After the Fourth of July attack, Brody finally convinces the mayor to hire Quint, who reluctantly allows Hooper and Brody to join the hunt. The three set out to kill the shark aboard Quint's vessel, the Orca.

Quint estimates its size as twenty-five feet in length, with a weight of over three tons. He harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls the barrel underwater and disappears.

Brody attempts to call the Coast Guard, but Quint, who has become obsessed with killing the shark without outside assistance, smashes the radio.

When the shark leaps onto the Orca, Quint slides down the deck and is devoured alive.

Brody shoves a pressurized scuba tank into the shark's mouth and shoots it, causing it to explode and blow the shark to pieces.

The crew nicknamed the shark "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer. Spielberg, frustrated by the shark's frequent malfunctions, had another name for it: "the great white turd."

The budget for the film would ultimately tip the scales at $12 million, 300 percent over what the studios originally allocated and nearly four times as much as the average production cost for a film in 1975. Not only that, but the shooting schedule had ballooned from 55 to 159 days.

When composer John Williams first played his ominous two-note "shark theme" score for Spielberg on a piano, the director thought it was a joke. Later Spielberg would say, "The score was clearly responsible for half of the success of that movie."

Jaws won three Academy Awards for Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound. It was also nominated for Best Picture but lost to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Michael Brody is the older brother of the late Sean Brody and the son of Chief Brody and Ellen Brody. He is a major character in Jaws, a supporting character in Jaws 2, and the main protagonist of Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge.