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‘Jaws' at 50: Jeffrey ‘Deputy Hendricks' Kramer recalls ‘horrific' first scene and an epic Roy Scheider flub
Move over Helen of Troy. Fifty years ago, Jeffrey Kramer became the face that launched a trio of shark hunters on that famously not-big-enough boat, the Orca.
Released on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws holds bragging rights as Hollywood's first contemporary summer blockbuster, generating massive box-office returns and waves of movie-based merchandise. And Kramer can boast to being the first actor in the four film Jaws-verse to react to the gruesome remains of a shark attack victim.
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As Amity Island's Deputy Leonard "Jeff" Hendricks (more on those two names later), the actor is first on the scene the morning after the titular great white sinks its jaws into its first piece of human prey, a nude night swimmer named Chrissie.
While Hendricks' boss — water-avoidant police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) — approaches, Kramer's horrified face dominates the foreground, his hand at his mouth in shock and his eyes wide with terror.
That expression single-handedly establishes the stakes of the movie — and telegraphs the thrills and jump scares to come. "Hendricks is the audiences' eyes and ears," Kramer, now 79, confirms to Gold Derby. "He reacts with the same revulsion viewers had in the theater. And none of us have swam in the ocean the same way since!"
Kramer credits Spielberg and the Jaws crew with giving him something revolting to react to in that moment. A bloody severed arm — of the artificial variety, mind you—was buried in the sand as real crabs clambered all over it.
"It was pretty horrific," recalls Kramer, who grew up visiting the beaches that wrap around Martha's Vineyard, the Massachusetts island retreat where the problem-plagued production was filmed over the course of five very long months.
Of course, Kramer had another good reason for feeling queasy. His crucial reaction shot was filmed on the very first day of his very first major studio production. "There were a lot of firsts happening," he says with a hearty laugh. "I was so nervous, I probably could have thrown up for real!"
Derek Storm/Everett Collection
Kramer's all-too-human response is one of the many grounded grace notes that makes Jaws an endlessly rewatchable character study in addition to being an eminently re-playable thrill machine. Five decades on, Kramer — who still wears his Amity Police cap every day, including during this interview — says that his association with Jaws reaps more valuable rewards than the $10,000 fee that Quint (Robert Shaw) received for piloting the Orca out to open water with Brody and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) in tow.
"I got stopped by a cop in Sherman Oaks once for running a stop sign," he recalls. "I apologized, and he said, 'Why are you wearing that hat?' I told him, 'Oh, I played the deputy in Jaws.' He let me go and said: 'I love that movie — don't run that stop sign again.'"
To celebrate the golden anniversary of Spielberg's classic shark tale, Kramer shared five stories from the sets of Jaws and its 1978 sequel, Jaws 2. Consider this your essential summer beach reading.
Talk about your temperamental movie stars. Due respect to the trio of Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss, but Jaws' main attraction was a mechanical shark named Bruce — and he famously didn't like performing on command. Bruce's various breakdowns and no-shows have long since become the stuff of Hollywood legend, and Kramer can attest to their veracity.
Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
"The first time I ever saw the shark, it was supposed to surface, but instead it just sank," he remembers. "Sometimes they'd be rolling three cameras, and there wouldn't be a foot of film that they could use."
The upshot of Bruce's unreliability is that Kramer ended up with more screen time. "They needed to keep shooting something,' he laughs. 'So, my part blessedly got a little bigger."
Meanwhile, watching Spielberg roll with the shark's various punches gave him an early crash course in set management — a lesson Kramer took with him later in life when he moved behind the camera as a producer on such shows as The Practice and Chicago Hope.
"I always found him to be a kind, decent and talented man," Kramer says of the two-time Oscar winner. "There was so much on his shoulders, but he knew what he wanted, and he let you get there — but also helped you along the way."
As an example of how Spielberg would allow the actors find their own way through a scene, Kramer points to a moment early on in Jaws where Brody and Hendricks are busying themselves as a battalion of fisherman descend on Amity in the hopes of being shark slayers. While Hendricks stands on the dock observing the action, Brody is inside a shack speaking hurriedly into the phone. As he hangs up, he throws a handful of debris at the window to catch his deputy's attention and motions for him to come inside.
Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
Kramer says that bit of business was improvised by Schieder on the day of filming. "It was a better entry into the scene than just having me walk through the door," he explains. "It also adds to the characters a little bit. Hendricks is such a happy guy, and he loves the island, so he's a little suspicious of all the outsiders showing up."
Some of those outsiders do eventually catch a shark — though it's not the one that's responsible for all the mayhem. A tiger shark is hoisted on the dock as Amity's tourist-minded mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), prematurely declares the crisis over. Kramer says that the body of a real tiger shark was used for that scene, flown in directly from Florida, due to the absence of that particular species from Massachusetts waters.
"They flew it up in a box filled with ice and every night after shooting they'd put it back in the box," he says now. "After three days, it smelled so bad! But we still had to smile and pretend that it didn't."
Speaking of funky smells, Kramer recalls a particularly fragrant night out with Hamilton during the production of Jaws 2. As with the first film, the sequel wound up being a much longer shoot than anticipated… like nine months longer.
Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
Fortunately, Kramer and Hamilton had become fast friends during their first extended go-around on the Vineyard and knew how to put all that extra time on the island to good use — namely, lots of late nights at local watering holes. After one of those last-call lost evenings, the duo made their way back to their hotel when Hamilton decided to stop and pet a stray cat that had crossed their path.
There was just one problem — that nighttime critter wasn't a cat. "It was a skunk!" Kramer exclaims, cringing at the sense memory. "Murray got full-on skunked! When we got to the hotel, he refused to go to his room and ended up sleeping on the couch in the lobby. By the next morning, that place was almost uninhabitable."
Despite the olfactory offense, Kramer has nothing but fond memories of Hamilton, who passed away in 1986. "We shared a dressing room, and Murray used to keep a bottle of gin in my boot,' he says wistfully. 'Those movies took so long to shoot that you tended to make lifelong friends."
You're not crazy: Deputy Hendricks really does go by Leonard or "Lenny" in the first Jaws. But in a key scene in Jaws 2, Brody calls him Jeff — a Scheider flub that ended up in the finished film.
Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
It's not unlike the infamous moment in Star Wars: A New Hope when a post-trench run Luke Skywalker triumphantly climbs out of his X-Wing and bellows, "Carrie!" — as in Carrie Fisher — instead of "Leia." (For the record, Mark Hamill has strenuously declared himself innoncent in the name-blame game.)
"Roy called me Jeff in the scene and how it ended up staying in there, I'll never know," Kramer sighs. "It's such an oversight; I never imagined that they'd leave it in."
The blatant flub might be indictive of Scheider's general disinterest in being part of Jaws 2. Kramer says that the actor was contractually obligated to headline the sequel, for which neither Spielberg nor Dreyfuss returned. Scheider fulfilled his contract, but his mind was clearly on other things — like soaking in the beach rays.
"Roy got so tan in the movie, he had to be color-corrected in the final mix," Kramer says, chuckling. "He loved the sun — he sat out there all the time with a reflector and a G-string." (Scheider died in 2008 at age 75.)
For a hot minute, it looked like Scheider was going to lose a deputy going into Jaws 2 as well. Kramer recalls that he turned down the movie after original director, John D. Hancock, created a partner for Hendricks who got all of the best lines.
"But then Hancock got fired, and they brought in Jeannot Szwarc," Kramer explains. "Jeannot said, 'What happened to the deputy who was in the first movie? I liked him.' They brought me back and I was so grateful."
During the course of Jaws 2, Hendricks becomes Amity's police chief after Brody is stripped of that title courtesy of his shark obsession. And even though the ex-chief ultimately saves the island again, Kramer believes that Brody let his deputy keep the badge.
"I think Brody said, 'Get me off of this island!'" laughs Kramer. "'If I'm going to live here, I'm just going to go to the beach — I don't want to deal with sharks anymore.'"
Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
It's worth noting that 1987's Jaws: The Revenge revealed that Brody died of a heart attack in between movies. Kramer says he wasn't asked back for that notoriously awful fourth and final installment and wouldn't have wanted to return anyway. "Even I knew when to stop," he jokes.
But that doesn't mean he's stopped thinking about his alter ego. Kramer says that he believes Hendricks remains a devoted Amity islander to this day, starting a family and maybe even taking his own adult kid on as the department's newest deputy. (In 2018, Hendricks starred in his own independent comic book that took the character in a more fantastical direction.)
Not for nothing, but a Chief Hendricks cameo would be ideal fodder for an all-new Jaws sequel or reboot, although Kramer doesn't expect either to happen anytime soon. "Jaws will never get remade," he vows. "Nowadays they just want these kinds of movies to be bigger and it takes you out of any essence of reality."
"Steven captured the fear of the primordial and the depths of the unknown, and inspired a generation of filmmakers," Kramer continues. "As time goes by, you appreciate Jaws more and more."
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