Nick Nolte in The Deep (1977)

The Deep lobby card set image courtesy Heritage Auction Galleries

Director Peter Yates and Columbia Pictures delivered The Deep to movie theaters in 1977. Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset play the young treasure hunters, with Robert Shaw and Louis Gossett Jr. also on board.

Peter Benchley’s The Deep

The Deep is based on the 1976 best-selling novel of the same name by American writer Peter Benchley (1940-2006). Also the author of the mega-selling Jaws (1974), Benchley garnered the idea for The Deep while working on an article in Bermuda for National Geographic in 1969-70.

“The Deep was based on a real shipwreck called The Constellation, which was carrying a cargo of drugs during World War II,” Benchley recalled in an interview. “That particular ship sits on not one, but two old Spanish ships, wrecked hundreds of years earlier than The Constellation. I could only make one credible, so that’s what I based The Deep on.”

Columbia Pictures had secured the movie rights to The Deep in pre-publication, paying $350,000 for the privilege. The Deep would mark the first film for producer Peter Gruber and his Casablanca Filmworks.

Peter Yates Directs The Deep

Peter Benchley was paid between $500,000 to $1 million to write The Deep’s screenplay. Lending assistance were Tracy Keenan Wynn and an uncredited Tom Mankiewicz. Among those considered for the director’s chair were Franklin Schaffner, Steven Spielberg, John Frankenheimer, John Boorman and Peter Yates. It was the Englishman Yates who got the call, as he was immediately available and had previous experience in making a film near the ocean.

Nick Nolte (David Sanders), Jacqueline Bisset (Gail Berke) and Robert Shaw (Romer Treece) head the small cast. Other players are Louis Gossett Jr. (Henri Cloche), Eli Wallach (Adam Coffin), Dick Anthony Williams (Slake), Earl Maynard (Ronald), Bob Minor (Riley), Teddy Tucker (The Harbor Master), Robert Tessier (Kevin), Lee McClain (Johnson), Peter Benchley (Mate), Colin Shaw (Young Romer Treece) and Peter Wallach (Young Adam Coffin).

The Deep Filmed in the British Virgin Islands and Bermuda

Budgeted at $9 million, The Deep began filming on July 5, 1976, in the British Virgin Islands. It is here where the 310-foot RMS Rhone – doubling for the movie’s Goliath – was resting in two sections on the bottom, having gone down in a hurricane on her 1865 maiden voyage with 125 hands on board. Filming on the Rhone consumed several weeks, at a cost of $35,000 per day.

The first production unit then headed to Bermuda where the surface scenes were shot, along with more diving action using a specially-constructed underwater set carved out of a coral hill overlooking the ocean. When filled, this remarkable set held over a million gallons of clear sea water, various marine life and a Hollywood-made shipwreck.

The final weeks of filming were consumed with what producer Peter Gruber called “the disaster business.” The most difficult scene in this vein was the destruction of Romer Treece’s lighthouse, accomplished by the Ira Andersons, Senior and Junior, a father and son special effects team who employed 26 sticks of dynamite, 14 pounds of explosive powder and hand-made bombs, 15 gallons of gasoline, 11 gallons of rubber cement and 500 feet of explosive-laden cord.

Following 9,885 dives, 10,780 underwater man hours, 1,054,000 cubic feet of compressed air and over four months of filming in three locations, principal production on The Deep ended in mid-November 1976. The raw product was then edited, given sound for the underwater scenes, musically scored by John Barry and transformed into the final cut for release to movie theaters.

Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Shaw: Treasure Hunters of The Deep

The Deep opens in Bermuda, where vacationing New Yorkers David Sanders and Gail Berke are diving on old shipwrecks. They stumble on the World War II cargo ship Goliath, which was carrying a fortune in morphine ampoules when it went down in a storm in 1943.

Haitian drug lord Henri Cloche later approaches the couple, pretending to be a collector of antique glass. The 98,000 morphine ampoules aboard the Goliath are worth a fortune to him, and he will stop at nothing to learn their exact location.

Also found by David and Gail in the wreck was a mysterious gold medallion. With the help of local treasure hunter Romer Treece, the couple discover that the Goliath is resting on the treasure-laden Spanish galleon El Grifon. With Cloche and his band in hot pursuit, Treece and the New Yorkers descend into the deep, hoping to verify El Grifon’s identity and eventually recover “a bloody fortune.”

The Deep Release, Movie Review

The Deep hit movie theaters with great fanfare on June 17, 1977.

“The Deep, which is even sillier than the Peter Benchley novel, recalls – though not to its own advantage – the sort of adventures Frank and Joe Hardy used to have on their summer vacations…The story, as well as Peter Yates’s direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innocent, but the underwater scenes are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling,” reported Vincent Canby of The New York Times in his review titled “The Deep, a Movie, Is Shallow” (6/18/77).

“It’s possible that inside this slick piece of engineering there is a genuinely mordant satire of human greed struggling to get out, but it never quite makes it to the surface,” observed Variety.

The Deep Box Office, Oscar Nomination, Trivia, DVD

• The Deep grossed $31.266 million at the American box office, good for the #7 position on the list of the top moneymaking films of 1977.
• One Academy Award nomination: Best Sound.
• The Deep’s theme song: “Down Deep Inside,” performed by disco diva Donna Summer.
• Special effects wizards Walter Stones and Charlie Spurgeon designed and built “Percy,” a ravenous sea snake prop with razor-sharp fangs.
• Real-life treasure hunter Teddy Tucker served as a consultant.
• A special underwater team filmed in Australia, where they gathered some 24,000 feet of film featuring divers and sharks.
• Producer Peter Gruber, on the November 8, 1976, detonation of Treece’s Bermuda lighthouse: “There was an initial bang, and then a deafening explosion rang out that shot the top cap of the lighthouse 150 feet into the air while fiery pieces of debris rained down onto the island.”
• Robert Shaw died of a heart attack at age 51 on August 28, 1978, a little more than a year following The Deep’s release.
• The unofficial remake of The Deep: Into the Blue (1985), starring Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan and Ashley Scott.
• On DVD: The Deep (Columbia/Tristar, 1999).

“Hey, boy, this is Goliath trash! What the bastard hell were you doing diving down there?” Robert Shaw asks Nick Nolte.

Looking for buxom Jacqueline Bisset in her wet, clinging T-shirt maybe?