THE SCREENPLAY
JURASSIC PARK SCREENWRITER DAVID KOEPP BREAKS DOWN JAWS ’ SENSATIONAL SCRIPT
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
JAWS IS, OF COURSE, a Steven Spielberg movie adapted from a bestselling book about an animal running (well, swimming) amok and eating humans. So, when it comes to appraising the film’s screenplay, credited to Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, there is only one choice: David Koepp, the screenwriter of Jurassic Park and therefore a man who knows what it takes to write a Steven Spielberg movie adapted from a bestselling book about animals running amok and eating humans. “It’s a superb script,” says Koepp. “It’s a miracle of structure, of character, of suspense. What’s most surprising about it is the way it was written. It’s not the way a screenplay should ever be written. But there’s the occasional exception —Jaws being one of them, Tootsie being another —where the process of crafting the screenplay is utterly chaotic. And the end result is perfect.”