Robert Shaw courtesy Universal Video
Question Someone told me there was a real Jaws guy Were they messing with me Jake FlickChick Im guessing someone told you Quint the crusty old shark fisherman played by the late Robert Shaw in Jaws 1975 was based on a real person And he or she was right Its widely acknowledged that Peter Benchley modeled Quint on Brooklyn-born fisherman Frank Mundus nicknamed the Monster Man and some accounts claim that the seed from which Jaws later sprang was planted when Benchley read a newspaper article about Mundus hauling in a huge great white shark off the coast of Long Island in the early 1960sMundus says he took Benchley out on fishing trips and that Benchley was fascinated by the way he harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track the shark while it ran to exhaustion But Benchley who died in 2006 at the age of 64 never named Mundus now in his early eighties as his inspiration In fact he was known to actively deny it a fact that
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Shark Week
In July of 1916, a great white shark terrorized the New Jersey shore, devouring all or parts of five swimmers (four died) and inspiring the plot for a future film that would thrill and terrify the world. The movie is Steven Spielberg's 1975 summer classic Jaws, in which Richard Dreyfuss stars as Matt Hooper, a marine biologist on the trail of a murderous monster. Who better, then, to narrate Ocean of Fear: The Worst Shark Attack Ever, which kicks off Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week with a two-hour premiere on Sunday, July 29 (at 9 pm/ET)?
Yes, it's time to whip your trembling tootsies out of the surf again. The most jaw-dropping week of summer television, Shark Week, turns 20 this year, and to mark the occasion, Discovery is offering an all-ou
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Salma Hayek has inked a new two-year deal with ABC Studios, under which she and fellow Ugly Betty exec producer Jose Tamez will develop new series.... Ozzy Osbourne will perform on consecutive nights of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Monday, May 21, and Tuesday, May 22.... MTV has announced a May 22 premiere for Season 2 of Rob & Big.... Starz' Encore marathons all four Jaws films on Memorial Day, starting at 5 am/ET. Think that includes The Spy Who Loved Me?... Which of the three Spider-Man films is now your all-time fave? Vote in today's poll (bottom right).
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What, if anything, do Star Wars, Mission: Impossible, and Jaws have in common?
What is the formula for blockbuster-movie success? And how does it differ from the recipe for disaster? Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters, an HBO documentary premiering tonight at 9 pm/ET — and based on the new book Boffo! How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb, by Variety editor-in-chief and former studio exec Peter Bart — explores those much-asked questions by way of A-list talking heads and fantastic clips from films both great and... so-so.
Bart says that — especially as cohost of AMC's Sunday Morn
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What, if anything, do Star Wars, Mission: Impossible, and Jaws have in common?
What is the formula for blockbuster-movie success? And how does it differ from the recipe for disaster? The new book Boffo! How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb, by Variety editor-in-chief and former studio exec Peter Bart, explores those much-asked questions, as does an accompanying HBO documentary, Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters, premiering June 29 and featuring almost as many A-list talking heads as fantastic clips from films both great and... so-so.
Bart says that — especially as cohost of AMC's Sunday
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Jacqueline McKenzie, The 4400
The Season 3 premiere of USA Network's The 4400 (returning June 11 at 9 pm/ET) is now little more than a week away, but intel on the new season is still hard to come by. TVGuide.com called Jacqueline McKenzie, the Aussie actress who plays NTAC agent Diana Skouris, to see what (if anything!) she has heard about this year's big twists.
TVGuide.com: I was just checking out your MySpace page, and you've got some interesting people dropping by: costar Karina Lombard,
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The ApprenticeFor supposedly smart financial wizards, the Apprentice candidates sure did some dumb things this week. Honestly, it's hard to pick out the worst idea of the bunch. Was it Team Gold Rush planning an entire event to promote the Chevy Tahoe without a theme? Maybe it was Synergy deciding to have a Dick Cheney-style skeet shoot in a public park. No, then it had to be Lenny, the Mad Russian, not renting a generator to run a revolving stage, right? (His response, "It's not my problem," was priceless. Who's problem was it, exactly?) How about Tarek digging post holes so the Chevy-dealership guys could pretend to play golf on a dirt track? For her part, Charmaine hired a foulmouthed comedienne for the event, then proceeded to pay
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Question: What do you think are the most overrated Oscar nominees this year?
Answer: You know, almost any other year I could have come up with a list a foot long. But the 2005 Academy Award nominees are a really strong bunch — among the major categories I can honestly say that there isn't a single one I strongly feel doesn't belong in the running. That said, I don't think John Williams merits two nominations in the category for best original score — for Munich and Memoirs of a Geisha. But I'm consistently at odds with the prevailing opinion on him. I find the overwhelming majority of his compositions overblown and totally ordinary — just because he can orchestrate up the yin-yang doesn't mean he has to do it every single time. He has 36 prior music nominations (all but three for original score), many of which represent two films in a single year; he also has five wins t
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Jaws author Peter Benchley died Saturday at the age of 65. Idiopathic fibrosis, a condition marked by the progressive and ultimately fatal scarring of the lungs, did in the writer, on whose novel the best killer-shark movie ever was based.
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