What Was Jaws Based On

Jaws is not a true story. It is based on Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name. The Jaws author had a lifelong fascination with sharks and said that he came up with the concept for the novel after reading about a great white shark that had been caught by fisherman Frank Mundus in 1964 (pictured below).

How big was the shark in Jaws?

At a whopping 25 feet long, Bruce would have weighed 4.9 tons in real life, higher than Quint’s estimation of 3 tons.

What happened on Shark Island?

A 1904 uprising in what was then called German South-West Africa turned into a war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama peoples. At least 60,000 are believed to have died, including some 2,000 in the Shark Island camp, where inmates were starved, beaten and worked to death.