To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of JAWS, released on June 20th, 1975, a bunch of us gathered on the dock by the water to talk about this question…
Who is your favorite peripheral character from JAWS (1975)… and why?
SAMANTHA SCHORCH
My favorite JAWS character transcends space and time by scaring the hell out of multiple generations: Ben Gardner (Craig Kingsbury), or more accurately, Ben Gardner’s head.
JAWS is beloved in part because of its excellent use of atmosphere and creeping dread, it’s not a “jump-scare” horror movie, but when that fisherman’s severed head fell out of that boat, I promise you I got air off of the couch previously unheard of before, and people like my mom felt the same thing in theaters. After two deaths mostly unseen, a disembodied head with shredded neck flesh bobbing in the dark abyss hits like a freight train.
Someday my niece will be terrified of the head of Ben Gardner for her first viewing, and her niece, and all people, until the heat death of the universe.
VITO NUSRET
MEG BELVISO
KATELYN NELSON
BRETT GALLMAN
There’s a real lived-in quality to Amity Island that gives JAWS so much of its distinctive flavor. It truly feels like Spielberg drops you into a cozy New England community that boasts a rich sense of history and place, thanks in large part to shoot most of the film in Martha’s Vineyard, an actual cozy New England community. His decision to also tap locals to fill out the film’s abundance of bit roles adds another layer of authenticity, and there’s no shortage of interesting folks operating on the margins in JAWS.
My personal favorite is Ben Gardner, the local fisherman who greets Hooper when he arrives on Amity Island. Bearing a thick accent and a dismissive attitude towards the “nuts” trying to claim the bounty on the shark, Gardner is the quintessential local who knows most of these interlopers don’t stand a chance. It’s obvious that his reputation precedes him in Amity, as Brody assumes he’s the one who kills the red herring tiger shark. I’ve always wondered if he wasn’t somewhere laughing it up at the sight of the celebration just like Quint was. I like to think his boat was adrift at sea later that night precisely because he knew the real culprit was still out there; unfortunately for him, his suspicions were confirmed. Fortunately for us, it gave us one of the all-time great jump scares once Spielberg got a little greedy and decided to weave one more jolt into the proceedings. Instincts like that are what make him one of the greatest filmmakers to ever do it. The man knows how to use his head — and the prosthetic head of Ben Gardner.
JON ABRAMS
One unusual thing about JAWS, owing possibly to its status as the arguable first movie of the blockbuster era and as a transitional moment between Old and New Hollywood, is how its credits work. You don’t get much up top, and by the time the end credits start to roll, it’s a brisk run down Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss, with just a few more names and credits before the lights come up.
This is a long distance from, say, THUNDERBOLTS, in which I had to wait through what felt like fifteen minutes of best boys and personal assistants and VFX technicians (as much as I celebrate everyone who brings us the movies we love) to get to a tease of the next Marvel thing. JAWS is one of the few movies that people watch (outside of the TCM crowd) that does the credits by the older customs: Some up top, little or none at the end.
That’s why, if you go to the IMDb page for JAWS, you see just seventeen credited actors. The rest are uncredited. We’ve celebrated a few of them here. One I’ve always remembered is Carla Hogendyk, credited (or uncredited) as “Artist.” She’s the young lady who, after a false alarm on the main beach, is the first to spot the shark coming in the estuary. Her voice cracks while she struggles to scream, “Shark…” almost as if she knows that the single most horrifying shot in the entire movie is coming right up.
But she’s not who I’m here to talk about. I want you to scroll all the way down that extended cast list on IMDb. It’ll take you a full drags of the mouse, if you’re on your desktop, or a few swipes, if you’re doing it from a smartphone. The uncredited players in JAWS outnumber the people with official credits by a magnitude of six or seven. I need you to go all the way down to the last guy on the list.
The gentleman’s name is Dick Young. Born in 1937, he was a veteran of the United States Marines and an authentic fisherman, who lived in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts until his death in 2009. He was not a professional actor. In fact, JAWS was his sole film credit. Dick Young played “Pratt.” To my knowledge, we never hear the name said out loud. To be fair, there’s a lot of commotion during his scene.
No doubt Dick Young’s military service and his blue-collar background lent a fair amount of authority to the moment where he warns Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper, who has challenged the catch he’s made, that he’s “gonna stuff your friggin’ head in there, man, and find out if it’s a man-eater, all right?”He’s gonna stuff Dreyfuss down the open mouth of a dead shark, is what he’s threatening to do. And you believe him, too!
But that’s not why you remember Dick Young.
And now here’s a picture to refresh your memory:
Rewind a moment. Why is “Pratt” so angry?
All of the fishermen within a hundred nautical miles of Amity Island have descended on the harbor, eager to be the one to catch the man-eating great white that has already claimed the lives of Chrissie Watkins and Alex Kintner. “Pratt” is one of them. He made a major catch: A huge shark. Pratt is having his greatest day. Then this snot-nosed kid Matt Hooper shows up and tells him what he really caught, and Pratt has his moment of eternal glory:
JAWS is a movie with a fair amount of humor, but this is unquestionably hands-down the funniest line and, with respect to Robert Shaw, the single funniest performance in the movie. The comic Pete Davidson has a very good bit about how a moment this broad and bizarre could have possibly ended up in a movie this finely controlled. I won’t spoil the bit, but Davidson’s conclusion is that it’s just a delirious accident. I have to admit, it’s pretty goddamned incongruous. And who is Dick Young? He’s not a professional comedian. You pull this guy off a lobster boat and all the sudden, he’s Curly Joe DeRita. Pete Davidson says this moment doesn’t belong in the movie. Sir, I disagree. The answer is in the form of a question: Do you wish this moment had been cut?
Dick Young’s performance as Pratt is pitch-perfect. We may never know if his unique line reading of “A whaaaat?!?” was intentional. We know on the basis of his scant remaining screen time that no, he did not have a speaking voice like one of the lesser Stooges who had to follow Curly after he left. He was a two-fisted guy’s-guy with a speaking voice that was not at all funny in any other context. But he had a moment of incalculable brilliance. He gets a laugh with two words that barely even count as words. Very few comedians, alive or dead, can accomplish such a feat.
And the movie needs it. JAWS, despite taking place primarily in daylight, regularly tops “Top Ten Horror Movies Of All Time” lists. This is a movie that kept people out of the water, even swimming pools, regardless of the fact that great white sharks cannot live in water with that much chlorine, for years. It’s a scary fucking movie. As any horror filmmaker worth a damn will tell you, horror and comedy are kissing cousins. And a funny moment can help relieve the tension and leave the viewer blissfully unprepared for the next scare. Plus, by all accounts, the people making the movie might have needed something to help lighten the mood. Dick Young served his country as a United States Marine, and he served movies as “Pratt” in JAWS. It’s the funniest performance in one of the greatest movies of all time. Hail, king, well met.
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Tags: Craig Kingsbury, Dogs, Fritzi Jane Courtney, Horror, Lee Fierro, Movies, Sharks, Steven Spielberg, Summer, The Big Question
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