17. Jaws Almost Wasn’t Jaws
Photo: mentalfloss
As many of you already know, the film was based on the best-selling novel written by Peter Brenchley. But did you know that Brenchley originally had other titles in mind for his book and only changed it to “Jaws” at the last minute? The book was based on a combination of two events, a New York fisherman that caught a 4,500lb shark off the coast of Montauk in 1964, and a series of shark attacks that wreaked havoc on the New Jersey coastline in 1916. Some of the titles he had in mind were “Leviathan Rising,” “The Silence of the Deep,” and “The Stillness in the Water.”