the shark without outside assistance, smashes the radio. After a long chase, Quint harpoons the shark with another barrel. The line is tied to the stern cleats, but the shark drags the boat backward, swamping the deck and flooding the engine compartment. Quint prepares to sever the line to prevent the transom from being pulled out but the cleats break off, keeping the barrels attached to the shark. Quint heads toward shore to draw the shark into shallower waters, but he overtaxes the damaged engine and it fails. As the Orca slowly sinks, the trio attempts a riskier approach. Hooper enters the water in a shark-proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with strychnine via a hypodermic spear. The shark attacks the cage, causing Hooper to drop the spear, which sinks. While the shark thrashes in the tangled remains of the cage, Hooper manages to escape to the seabed. The shark breaks free and leaps onto the boat, subsequently devouring Quint. Trapped on the sinking vessel, Brody shoves a pressurized scuba tank into the shark's mouth and climbs onto the crow's nest. He shoots the tank with Quint's rifle, killing the shark with the resulting explosion. Hooper resurfaces and paddles back to Amity Island with Brody, clinging to the remaining barrels. Production Development Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, producers at Universal Pictures, independently heard about Peter Benchley's novel Jaws. Brown came across it in the literature section of lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan, then edited by his wife, Helen Gurley Brown. A small card written by the magazine's book editor gave a detailed description of the plot, concluding with the comment "might make a good movie". The producers each read the book over the course of a single night and agreed the next morning that it was "the most exciting thing that they had ever read" and that they wanted to produce a film version, although they were unsure how it would be accomplished. They purchased the film rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000 (). Brown claimed that had they read the book twice, they would never have made the film because they would have realized how difficult it would be to execute certain sequences. To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, —before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co., had