True or False Trivia: Jaws

One of the fascinating pieces of trivia below is true*, the other is false. Do YOU know which is which?

Jaws (1975)

1) Though his affair with Brody’s wife was left out of the film, Hooper’s death was actually in the script. The plan was to have a dummy representing Hooper placed in a cage underwater, and Australian filmmakers Ron and Valerie Taylor, who were filming the underwater shark scenes in Australia, would entice an actual shark to attack the cage and tear the dummy apart. They could never provoke the shark properly. Ultimately, the shark did attack and destroy the cage, but there was one problem: the Hooper dummy wasn’t inside at the time. As this was the best footage they had, Steven Spielberg decided to use it, and allow Hooper to escape the shark.

2) Craig Kingsbury, the actor who played Ben Gardner, infuriated everyone on the set with his crude behavior and foul hygiene to the point that Steven Spielberg and the producers took advantage of a little-known Martha’s Vineyard law stating that “an oaf may be fooled into slaughter if the sea demands it.” The crew pulled this off by convincing Kingsbury to hide inside of a shark suit under the pretense that he would scare Richard Dreyfuss during a scene. Unfortunately for Kingsbury, the scene was the one where Hooper slices open a shark’s gut to see if it ate the Kitner boy. Kingsbury’s agonizing screams were edited out of the final film, but locals say that you can still hear them echoing throughout the wharf when the moon and wind are just right. The stomach contents shown in the film were the actual contents of Kingsbury’s stomach, suggesting that earlier in the day he had swallowed three large mackerel, a tin can and a Louisiana license plate. Richard Dreyfuss has claimed in recent interviews that “to this day, I can’t get that ogre’s smell off of me.” In addition, after Kingsbury was beheaded by the prop master in accordance with the law, Spielberg was inspired to include the scene of Hooper finding Ben Gardner’s severed head underwater. However, Spielberg ultimately decided to use a fake head because, “I felt that the entire production had been cursed by this man’s very presence, so I’d be damned if I was going to give his rotten head more screen time. So we tied chains and garlic to it and sunk it straight to Hell where it came from.”