Jaws: Roy Scheider and his Brodyisms

While checking the listings for Birmingham’s Electric Cinema I saw the following:

Electric Beach Party – Jaws & Roy Scheider Tribute

Friday 18^th

Summer comes early to the Electric with this special tribute to the late, great Roy Scheider and one of the scariest films ever made. The Electric Cinema Film Orchestra will return with a full 22 piece orchestra! £9 standard and £15 sofa with free Pina Coladas!

That sounds like fun and I’ll probably go. No products found. is one of my favourite films and Scheider’s death in February has got me thinking a lot about it. Scheider was more synonymous with Jaws than even his co-stars Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss, but it wasn’t his only great film. His acting résumé featured numerous shark-free classics of 70s cinema including No products found. No products found. No products found. and No products found.

He also turned up in films that weren’t so critically acclaimed but I like them anyway. For instance, he was great in John Frankenheimer’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s No products found. David Cronenberg’s body horror remix of William Burroughs’ No products found. and John Badham’s No products found.

Mind you, I’ve always had an inordinate weakness for Elmore Leonard, William Burroughs and copter-based conspiracy thrillers.

Date movies

Scheider also starred in Peter Hyams’ criminally underrated sequel to No products found. entitled No products found. Surprisingly, he didn’t appear in any other date movies of the era such as Spielberg’s 1941, Ridley Scott’s 1492 or the 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s No products found.

(He was, however, perfectly cast in the role of stretchy super-genius Reed Richards in the 80s Fantastic Four movie I vividly imagined as a kid.)

Be that as it may, Scheider will always be remembered as Amity Island’s Police Chief Martin Brody and that’s just the way it should be. I love Jaws and have lost count of how many times I’ve watched it. In fact, my brother and I once kept an inflatable Jaws shark suspended above our pool table in lieu of a lamp. Only true fans would do something that ridiculous.

Like all my favourite films it’s part of who I am. Its scenes and characters are hard-wired into my imagination and can manifest themselves in strange and unpredictable ways.

Or to put it another way, I like to quote it a lot.

So Brody

For instance, when faced with the insufficient storage capacity of the modern supermarket shopping basket I’ll often snarl: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” When Scheider ad-libbed that famous line during the filming of Jaws he didn’t get strange looks from shoppers, shelf stackers and instore security staff. While photographing people, I like to substitute the traditional “Say Cheese!” with Chief Brody’s more ballsy shark-slaying pose-prompt: “Smile, you son of a BITCH!” That gets a mixed response, especially at weddings. I’ve also been known to blurt out “This was no boating accident” to describe anything that doesn’t fit the strict maritime definition of “boating accident“.

In land-locked Birmingham, that tends to include most things.