50 YEARS AGO, ROY SCHEIDER WARNED US THAT WE’RE ‘GONNA NEED A BIGGER BOAT’
- Donny Levit
- 12 minutes ago
- 6 min read
How the star of "Jaws" cut his teeth on acting in Maplewood
By Donny Levit
With the colder months in full effect, your 2025 memories of swimming down the shore may be fading. Most likely, you took a dip, walked the boardwalk and maybe even indulged in a little salt water taffy. The Jersey beachgoers in 1916 weren’t so lucky. That summer, at least four swimmers fell victim to deadly shark attacks and haunted many a beach town.
In 1974, author Peter Benchley spun a contemporary shark tale of his own from his home in Princeton. His bestseller about a fictional shark that haunted a beach town was adapted into a movie that quickly became a pop culture phenomenon.
Columbia High School graduate Roy Scheider (1950) was front and center to it all.
In addition to playing police chief Martin Brody in Jaws, Obie Award-winner and Academy Award-nominee Scheider brought his intense everyman acting persona to other iconic roles in The French Connection (NYPD Detective Buddy Russo), All That Jazz (Joe Gideon), and Marathon Man (Agent Doc Levy).
Before he hunted Jaws, Scheider acted on stage, attended the mathematics club and volunteered on the lunchroom committee at Columbia High School. When he graduated in 1950, he could never have guessed that he would be one of the first of two alumni to be inducted into the Columbia High School Hall of Fame.
Although trips to the beach are very much behind us, the 50th anniversary of Jaws this past summer provided an opportunity to revisit Scheider’s exemplary performance. The re-release of the movie during Labor Day weekend included 3D viewings in theaters and pop-up drive-in screenings that brought out nostalgic viewers as well as first-timers who were eager to catch the flick on the big screen. Many film buffs and Hollywood industry leaders argue that Jaws was the first-ever summer movie blockbuster.
The “wide release” was a new marketing approach at the time. Approximately 450 theaters ran the film at once, leading to massive profits and an increase in Hollywood summer film budgets. Marketers incorporated merchandising (“Jaws: The Game,” T-shirts, beach towels and bikinis) and studios leaned into sequels after the film’s success. In a 1975 article in The New York Times called “Records Fall Prey to ‘Jaws’ ” the lede reads: “There are two schools of thought about the ‘Jaws’ phenomenon: Either it’s the crassest promotional stunt ever pulled on the masses or it’s a classic case of skillfully orchestrated business strategy producing a pop culture craze.”
In addition, the adapted novel Jaws led the best-seller list for 45 consecutive weeks. But the Steven Spielberg-directed film did a lot more than just introduce a shark. In addition to Scheider’s Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss (ichthyologist Matt Hooper), Robert Shaw (Captain Quint), and Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody) prioritized a serious acting approach that would lend depth to the film’s main characters.
Born in Orange, N.J. in 1932, Roy Richard Scheider attended Chancellor Avenue Elementary School in nearby Irvington before his family moved to Maplewood. During his years at Maplewood Junior High School, now Maplewood Middle School, he performed in an operetta. He then went on to act in several shows at Columbia High School, including the senior night production of a comical mystery play called The Bat. Although he was known for his imitations and comedic timing, Scheider intended to study law after his graduation. By the time he graduated from Columbia High School, his family was living on Jacoby Street.
As a child, Scheider had struggled with rheumatic fever starting at age 6 that returned on and off throughout his teenage years. “When I was a kid, the treatment was bed rest, all the joints wrapped in cotton, and you had to stay like that until your temperature went down,” he said in a biographical interview. The desire to strengthen his body led to a surprising amateur boxing career. “I never went to high school dances or football games. I remained an outsider until I lost 30 pounds,” he said in the same interview. A year after his graduation, he was classed as a welterweight and competed in the 1951 Jersey Diamond Gloves Tourney. Although he won his first match, he was knocked out and suffered a severely broken nose during his second bout.
Years later, Scheider would have damaged cartilage removed from his nose. However, he chose to keep the broken shape as he felt it was central to his persona. “That bump marks him as a man who has struggled and survived and is as central to his movie star persona as Barbra Streisand and Robert DeNiro are to theirs,” writes biographer Diane Kachmar. The acting bug hit Scheider hard again during his time as a pre-law student at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. He tried out for Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “I played an 80-year-old senator in that,” recalled Scheider in a 1987 interview. “I liked the atmosphere. I liked being there at night. I found a home. Everything in my life changed. All of a sudden, my grades were better, my relationships with everybody were better. By the time I graduated, I said, ‘Who am I kidding?’ I didn’t even say I want to be an actor. I had a feeling I was an actor.”
He had his professional stage debut in 1961 at the New York Shakespeare Festival where he played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. In the 2025 documentary Jaws at 50: The Definitive Inside Story, Steven Spielberg discusses the immense stress experienced by the cast and production crew due to time delays, budgetary and technical issues. The mechanical shark – Spielberg nicknamed it “Bruce” after his lawyer – experienced numerous malfunctions during the production process. “
Jaws was a fun movie to watch but not a fun movie to make,” says Spielberg, in an interview with filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau. “It was made under the worst of conditions. People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle – but where we won was with audiences in every country.” “Well, a very fortuitous thing happened on that film: the shark didn’t work,” recalls Scheider in an interview with Paul Iorio. “And that left us with weeks and weeks and weeks to shoot, polish, to improvise, to discuss, to enrich, to develop, to experiment with all the other [non-shark] scenes that, in a movie like that, would usually get a cursory treatment.”
An ad-libbed line by Scheider has become one of the most celebrated moments of the film. “It became a catchphrase for any time anything went wrong – if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’, says Carl Gottlieb, co-writer of the Jaws screenplay. Gottlieb explained that Scheider would work the line into several moments as an inside joke. But when Chief Brody sees the shark for the first time, the usage of the line combined with the massive reveal created a moment of dark humor that cinephiles still treasure as one of the more memorable film quotes.
The Columbia High School Hall of Fame committee was founded in 1985 by CHS alum and actor Andrew Shue, who would eventually receive his own spot in the HOF in 1994. At the time, Shue was the student council president. It is the committee’s job to identify alums who have gone on to serve as a positive and meaningful influence. Shue and the committee tapped Scheider and Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Amalya Kearse (1955) as the inaugural Hall of Fame recipients. When Kearse was sworn in as district judge, she became the first woman and only second African American to achieve the appointment. In an introduction to clips of Jaws and All That Jazz, Shue shared advice that he learned from Scheider. “He feels the first thing an actor should have are intelligence, but not too much, just enough to make good choices; second, a certain physical grace, no matter what the character, and a child-like belief in the make believe.”
Both recipients advised the students to believe in themselves “always, when others don’t,” said Scheider. “If there’s something you want to do, keep at it and persevere because perseverance will take you a long way.” The public address system interrupted the final words of Scheider’s acceptance speech. However, Scheider was unphased. He was more than used to the imperfections that took place on the stage and screen. If he could film 12 miles into the ocean with a rusting mechanical shark, he certainly could ad-lib through a few loud announcements on the intercom system echoing through the halls of Columbia High School.
Donny Levit is a writer, theater director, and radio DJ living in Atlanta with his wife, two kids, and two dogs. Catch his radio shows on IG at @jazzmonsters and @newishradio. Research for this article was generously provided by Anne Wessel Dwyer and Carol Moran Petrallia, retired Columbia High School English Language Arts teachers. Both are currently volunteers for the CHS Archives Collection.
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