Jaws (franchise) about a great white shark terrorizing a beach resort. After various revisions and rewrites, Benchley delivered his final draft in January 1973. The title was not decided until shortly before the book went to print. Benchley says that he had spent months thinking of titles, many of which he calls "pretentious" such as "The Stillness in the Water" and "Leviathan Rising". Benchley regarded other ideas, such as "The Jaws of Death" and "The Jaws of Leviathan", as "melodramatic, weird, or pretentious." According to Benchley, the novel still did not have a title until twenty minutes before production of the book.
Jaws (novel) couldn't possibly write "Jaws" today ... not in good conscience anyway. Back then, it was generally accepted that great whites were anthropophagus (they ate people) by choice. Now we know that almost every attack on a human is an accident: The shark mistakes the human for its normal prey." Upon his death in 2006, Benchley's widow Wendy declared the author "kept telling people the book was fiction", and comparing "Jaws" to "The Godfather", "he took no more responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario Puzo took responsibility for the Mafia." Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, film producers at