Today anybody with access to the
Discovery channel can become a shark expert within a week, but back in 1975 it
was felt necessary to educate the audience on some aspects of the fish’s
behaviour. In explaining the concept of territoriality to the mayor, Hooper fleetingly
references a series of shark attacks that took place off the Jersey Shore
between July 1 and July 12, 1916. In another version of Jaws, one can imagine this historical incident being expanded into
an Indianapolis-like monologue for
Hooper at the Brody’s dinner table. As it is, the events are compressed (and
slightly distorted) into one memorable line delivered by Brody (‘Five people chewed up in the surf.’).
The full story itself would eventually be told in a 2004 TV movie called 12 Days of Terror, co-written by Tommy
Lee Wallace, friend of and longtime collaborator with John Carpenter, and the man behind the mask in Halloween.
Although the Jersey Shore attacks are often credited as being the inspiration for the original novel, the fact that the story is widely known today owes much
to its brief name-check in the movie, just as Quint’s Indianapolis story has usurped the true historical facts of that
incident in many peoples’ minds. In the novel Benchley references the Jersey Shore
attacks in journalist Bill Whitman's report in the New York Times (page 58 of the Fawcett paperback edition), citing it as "the only other recorded instance of multiple shark-attack fatalities in the United States in [the 20th] century."
