Having licked his fingers clean of lemon meringue pie, Harry Meadows proceeds to give Chief Brody a crash course in sharks. "Who knows about sharks? [he says] I'll tell you this: at the moment I know a hell of a lot more about them than I did this morning." As an ex-newspaperman himself, Peter Benchley appreciated the importance of background research and he prided himself on his shark knowledge. Others, however, were not so complimentary.
Frank Mundus, the real life shark fisherman who was essentially Benchley's Deep Throat when it came to background information on Great Whites, said of the novel, 'Jaws is fiction and fiction is bull. There's nothing in that book that's true. And Peter Benchley don't know about sharks.' Although Mundus seemed to develop a grudge against the author, he was happy to lay claim to being the inspiration for the character of Quint.
In fact, he was more than that. He was the inspiration for the entire novel. In 1964 Mundus caught a 5,550 pound Great White off the town of Amagansett in Suffolk County Long Island. A newspaper article reporting the catch planted the seed of an idea in Benchley's mind and what particularly piqued his interest was the fact that the shark was caught in reasonably shallow waters frequented by bathers. Mundus was among a number of fisherman the author interviewed as research and he even went fishing with him. When book and movie became a hit, Benchley was happy to promote himself as some kind of marine expert, and his failure to acknowledge the help Mundus had given him rankled with the fisherman.
Another old man of the sea who was quick to come forward to criticise the shark facts of Jaws was Jacques Cousteau. In an interview with the Miami Herald Cousteau called the novel 'a bad book' and said simply 'sharks don't behave like that.' The comment clearly stung Benchley - more than the carpings of Frank Mundus - and he wrote letters to the Frenchman, which were never acknowledged.
Later in life, Benchley disowned the notion of a rogue shark ("It's just a theory that I happen to agree with.") and tried to redress the balance with a book called Shark Trouble, going on record to say that sharks are more curious than aggressive.
It was in the interest of the movie makers to promote the idea that a shark could - like Frank Mundus - develop a grudge. It's touched upon in Jaws 2, which helpfully provided a raft of shark facts in its promotional material, and positioned front and centre for Jaws: The Revenge. God knows what Jacques Cousteau would have thought of that movie.
Today -in part, thanks to Jaws - everybody is a shark expert. Discovery runs its annual Shark Week in the summer. We all know that the sight of a circling fin and the alternating pattern of the two notes E and F can only mean one thing: trouble.
