Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they wouldn’t get it right.
The Steven Spielberg classic “Jaws” takes place in a fictional small town in New England — but Long Islanders claim the blockbuster movie and novel that inspired it owes a hat tip to a late local legend.
“Monster” hunter fisherman Frank Mundus — a proud son of Montauk — was the inspiration for Robert Shaw’s salty Capt. Quint in the movie, which turns 50 on Friday, family and friends said.
“Anybody who knows anything about fishing knows that it’s based on him,” the shark hunter’s daughter Pat Mundus told The Post.
“Everybody on the East End knows,” she added of the mighty man who died in 2008 at 82.
Mundus, who lives in Greenport, said people still ask her daily if she’s related to Frank.
The Brooklyn-born seaman came to the Montauk Point from the north jersey shore in the early 1950s to do what wasn’t traditionally done before: intentionally go out in search of the feared apex predators of the sea.
The self-branded “monster fisherman” turned the tide of “the family-friendly inshore fishing image that Montauk had,” said Pat, a former oil tanker worker who is now 68.
Mundus couldn’t give two flying fins, however.
“He branded himself a ‘monster fisher’ because he knew that it would attract more charter customers,” she explained, adding that there was a method to the madness.
As a boy in the city, Mundus tried jumping from roof to roof between a pair of three-story buildings and fell to the ground, breaking his arm and developing a near-fatal infection. The miracle recovery — one that hindered his schooling to the point he finished eighth grade at nearly 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.”
Perhaps 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 1960s, the attention-grabbing antics were enough to reel in “Jaws” author-to-be Peter Benchley.
The penman fatefully rode on Mundus’ boat, the Cricket, which was named for the running joke that its captain looked 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 of Frank’s three daughters, said.
“He just thought it was a guy who was interested in listening to stories about catching fish.”
The depiction of Quint and the lack of recognition of the real story sent Mundus overboard, his daughter said.
“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 Executive Ed Romaine laments to this day that Mundus and the setting of Montauk were shortchanged.
“Frank Mundus was a legendary fisherman who could be in Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea,’” he told The Post.
What ‘Jaws’ got wrong
Mundus said her father isn’t the bitter old 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 said.
“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.”
When they saw the film in theaters together, Mundus wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.
“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.”
Although Pat said that her dad moved on from his gripes, Roy Scheider apparently didn’t get the message and worried Mundus would do something like give him a black eye — like a doll’s eye.
The man who played Chief Brody told publicist Todd Shapiro he was petrified of doing film anniversary events on the East End in case he would run into Mundus, according to the PR consultant who tried recruiting Scheider for a reunion.
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The real sequel
Regardless of whether it was fact or fiction, the fame of “Jaws” reshaped Montauk in the 1980s and transformed the then-quaint fishing village into Sharktown USA.
Sam Hershowitz began hosting annual shark tournaments at his marina on Star Island, “that brought people all the way up from the Carolinas,” he said.
“The first year we had 82 boats, the year after we had 150,” Hershowitz, 85, told The Post, adding that he would play John Williams’ iconic “Jaws” score before they all left for sea.
“The motel owners used to thank me because they would be booked solid.”
During the 1986 competition, Mundus and his former colleague Donnie Braddick made more fishing history.
They managed to reel in what some record books consider the largest great white shark ever caught with a rod and reel, measuring at an impressive 17 feet and weighing 3,427 pounds.
At Sam’s Star Island Yacht Club and Marina, there stands a replica of this massive shark, a popular spot for tourists to take selfies. Due to regulations on shark fishing, it’s a record that is unlikely to ever be surpassed.
Braddick, now 69 years old, was leading a tuna fishing boat when he came across a group of sharks feasting on a dead whale about 25 miles southeast of Montauk Point.
Although the other boaters were too scared to approach the sharks, Braddick waited until he returned to shore to team up with Mundus for the challenge.
On their way back to land, Braddick spotted Mundus returning from an overnight charter.
“If you needed heart surgery and the best heart surgeon was passing by, it would be a good idea to grab him,” Braddick, who relocated from Montauk to North Carolina due to the changing nature of the town, told The Post.
The two men restocked on essentials – beer and pizza – before heading back out into the moonlit night on their separate boats.
“In the middle of the night, we felt the boat get bumped… and then it was like, ‘oh boy, they’re here,’” Braddick recalled of the intense moment when they encountered the great white shark.
“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.”
After a skilled display of fishing techniques, the men were able to capture the beast and bring it back to shore.
“The rest was one big friggin’ party,” Braddick added. “A lot of people know about it, and they still talk about it.”
While the legacy of Mundus continues to endure, Pat is ready to forge her own path and live a life beyond the family’s tales.
However, there is one piece of advice Mundus shared with her that she holds dear to this day.
“Fear is just not understanding something,” Pat reflected. “And if you want to get over a fear, you have to gain competency in it.”
