After a
many drinks and stories comparing old wounds and scars, Quint tells
about his experience on the USS Indianapolis, a horrible shipwreck in
which sailors were systematically eaten by sharks while they awaited
rescue. Apparently there was a lot of disagreement as to how the
scene should be written, so a frustrated Robert Shaw wrote the damn
thing himself and it worked out wonderfully. With the night air, the
creaking of the boat, and Quint's haunted delivery, it remains one of
the most scary portions of a screenplay ever written.
"Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We
was comin' back from the island of Tinian Delailie, we'd just
delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into
the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first
shark for about a half hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you
know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the
dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission
was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even
list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come
cruisin', so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like
you see in the calendars, you know the squares in the old calendars
like the Battle o' Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the
nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes
that shark he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes
that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing
about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's
eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til
he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then
you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red,
and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in
and... they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first
dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks, maybe a
thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday
mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from
Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson's mate. I thought he was asleep,
Reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was
like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the
waist. Noon the fifth day a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he
spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway
he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and
start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most
frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket
again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. Three hundred and
sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the
twenty-ninth, nineteen-forty five. Anyway, we delivered the bomb."
What makes the scene even scarier is that it's based on a true story.
According to
THIS account, the sailor only saw one man actually attacked by a
shark, but conceded that the bodies of 56 men who had apparently been
bitten by something when all was said and done, and some believe the
sharks may have feasted on those that were already dead.
