The Palm Beach Post has a nice piece on Susan Backlinie, the first person attacked by the shark in Jaws (1975). “Backlinie met Spielberg in the spring of 1974 and made her pitch: ‘I said, “If you use me, you could get close-ups during the stunt itself. If you use an actress, she’ll have to hide her face,”‘ she told The Post.

Spielberg would soon learn that Backlinie was more at home in the water than his notoriously glitchy mechanical shark.

In the Biography channel’s Jaws: The Inside Story documentary, Spielberg called Backlinie’s sequence ‘one of the most dangerous’ stunts he’s ever directed: ‘She was actually being tugged left and right by 10 men on one rope and 10 men on the other back to the shore, and that’s what caused her to move like that.'”

Read more here.