The original director of the movie Jaws, was fired because he kept calling the shark a whale.

Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, producers at Universal Pictures, independently heard about Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws. Brown came across it in the fiction department of the Cosmopolitan lifestyle magazine, then edited by his wife, Helen Gurley Brown. A small card written by the magazine’s book editor gave a detailed description of the plot, concluding with the comment “might make a good movie”. The producers each read the book over the course of a single night and agreed the next morning that it was “the most exciting thing that they had ever read” and that they wanted to produce a film version, although they were unsure how it would be accomplished. They purchased the movie rights in 1973, before the book’s publication, for approximately $175,000. Brown claimed that had they read the book twice, they would never have made the film because they would have realized how difficult it would be to execute certain sequences.

To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure,The Old Man and the Sea—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co. had come out the previous year. However, they grew irritated by Richards’s habit of describing the shark as a whale and soon dropped him from the project. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg very much wanted the job. The 26-year-old had just directed his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck and Brown. At the end of a meeting in their office, Spielberg noticed their copy of the still-unpublished Benchley novel, and after reading it was immediately captivated. He later observed that it was similar to his 1971 television film Duelin that both deal with “these leviathans targeting everymen.” After Richards’s departure, the producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before the release of The Sugarland Express.

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