Illustrations from the Reader’s Digest version of “JAWS”

These paintings appeared in the 1974 Reader’s Digest edition that featured a condensed version of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws”. It is interesting in that this is before the movie came out, so people did not have images in their mind of what the characters looked like and there are some scenes illustrated here that do not appear in the movie or are significantly different.

These paintings were done by Stanley Galli, who also did a lot of work for the Saturday Evening Post.

I did the best I could shooting these pages, but the book binding made it difficult and I didn’t want to damage the volume.

The shark is approaching Chrissie as she takes her midnight swim. Note that the shark is not really modelled after a Great White, but the artist does a better job in subsequent illustrations.

The opening chapter is adorned with this “Beach Closed” illustration.

This is the most interesting illustration. Quint is described as completely bald in the unabridged version and that detail is omitted in the condensed version. Here he is shown with a dark complexion and widow’s peak. Hooper is as described in the book and much different from the movie. You could not imagine Lorraine Gary and Richard Dreyfuss engaging in an extra-marital affair like the Hooper portrayed here.

Mrs. Kintner is much younger here as one would imagine. One of the first things people who see the movie say is “Is that the kid’s grandmother?”

The dinner party in the book is a much longer and elaborate scene than the brief one in the movie that gives Hooper some backstory. Hooper, Meadows and his wife, and a local girl are all invited. Brody gets drunk and Ellen is disappointed that she cannot reconnect with her old life as a wealthy socialite from New York because she married a local policeman in Amity.

This scene was much more malevolent in the book. Meadows phones Brody in the middle of it to tell him about Vaughn’s Mafia entanglements that are pressuring him to open the beaches. This entire subplot is absent from the movie.

This incident is absent from the movie altogether. One teen challenges another to swim out about 100 yards for $10 after Brody is pressured to open the beaches. When he does, the shark appears and Brody jumps in to help the kid ashore. The beaches are then closed thereafter. There is no July 4th panic on the beach as in the movie.

In the book, the shark attacks Hooper’s cage and eats Hooper. I always thought this was one thing the movie got wrong — they should have had Hooper die in the attempt to kill the shark. His survival seemed contrived and unnecessary.

The shark jumps out of the water and sinks the “Orca”, similar to the book. However, in the book, Quint gets entangled in the harpoon line and is pulled overboard and not eaten in the same dramatic way as the movie.

In the book, Brody is the only survivor and makes it home on the flotation cushions about which Hendricks had told him earlier, “They would hold you up, if you were an eight year old boy.”

Overall, this is one of the rare cases where the movie is superior to the book. In the book, none of the characters are really likeable. Brody is ineffective in closing the beaches and then obsessed with whether Hooper is sleeping with is wife. Hooper does sleep with Ellen, who initiates the tryst. Quint is pathologically obsessed with killing the shark to the exclusion of all else. No one really comes off as someone the reader is pulling for. Carl Gottlieb and Spielberg, writing the script on the fly every night since the drafts they were given were not able to be filmed, did a brilliant job putting together a suspenseful tale. Even more impressive was the way they managed to work around the fact that the mechanical shark did not work and only ended up in a small number of scenes compared to what was planned.