Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 he wades in the water. In 1974, writer Peter Benchley published "Jaws", a novel about a rogue great white shark that terrorizes the fictional coastal community of Amity Island. Chief of police Martin Brody, biologist Matt Hooper, and fisherman Quint hunt the shark after it kills four people. The novel was adapted as the film "Jaws" by Steven Spielberg in 1975. Spielberg's film makes reference to the events of 1916: Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) urge Amity's Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) to close the beaches on the Fourth of July after the deaths of two swimmers and a
Jaws (film) the story was to change the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion, as he felt audiences would respond better to a "big rousing ending". The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book. Benchley had written "Jaws" after reading about sport fisherman Frank Mundus's capture of an enormous shark in 1964. According to Gottlieb, Quint was loosely based on Mundus, whose book "Sportfishing for Sharks" he read for research. Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War