This episode is produced by Bruce Strong, Cameron Jesric, Caroline Mathlin, Courtney Hickling, Eric Mancia, Gabriel Stalker, Joe and Jen Stillwell, Kathleen Hale, Krista Duppes, Megan Martin, Melanie Bennett, Melanie Johnson Saville, Michael Young, Misty Shelton, Nicholas Tara, Paul Schumann, Peter Gordon, Saoud al-Hassan, T.M. and Von M. Dennis.

Spoiler alert. This podcast assumes you've already seen the movie or read the book and are curious about the differences between them.

If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, this is your cue to stop the podcast,

go do one, the other, or both, and come on back. This episode is also rated R. Red Band R. It contains

graphic violence, vulgar language in the book, sexual content in the book, and other materials some might not find suitable.

Discretion is advised.

Hello. Hello, and welcome to Cinema Story Origins, Episode 20A, Jaws, Part 1. The The Before Jaws was a movie that made people afraid to swim in the ocean, to many people surprised today, it was a book, and before that it was an idea swimming around in the head of a guy named

Peter Benchley. Benchley wasn't a novelist yet. He'd done some journalism, worked as an editor

at Newsweek, and even wrote speeches for Lyndon B. Johnson back when

LBJ was president. But like a lot of writers, he was freelancing, broke, and looking for that

one big idea. Turns out his idea had teeth. Inspired by a 1964 story about a fisherman who

hauled in a 4,500-pound great white off of Montauk

and haunted by the infamous Jersey shore attacks of 1916, Benchley started to put the pieces

together. Those attacks happened over the course of 12 days when a rogue shark killed four

people and injured a fifth, striking in shallow water even miles inland

along a creek it made national headlines people were terrified it was one of the first times

americans realized sharks could be a real threat mixed that with benchley's childhood summers

by the ocean always watching for for Finns, always obsessed

with what might be lurking under the surface, and the story started to take shape.

A shark shows up off a beach town and doesn't leave. His editor at Doubleday said, sounds good,

go write it. And he did. It took him a couple of years, riding wherever he could, sometimes in a

furnace supply office in Jersey, other times in the back of a converted garage, and even in a

...