'd gotten a hold of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books (ugh, what a concept) edition that included Jaws 2. It had these cool little illustrations - none of the shark, alas - and I must've read that thing a dozen times. It took me forever to figure out that Brody's son's name, Sean, was pronounced "Shawn" and not, of course, "Seen." But I was like 10, give me a break.

On vacation the summer of 2008 visiting my hometown, I found a copy of the original at the bookstore I used to work at, and read it pretty much in an afternoon with a rum and Coke (the only booze I could find in my mom's cupboards, left over from her Christmas fruitcake). What did I find, as an adult reader? Why, the book held up. Remarkably well. Hanks Searls' novelization is better than Peter Benchley's original 1974 novel, and better than the 1978 movie, which I feel is more of a teenage slasher flick.

Simply terrifuckingfying.

This "version" of Jaws 2 is rather moody in a believable way, and much more concerned with character conflict. In the fictional town of Amity, business is down and shops are closing up. Police Chief Martin Brody broods, and can't shake the nightmare, or the Trouble, as it's vaguely referred to around town. It's as if the original great white still haunts Amity, as if its ghost still glides silently through the darkened offshore waters. But it is no ghost. The titular great white is a female this time, over 30 feet long, gravid with rapacious young.

This novelization is based on an earlier draft of the screenplay than the one produced, and Searls is a much more competent and skillful writer than Benchley; he'd already written several novels that took place at sea and dealt with marine life. As for the cover art, the movie could never hope to replicate such a dramatic image (courtesy of legendary cover artist Lou Feck). But the attacks as Searls writes them are weirdly metaphysical and existential at the same time:

He had a vision of himself, as if from above, enveloped by a dark shadow from the sea. No thought of a shark entered his consciousness: he'd offended somewhere, this was the hand of God. Mangled and torn, he knew nothing else.

It's this fatalistic quality that gives Jaws 2 a grim verisimilitude the original novel only hinted at. Any serious Jaws fan should give it a try.

Before her, an invisible cone of fear swept the sea clean, from bottom to surface. For a full mile ahead the ocean was emptying of life. Seals, porpoises, whales, squid, all fled. All had sensors - electromagnetic, aural, vibratory - which were heralding her coming. As she passed, the Atlantic refilled in her wake. Man would have ignored such sensors, if he still had them.

She grew more ravenous with every mile that passed...