One doesn’t exactly have to squint to spot the ways “Moby Dick” influenced Benchley’s novel. Supposedly, an early “Jaws” script draft even had Quint (Robert Shaw), the Ahab of this salty tale, laughing his ass off watching John Huston’s 1956 movie version of Herman Melville’s touchstone adventure novel in a theater (a scene that was presumably, and fairly, deemed too on-the-nose). It seems Richards similarly had “Moby Dick” on his brain when he met Benchley, Brown, and Zanuck, seeing as he kept referring to the film’s man-eating antagonist as a “white whale.”
Richards, who had landed on the producers’ radar thanks to his 1972 revisionist Western “The Culpepper Cattle Co.,” quickly found himself out of the running thanks to his faux pas. Spielberg confirmed the story in an interview from Laurent Bouzereau’s book “Spielberg: The First Ten Years” (via Vanity Fair), explaining that he had approached Brown and Zanuck about directing “Jaws” himself only to learn they were meeting with someone else. In his own words:
“That was that, until I got a call from Dick asking me to come meet with him and David. They sat me down and announced, ‘We want you to direct ‘Jaws.” I said, ‘Whatever happened to the director?’ And they explained, ‘We had the meeting with him, but he kept referring to the shark in front of Peter Benchley as ‘the white whale.’ And Peter became very disinterested in having his shark called a whale.’ And that’s how the project finally came to me.”
Would Richards have landed the job, had he not kept mixing up his sea critters? One’s imagination could run wild thinking about the alternate reality in which Spielberg didn’t make his blockbuster saga of man versus shark. What a whale of a tale that might’ve been! (Apologies to Mr. Benchley.)
