Typically they get it proper, typically they wouldn’t get it proper.
The Steven Spielberg traditional “Jaws” takes place in a fictional small city in New England — however Lengthy Islanders declare the blockbuster film and novel that impressed it owes a hat tip to a late native legend.
“Monster” hunter fisherman Frank Mundus — a proud son of Montauk — was the inspiration for Robert Shaw’s salty Capt. Quint within the film, which turns 50 on Friday, household and mates stated.
“Anybody who knows anything about fishing knows that it’s based on him,” the shark hunter’s daughter Pat Mundus advised The Put up.
“Everybody on the East End knows,” she added of the mighty man who died in 2008 at 82.
Mundus, who lives in Greenport, stated individuals nonetheless ask her each day if she’s associated to Frank.
The Brooklyn-born seaman got here to the Montauk Level from the north jersey shore within the early Nineteen Fifties to do what wasn’t historically carried out earlier than: deliberately exit searching for the scary apex predators of the ocean.
The self-branded “monster fisherman” turned the tide of “the family-friendly inshore fishing image that Montauk had,” stated Pat, a former oil tanker employee who’s now 68.
Mundus couldn’t give two flying fins, nevertheless.
“He branded himself a ‘monster fisher’ because he knew that it would attract more charter customers,” she defined, including that there was a way to the insanity.
As a boy within the metropolis, Mundus tried leaping from roof to roof between a pair of three-story buildings and fell to the bottom, breaking his arm and creating a near-fatal an infection. The miracle restoration — one which hindered his education to the purpose he completed eighth grade at practically 18 — is what gave Mundus his “big booming energy.”
“He painted one toenail red and the other blue and called them port and starboard. He wore an earring. He went barefoot everywhere. He played pranks and made a public spectacle of himself.”
Maybe Mundus’ most iconic gag was when “he had another guy dress up as a Frankenstein-like monster and they put him in a waterproof casket and marked it offshore.”
“They ‘discovered’ the guy, they brought the casket back and opened it up on the dock, and this big monster sprang out.”
By the Sixties, the attention-grabbing antics have been sufficient to reel in “Jaws” author-to-be Peter Benchley.
The penman fatefully rode on Mundus’ boat, the Cricket, which was named for the operating joke that its captain appeared like Jiminy.
“My father was a very intelligent person, but not terribly well-educated, so he didn’t know who Peter Benchley was,” Mundus, one in every of Frank’s three daughters, stated.
“He just thought it was a guy who was interested in listening to stories about catching fish.”
The depiction of Quint and the shortage of recognition of the actual story despatched Mundus overboard, his daughter stated.
“He had very carefully crafted his whole image in his own brand for 30 years,” she added. “And then some guy just came along and stole it without acknowledging who he was.”
Even Suffolk County Government Ed Romaine laments to this present day that Mundus and the setting of Montauk have been shortchanged.
“Frank Mundus was a legendary fisherman who could be in Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea,’” he advised The Put up.
What ‘Jaws’ obtained mistaken
Mundus stated her father isn’t the bitter previous salt that his Hollywood counterpart.
“He was never in the Navy, he had no revenge against evil — he didn’t seek restitution for the loss of his shipmates, who were all eaten by sharks, none of that,” she stated.
“He had a flair for being outrageous, but he wasn’t angry and pissed off, and would never take a baseball bat to a VHF radio.”
After they noticed the movie in theaters collectively, Mundus wasn’t afraid to talk his thoughts.
“A couple of times he stood up and said, ‘that’s impossible, that wouldn’t ever work!’” she recalled.
“He laughed through all the parts that everybody else was totally scared about.”
Though Pat stated that her dad moved on from his gripes, Roy Scheider apparently didn’t get the message and frightened Mundus would do one thing like give him a black eye — like a doll’s eye.
The person who performed Chief Brody advised publicist Todd Shapiro he was fearful of doing movie anniversary occasions on the East Finish in case he would run into Mundus, in line with the PR guide who tried recruiting Scheider for a reunion.
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The true sequel
No matter whether or not it was truth or fiction, the celebrity of “Jaws” reshaped Montauk within the Eighties and reworked the then-quaint fishing village into Sharktown USA.
Sam Hershowitz started internet hosting annual shark tournaments at his marina on Star Island, “that brought people all the way up from the Carolinas,” he stated.
“The first year we had 82 boats, the year after we had 150,” Hershowitz, 85, advised The Put up, including that he would play John Williams’ iconic “Jaws” rating earlier than all of them left for sea.
“The motel owners used to thank me because they would be booked solid.”
Through the 1986 competitors, Mundus and his former colleague Donnie Braddick made extra fishing historical past.
They introduced in what some file books name the biggest ever rod-and-reel caught nice white at a whopping 17 ft and three,427 kilos.
Sam’s Star Island Yacht Membership and Marina has a duplicate of the large man that is still a vacationer selfie favourite to this present day, Hershowitz stated, including that as a consequence of shark fishing rules, it’s a file that may by no means be damaged.
Braddick, now 69, was captaining a tuna fishing boat when he noticed tons of sharks devouring a lifeless whale about 25 miles southeast of Montauk Level.
The boaters he was with have been too frightened, so Braddick needed to wait till he introduced them again to make a go on the sharks.
En route again to land, Braddick noticed Mundus coming in from an in a single day constitution.
“If you needed heart surgery and the best heart surgeon was passing by, it would be a good idea to grab him,” Braddick, who left Montauk for North Carolina when it turned “credit cards and spending mommy and daddy’s money,” advised The Put up.
The duo returned to port and stocked up on necessities — beer and pizza — and headed again out of their respective boats into the moonlit hours.
“In the middle of the night, we felt the boat get bumped…and then it was like, ‘oh boy, they’re here,’” he recalled of the “all-star” group that sprang into motion to nab an ideal white.
“We reeled the boat to the fish, not the fish to the boat…after an hour and a half, that fish was like ‘f–k it, I’ve had enough of this s–t’ and it just charged the boat…All I see is him steaming at us.”
Lastly, after masterful gaffing and angling, the beast fell to the lads of the ocean and was towed again to land.
“The rest was one big friggin’ party,” added Braddick. “A lot of people know about it, and they still talk about it.”
Whereas the legend of Mundus is as everlasting as the ocean, Pat is prepared for a brand new wave and needs to dwell a lifetime of her personal relatively than echo household tales, she stated.
Nonetheless, there’s one factor Mundus advised his kin that she remembers to this present day.
“Fear is just not understanding something,” Pat recalled.
“And if you want to get over a fear, you have to gain competency in it.”
