The real-life tragedy that inspired Jaws’ most famous scene

“Whoom. Up in the air I went,” remem­bers Loel Dean Cox of the night the USS Indi­anapo­lis sank, 75 years ago. Loel, then 19, was on duty that evening, in posi­tion on the bridge of the Port­land-class heavy cruis­er. The ship was on its way back from Tin­ian Island, hav­ing lugged around half of the world’s sup­ply of Ura­ni­um-235 for use in the assem­bly of the atom­ic bomb named ​‘Lit­tle Boy’. Days lat­er, on 9 August, that bomb would be dropped upon Hiroshi­ma, killing approx­i­mate­ly 146,000 people.

It was just after mid­night on 30 July, 1945, when the first tor­pe­do hit the Indi­anapo­lis. ​“There was water, debris, fire, every­thing just com­ing up and we were 81ft from the water line,” Cox remem­bered in 2013, then aged 87. ​“It was a tremen­dous explo­sion. Then, about the time I got to my knees, anoth­er one hit.” With the Indi­anapo­lis going down and the fires rag­ing, Loel need­ed to get into the water. He jumped, hit the hull and bounced into the sea. He was one of around 900 – of the 1,197 that made up the crew pri­or to the Japan­ese attack – that had sur­vived the ini­tial explo­sion and made it into the water.

It was only then that the hor­ror tru­ly began.

You know Cox’s sto­ry, or a ver­sion of it any­way. In Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, it’s retold by Quint, Ami­ty Island’s res­i­dent shark hunter and a fel­low Indi­anapo­lis sur­vivor, one boozy night on the Orca. To many, Robert Shaw’s show-stop­ping mono­logue remains the film’s most mem­o­rable scene. Tankards clank. The Orca swells and groans. The swing­ing lamp above the table throws a shad­ow across the faces of Brody (Roy Schei­der) and Hoop­er (Richard Drey­fuss), who are enthralled by this old sea dog’s tale – Drey­fuss, in par­tic­u­lar, seems to be strug­gling to stay in char­ac­ter, vis­i­bly in awe of Shaw’s per­for­mance. ​“As the light went dark, the sharks came cruisin’…”

Quint goes on to describe four days and four nights of liv­ing hell. Of star­va­tion. Insan­i­ty. Hypother­mia. All true, all cor­rob­o­rat­ed by the 316 men who sur­vived the ordeal. And yet Quint’s claim that the mul­ti­tude of sharks, drawn to the blood, screams and thrash­ing in the water, ​“aver­aged six an hour” is artis­tic licence. The asser­tion that ​“eleven hun­dred men went into the water, three hun­dred six­teen men come out, and the sharks took the rest,” is just a device to final­ly explain why it is that Quint hates these crea­tures so much.

There are fur­ther inac­cu­ra­cies. A dis­tress sig­nal was sent by the sink­ing ship – it was just ignored by the sta­tion com­man­der, drunk at his post. The Indi­anapo­lis didn’t ​“deliv­er the bomb”, rather the parts to con­struct it. And the ship was sunk on 30 July, not the day before.

The Indi­anapo­lis’ doomed tale has been told with­in cin­e­ma with sim­i­lar fac­tu­al incon­sis­ten­cies in the years that have fol­lowed the cat­a­clysmic release of Jaws in 1975. Nei­ther exam­ple is one of par­tic­u­lar­ly good movie mak­ing. In 1991, the TV movie Mis­sion of the Shark: The Saga of the USS Indi­anapo­lis first aired. In 2016, Nicholas Cage and direc­tor Mario Van Pee­bles teamed up for the jin­go­is­tic USS Indi­anapo­lis: Men of Courage. And yet, the dif­fer­ence between these films and Flint’s per­for­mance with­in Jaws is that, while some fac­tu­al details aren’t true, Shaw’s con­veyance of ter­ror in the cold and dark absolute­ly is.

Spiel­berg gives cred­it to three men for the author­ship – and sub­se­quent edit­ing – of Quint’s mono­logue: Howard Sack­ler, the Brook­lyn-born play­wright respon­si­ble for the film’s ear­ly, com­plete script rewrite (despite no cred­it bear­ing his name); Apoc­a­lypse Now writer John Mil­ius; and Shaw him­self, a tal­ent­ed play­wright in his own right whose 1968 play ​‘The Man in the Glass Booth’ ran on Broad­way for 264 performances.

In a 2011 inter­view with Ain’t It Cool News, Spiel­berg final­ly cleared up the fisherman’s tall tales that had cloud­ed the issue of who’d fathered the icon­ic scene. Howard, he said, had writ­ten ​“about three quar­ters of a page” of the mono­logue, includ­ing intro­duc­ing the premise of the Indi­anapo­lis for the first time and quan­ti­fy­ing the length of con­struc­tion from the oth­er two writ­ers; Mil­ius took it up to 10 pages before Shaw man­aged to get it down to half that, where it stayed.

Shaw, a life­long alco­holic – just over three years after the pre­mière of Jaws, he would be dead of a heart attack, aged 51 – con­vinced Spiel­berg to let him record the scene after hav­ing had a few drinks. Shaw retired to the White­foot, the tug­boat-cum-float­ing green room that pro­vid­ed a place for the Jaws cast and crew to eat meals and use the toi­let when film­ing off­shore. He had to be car­ried back onto the Orca and didn’t make it through the take.

“At about two o’clock in the morn­ing my phone rings and it’s Robert,” says Spiel­berg, pick­ing up the tale. ​“He had a com­plete black­out and had no mem­o­ry of what had gone down that day. He said, ​‘Steven, tell me I didn’t embar­rass you.’ He was very sweet, but he was pan­ic-strick­en. The next morn­ing he came to the set, he was ready at 7:30 out of make-up and it was like watch­ing Olivi­er on stage. We did it in prob­a­bly four takes.” Anoth­er sto­ry goes that Shaw mourn­ful­ly told Drey­fuss he wished he could stop drink­ing. Drey­fuss, not miss­ing a beat, picked up his senior’s whiskey tum­bler and threw it into the ocean.

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to think what might have come next. Spiel­berg was report­ed­ly inter­est­ed in con­tin­u­ing Quint’s arc by telling a sto­ry that would revis­it the hunter’s youth, includ­ing his time aboard the Indi­anapo­lis. Per­haps there’s still hope for a prop­er Indi­anapo­lis sto­ry. In recent years Robert Downey Jr and his wife, the writer Susan Downey, have expressed as inter­est in adapt­ing the Indi­anapo­lis sto­ry, refo­cus­ing the nar­ra­tive on the real-life endeav­ours of 11-year-old Hunter Scott who, hav­ing obses­sive­ly binged Jaws as a child, start­ed to research the ship’s sink­ing for a school project.

Remark­ably, this new infor­ma­tion led to a posthu­mous exon­er­a­tion for Cap­tain Charles But­ler McVay III, who had long been blamed for the tragedy. On 6 Novem­ber, 1968, McVay had shot him­self at home with his ser­vice revolver. In his hand was a toy sailor he’d been giv­en in child­hood as a lucky charm. The tragedy of the sink­ing of the USS Indi­anapo­lis extends across eras.

Jaws itself cel­e­brates a land­mark anniver­sary this year, turn­ing 45. Loel Dean Cox passed away in 2015. There are now just 10 remain­ing sur­vivors of the USS Indi­anapo­lis tragedy. Only one, Drey­fuss, from that boozy night on the Orca. And yet Quint’s mono­logue and its rela­tion­ship to the ter­ri­ble events of 1945 are cer­tain to endure.