While many on the Island were cast as extras in Jaws — filling out beach scenes, running for their lives from the water or wandering about in the downtowns during parades or casual scenes, a few lucky Islanders scored bigger parts, ones that would come to define their lives, turning points to always look back on, or that propelled them into new careers.
For example, early in the movie, just after the first shark attack, Chief Martin Brody hands Deputy Leonard Hendricks supplies to create some ‘Beach Closed’ signs. As Chief Brody speeds off, and mayor Larry Vaughn and Deputy Hendricks discuss the signs, a drum and bugle corps band marches up the street, practicing for the Fourth of July parade.
Drum and Bugle Corps
The drum and bugle corps is on screen for just a few seconds, reminding the audience that the height of summer is near. But for the Island kids in that band, the scene lasts a lifetime.
The drum and bugle corps was a real group on the Vineyard, part of The Boys Club, an organization that hosted a variety of activities including band, photography and woodworking.
Joe Sollitto began working for the Boys Club in the early ‘70s, and he and Jack Simmons were the band instructors.
“It was quite a group of kids,” Mr. Sollitto said. “They were very respectful. They are still calling me Mr. Sollitto.”
Recently, some the band members who still live on the Island gathered outside the Gazette office to reminisce about the old days and their time on set. Others checked in by phone to give their recollections.
The band practiced on Monday nights at the old Edgartown school and participated in three parades during the year: Veterans Day, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.
Tom Smith, who is in the front of the band carrying a rifle in the movie, said that the Boys Club was a staple of Edgartown childhood.
“The Boys Club in general was a very important part of growing up in Edgartown. It provided a place to go, good role models as far as the adults involved in it,” he said during a phone interview.
The parade scene was shot in 1974, when school was still in session. Six of the boys are missing in their end-of-year third grade class photo because they were busy filming.
Tom Sawyer said the monotony of shooting the same thing a number of times was one of the most memorable aspects of the film.
“It was a real eye-opening experience, just how long it takes to film a movie,” he said. “I remember watching certain things, they just did it over and over and over again.”
Mr. Smith said he remembered doing at least 16 takes for the drum and bugle corps scene.
Jeff Norton said they had to keep starting over because the kids frequently looked directly into the camera, either by accident or on purpose.
“Somebody would do something that a nine year old would do,” he said during a phone interview. “It normally was somebody making a face.”
The food from cafeteria trucks stood out to Rob Morgan.
“I remember the monotony and I remember how good the food was,” Mr. Morgan said. “We get out of school and they’re paying us to do this.”
The band members were expected to donate the money they made from filming to the Boys Club.
When the film crew blew up the mechanical shark at the end of the movie the kids skipped school to watch.
“You think they were out to sea, but it’s all in Katama Bay,” said Oak Bluffs police chief Jonathan Searle, who in addition to performing in the band scene, played one of the boys who pranked beachgoers by swimming around with a fake fin. “We all went outside waiting for it.”
When the film premiered in 1975, Mr. Norton’s parents forbid him from watching it, so he had to sneak into the theatre. Mr. Norton said he still remembers being so startled when Matt Hooper finds Ben Gardner’s body that he bit his friend’s hand.
The drum and bugle corps members have remained close during the 50 years since the movie was released. Two of the band became police officers in Edgartown, Mr. Smith and Chief Searle, started on the force the same day. Mr. Smith even worked security detail on Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge.
Kevin Ward, who lives on Island, said that over the years he’s had many interactions with Jaws fans. In the late 90s, he was captaining a yacht in St. Thomas when a boat from Europe docked nearby. Mr. Ward befriended an English member of the crew, who had studied the film in his acting classes.
“I said I was from Martha’s Vineyard, his eyes lit up and he goes that’s where they filmed Jaws,” Mr. Ward said. “It’s weird little interactions like that over the years. I don’t really think much of it over the years until things like that happen.”
Mr. Ward said the friendship he has with his former bandmates is still important.
“It’s the one thing that keeps me here [on Island],” he said.
Mr. Sawyer said that watching the movie now brings back memories.
“It brings you back to your childhood because these were all very prominent members of the town at that time,” he said. “You see all these Island people that are no longer alive...even if it’s a quick shot of them, it’s like, oh I remember.”
Mr. Morgan said that since Jaws was filmed at a time before cell phones and digital cameras, having that record is all the more special.
“This was sort of a glimpse or record of the people in the times we lived in,” he said. “What Edgartown was like...how much community was created there [at the Boys Club]. It’s hard to explain to people now what this place felt like.”
Jeffrey Voorhees
Jeffrey Voorhees was 12 years-old when he died gruesomely in a shark attack. He lived to tell the tale.
Mr. Voorhees had just moved to the Island when film director Steven Spielberg and his film crew arrived on the Vineyard in 1974. Mr. Voorhees was cast as Alex Kintner, the second victim, who died in spectacular fashion, attacked while floating on his bright yellow raft and being devoured by the shark in a pool of blood.
“Here’s where I died,’” Mr. Voorhees, now 62 years old, said on a recent afternoon, pointing to an area off State Beach on the Oak Bluffs side of the Jaws bridge.
He went on to describe how Mr. Spielberg instructed him to get on the raft and swim out 20 yards until he reached a barrel-sized container of blood resting on the ocean floor.
“Spielberg’s like, ‘you gotta lie on top of it now...when it explodes, go in the water and stay there as long as you can,’” Mr. Voorhees recalled, shaking his head. “[I’m] 12 years-old, freezing.”
The scene was shot in May, Mr. Voorhees said, and the Vineyard’s waters still had their winter chill. It was also hard for the young Mr. Voorhees to stay under water, and the crew had to re-shoot the scene several times, waiting hours in between takes for the fake blood to clear.
Locals know Mr. Voorhees as the retired manager of the Wharf Pub in downtown Edgartown. But Jaws fans know him as “the little boy who died” and pay thousands of dollars to hear him speak at meet-and-greets all over the world.
Mr. Voorhees was a student at the Edgartown School when he heard about the film’s casting call, and that extras would make $40 per day. He went to the Kelley House to audition, thinking it could be fun and he’d make some extra cash. After he read a few lines, Mr. Spielberg told him he’d have a speaking part, making $140 per day, and asked him to sign up for the Screen Actors Guild.
He’s been reaping the benefits ever since.
“I never knew you got royalty checks,” Mr. Voorhees said. “The first time it came on TV... it was $1,000. [I’m] still getting royalties.”
He said the amount he makes each time the movie plays is less nowadays, but that he makes money through thedeadalexkintner.com, a website he operates selling autographed prints of his character and inflatable rafts with a very noticeable shark bite.
“I just mailed a photo to England, one to Ireland, a raft over to Germany [and] someone in Tokyo got a raft last week,” he said.
Mr. Voorhees said his signature is tattooed on 20 different fans that he knows ab
out, and people from all over the world ask him to tape video messages while standing beside the Jaws bridge.
Fans of the film are so devout, that at one point it became too consuming, he said.
“I hid from it for years,” he said.
He fell back in love with the film when he started touring the world for Jaws events. He was reunited with friends during panel talks, like Susan Backlinie, who played the first victim in the film, and Richard Dreyfuss, who played Matt Hooper.
He recalled meeting Lee Fierro again, the Vineyard’s drama teacher who played his mom in the film, when she came into the Wharf one evening and he was her server. Ms. Fierro, who died in 2020, is credited with one of the film’s most emotional scenes, where she slaps Chief Brody in the face.
The two hadn’t seen each other in years and so when Mr. Voorhees approached her, he said: “Can I ask you a personal question?. . . Any chance you believe in reincarnation? I think I died years ago and you look like my mother in a previous life.”
“She’s like ‘Oh my god, I had a son who died back in the ‘70s.”
The two laughed and hugged.
Mr. Voorhees said he cherishes the joy the film brings to fans.
“It’s fun,” he said. “You get some real Jaws fanatics and you make their day. . . Some people are so happy.”
Jonathan Filley
In the summer of 1974, Jonathan Filley had just finished his freshman year at Boston University. He had originally applied to the drama school, but did not get in and so instead ended up at the liberal arts school. At the time, he was planning on completing the earth sciences program.
Mr. Filley’s family has long ties to Chappaquiddick. He had come to the Island for the summer, like he had done his entire life, when he saw an advertisement in the Grapevine, a local paper, asking for 400 extras for Jaws. He sent in a photograph and a resume outlining the theatre work he had done in high school.
“I found a picture of myself on the beach with some friends and put an arrow, you know, [that’s] me,” he said.
After a few rounds of auditions, he was cast as Cassidy, the young man at the beach party in the opening scene who runs off to go swimming with Chrissie Watkins, the shark’s first victim, but is too drunk to join her in the water.
Mr. Filley said being on set was a huge learning experience. During his first day of filming, on the beach in early May, he had a sweater tied around his waist.
“Then after lunch it clouded in and the wind picked up off the water,” he said. “No problem, I’ll just put my sweater on. They said, ‘you can’t do that, you already established yourself with no sweater on’.... So I quickly learned continuity the hard way.”
Mr. Filley worked behind the camera as well, running support boats for the marine department of production, pulling barrels through the water and telling sailors not to interrupt shooting. Sometimes the marine department would anchor Quint’s boat, the Orca, and have everything in place, but when the tide changed they would have to re-anchor everything.
“There was a certain level of nervousness amongst everyone,” Mr. Filley said. “As a 19 year old, I wasn’t really aware, but you could sense that there was pressure.”
Mr. Filley’s time on set changed his career path. After filming he moved to California to pursue acting. He also worked as a stunt boat operator in Mexico for Lucky Lady, a 1975 film about rum running. Eventually, he returned to Boston University to study film.
“I realized that film production was the stuff that interested me the most, so I ended up in the physical production side of the industry,” he said. “What I do now...my job is problem solving.”
Mr. Filley is based in New York, where he moved in 1979 and has had a successful career as a film and television producer. In 2019, he was nominated for an Emmy for his work on Succession.
But it all started with Jaws.
“It was a life changing experience for me because it was all encompassing,” he said. “The circus came to town, and I ran off with the circus.”
Geno Courtney
Geno Courtney can be found most days surveying Edgartown from a bench outside of Vineyard Scoops, one of the many businesses he owns in Edgartown. From his perch he has seen many changes the town has undergone over the years.
On a recent afternoon he turned the clock back five decades, to the filming of Jaws and the impact it made on the town.
Mr. Courtney said Jaws saved the Kelley House, a hotel owned by Mr. Courtney’s friend and fellow businessman Robert Carroll. When members of the Jaws team arrived on the Vineyard, Mr. Carroll was struggling with the mortgage for the Kelley House, which had been under construction all winter. Mr. Courtney said that Mr. Carroll was behind on funding when someone working on a film came into Mr. Carroll’s office.
“That was kind of the local hangout for a few of us guys,” he said. “We were sitting there and this guy, this character came in from L.A.”
The man needed to rent rooms for six weeks. Mr. Courtney said that the man tried to negotiate a good rate but Mr. Carroll was firm. He wanted $25,000. The representative from Universal Studios eventually relented and wrote Mr. Carroll a check.
According to Mr. Courtney, Mr. Carroll went straight to New Bedford to pay off his mortgage on the Kelley House.
The cast and crew stayed at Kelley House and the Harbor View Hotel, but production dragged far longer than intended, stymied by the difficulties of filming on the water and a broken mechanical shark. This became a boon for Mr. Carroll.
“They came in and they got situated, but there was no way they were out of here by the end of May,” Mr. Courtney said. “They got stuck with the summer rates....Bob was happy.”
Mr. Courtney was also an extra in the film.
“It was exciting, but, you know, once you’re on the camera, give me the check so I can go home,” he said.
According to Mr. Courtney, the casting director did not give him a speaking role because of his thick Boston accent. He played an extra in the select board meeting scene where Quint drags his fingernails down the chalkboard. Mr. Courtney said that when he shows pictures of the scene to people, they have trouble picking him out of the crowd.
“I was a little bit younger,” he said. “I had a mop head of hair like a Beatle.”
Mr. Courtney was also an extra in Jaws: The Revenge in a funeral scene. He had an old army jacket in his closet that he wore for the shoot.
“I got the part in that just to show up and look somber,” he said.
Today, Jaws continues to be a staple of Edgartown. The movie theatre, which resides in a building Mr. Courtney owns, continues to play the movie all summer long every year.
“Everybody wants to see it,” Mr. Courtney said.
Mr. Courtney said that although there is much more to Edgartown than Jaws, the movie played an important role.
“It was a good thing for everybody,” he said. “A lot of people made money with it, and a lot of people enjoyed the excitement of it.”
Comments (1)
Comments
Comment policy »