Trivia: When John Williams played the "shark theme" for Steven Spielberg for the first time, Spielberg thought it was a joke.
Trivia: After the shark blows up and they show it under water you can hear a sound, taken from "Creature from the Black Lagoon ". It was also used when the truck was falling off the cliff in Duel, another Spielberg movie.
Trivia: Sterling Hayden was the original choice for Quint, but Hayden's tax problems with the US Government prevented him taking the role.
Trivia: When Brody is flicking through the shark book he sees a photo of a shark with a diver's air tank in its mouth, this is how he kills the shark later. (00:25:25)
Trivia: Steven Spielberg reshot the scene in which Hooper discovers the head of local fisherman Ben Gardner not in Martha's Vineyard, where the rest of the movie was filmed, but in editor Verna Fields' swimming pool. Spielberg spent $3,000 out of his own money because Universal refused to foot the bill for any more shooting.
Trivia: Quint's line, "Here lies the body of Mary Lee, died at the age of 103", was ad-libbed by Robert Shaw. Shaw later told Steven Spielberg that it was an epitaph on a tombstone in Ireland.
Trivia: Alex Kintner owns a seafood restaurant now and even has a sandwich called the Alex Kintner Sandwich.
Trivia: According to Spielberg, of the 12 hours of filming schedule each day, only 4 hours were spent actually filming. This was due to difficulties with the shark prop, disagreements with the actors, unwanted civilian boats coming into view and poor conditions at sea.
Trivia: Many problems happened at sea involving the boats. The Orca, for instance, once began to sink with the actors on board, and in another case, Carl Gottlieb, the writer of the film, was nearly killed in an accident when he nearly hit the propellers of the crew boat.
Trivia: The marine biologist, Hooper, was an unlikable character in Peter Benchley's novel. In the book, Hooper had an affair with Chief Brody's wife, and Hooper was appropriately eaten alive by the Great White at the end. Steven Spielberg originally intended to follow the Benchley novel and allow Hooper to be eaten inside the shark cage. As it happened, Spielberg fell in love with some accidental footage of a real Great White thrashing wildly with an empty shark cage; in fact, he loved that shot so much, the scene was rewritten on-the-fly to allow Hooper to escape the cage and survive.
Trivia: Although you cannot see him, Steven Spielberg is actually one of the people at the beach bonfire playing a clarinet.
Trivia: The reason that there are many shots of only the dorsal fin is because the prop shark was so damaged, they removed the fin and placed it in the water to make it look like the shark was swimming just below the surface.
Trivia: Because Spielberg took production over 100 days and made the crew suffer for his attention to detail, he refused to come for the final day of shooting, believing the crew were going to throw him into the water after they had finished. It has since become a custom of Spielberg to be absent on the final day of shooting on the majority of his films.
Trivia: When the shark's first victim's hand is found in the sand, Steven Spielberg believed that the fake arm they used was too false, so instead they buried a female crew member in the sand with her hand sticking out.
Trivia: The script was not written in one go. The writers had dinner with Spielberg and the cast every night, listened for suggestions for tomorrows shoot, and then finish their script a bit before shooting.
Trivia: A young and arrogant Richard Dreyfuss thought the movie "Jaws" was going to be a flop. So, weeks before "Jaws" ever opened in theatres, Dreyfuss did television and magazine interviews in which he criticized the film and apologized in advance for his performance in it.
Trivia: In the film, the Mayor is acting out of his concern for the town and its people, fearing an economic collapse if summer is ruined for beachgoers. In Peter Benchley's novel, things are a bit more complicated as the Mayor owes and is being manipulated/extorted by the mob due to their grip on Amity in general and money owed for a loan he took out to help save his then-ailing-and unaware-wife.
Trivia: Perhaps the most often-repeated "Jaws" trivia is that actor Roy Scheider spontaneously ad-libbed the film's most iconic line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat!" Screenwriter Carl Gottleib apparently started this rumor after "Jaws" became a worldwide sensation in 1975, probably because the only thing that generated as much publicity as the film itself was backstory of the film's production; and Gottleib's rumor has charmed fans and persisted to this day. However, when reporter Paul Iorio interviewed Roy Scheider in 2000 (for a story in the San Francisco Chronicle on the occasion of the "Jaws" 25th anniversary), he specifically asked Scheider about the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat." Scheider answered: "That was in the script. The first time he [Chief Brody] sees the shark. But I liked the line so much, it amused me so much, that I said, 'I bet I could work this in a few other places.' So I worked it in two more times." Indeed, Chief Brody does refer to needing a bigger boat twice more, and those subsequent lines are ad-libbed; but the very first and most memorable time he says the line, it was purely scripted. Paul Iorio's question and Roy Scheider's answer were edited out of the published San Francisco Chronicle story.
Trivia: A video game from Sega in 1972 was called Killer Shark, considered the first video game in the horror genre. The object of the game was to shoot at a giant shark with harpoons. This game can be seen in the seaside arcade in the movie.
Chosen answer: As mentioned in the movie, the posion was in the needle and the shark's hide was too tough for the needle to penetrate. Hooper had to go in the water so that he could get the needle into the shark's mouth, where the flesh was less tough.
Kevin Howard