Roy Scheider is chumming some a' this shit in the company of the almighty right now.

Well, the old dude was pretty goddamn cool. I actually saw him in person once: shooting SeaQuest, the day my family and I visited the Universal backlot, back when I was still young enough to think that Star Trek: The Next Generation + underwater + produced by Steven Spielebrg = good. I liked him when he popped up in other shit, because the guy was just enjoyable on screen. But mostly, with very little guilt about it, I just liked the dude cuz of Jaws. Jaws is about as close as you can get to a perfect movie where that much shit went wrong with it during its creation. And a huge part of it is just the degree to which Scheider sold the entire show with his bad-hat-harry fish-out-of-water(-fighting-a-shark)-ness. The face of a thousand summer days and eyes like Hemingway. Dreyfuss got the funny and Shaw got the cool-ass, but Scheider made that movie work.

As a final commemoration, here's a magnificent delivery of a magnificent line. Rest well, Chief.