JAWS STAR MURRAY HAMILTON LEFT IN A STINK AFTER SKUNK ATTACK DURING BREAK IN FILMING
Making a film can be fraught with all sorts of mishaps, and Jaws is probably one of the most famous examples of filming impacted by the elements and equipment not working.
That equipment was of course Bruce the mechanical shark that didn't take too kindly to the salt water in the sea.
This combination of factors saw the shooting schedule balloon from 59 days to 158 days. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw may have spent many hours on the Orca waiting for tide, time and Bruce, but Mayor Vaughn actor, Murray Hamilton, didn't have to worry about such problems.
He and the shark never crossed paths and - apart from a scene with Roy Scheider on the car ferry - his feet were firmly stuck to the Amity Island filming location of Martha's Vineyard. So, he was never in danger from the shark.
But that still didn't keep the Mayor of Amity actor from being attacked. It turns out it wasn't jaws he had to be worried, in fact it was quite literally the opposite.
After taking an evening walk after a day's filming, Hamilton is said to have gone to pet a cat sat on a fence (obviously it hadn't been karate chopped), but instead of content purrs he was greeted with a defensive squirting from the anal glands of a skunk. You read that right, a skunk.
Clearly, he could have done with Chief Brody's handkerchief full of Old Spice as the smell was said to be so bad that the next day the Jaws actor wound up burning his clothes.
And it turns out that it could all be the fault of Ben Gardner. Well, the islander who played him, Craig Kingsbury.
That's according to an interview the colourful local gave to Boston magazine’s Andrew Rimas in 2005.
He told the writer: "He wouldn’t have gotten sprayed if I hadn’t brought skunks over to the island. They didn’t have any on the island, and I thought it wasn’t ecologically balanced. So, I brought them over.’ [Laughs.] He was wonderful.”
It's said the smell of Hamilton was so bad that the hotel wouldn't let him into his room, so he ended up having to sleep on the hotel's porch. Again, that's from Kingsbury, whose stories are probably larger than life than he was.
Not that the skunk spraying incident didn't happen, which was confirmed to us by Hamilton's friend and Jaws dressing room buddy, Jeffrey Kramer.
It also features in the pages of The Jaws Log, by Carl Gottlieb. The Jaws co-screenwriter and actor remembers the events differently to Kingsbury, although the results are pretty much the same.
In Gottlieb's version it is a dog rather than a cat (but still ends up being a skunk) and that Hamilton did make it into his room, but no amount of windows he opened or showers he had could get rid of the awful smell.
He wound up in the lobby and slept on a couch wrapped in a blanket. He burnt the suit from the previous night and the blanket he'd been wrapped up in.
Just as Quint would never put on a lifejacket ever again after the USS Indianapolis incident, Gottlieb suggests that Hamilton would never ever go to pet an unfamiliar dog ever again.
This was not a Pipit accident.
Words by Dean Newman
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