The 1969 Burt Reynolds movie sold on a horrific on-camera death that never happened: “A realistic film became too real”
White lies are part and parcel of the movie business, but an early Burt Reynolds vehicle took things too far when it marketed itself on the back of a horrific and tragic death that had occurred on set.
It would have been bad enough for the film to use a crew member being killed as the basis of its marketing campaign, something it’s impossible to imagine happening today. If anything, though, it became even queasier when it turned out that nobody had died during its making at all.
The concept of 1969’s Shark! shouldn’t need any explaining, with the leading man’s latest B-tier action thriller casting him as a stranded gunrunner who falls in with a couple of treasure hunters. Naturally, the treasure they’re hunting resides in shark-infested waters, so it was never intended to be high art.
Shooting in and around the Mexican state of Colima, the production went off without a hitch. However, that’s not what the filmmakers wanted audiences to believe, so for whatever reason, a story was concocted, publicised, and picked up by the media, suggesting that stunt performer José Marco was attacked, mauled, and killed by a shark, and the whole thing was caught on camera.
As the story went, the aquatic predator had broken through the safety netting that was supposed to protect Marco from the very fate he allegedly suffered, and it gained so much traction that it was given a full spread in several newspapers and magazines. Originally titled Caine, the film was even rebranded as Shark! to capitalise on the headline-grabbing incident.
Various theatrical posters ran sensationalised taglines like ‘A Realistic Film Became Too Real’, ‘Gut-Grabbing Realism’, and ‘Shark Mangles a Man’, all based on the assumption that nobody involved with the film was telling porkies, and that one of the scenes had essentially elevated it into snuff territory.
Understandably, nobody questioned why on earth a low-budget schlocker would claim that a stuntman was attacked and killed by a shark while the cameras were rolling and lie about it, until somebody actually bothered their arse to find out if it was the truth, and they quickly discovered that it was, in fact, bullshit.
After a little digging, it was revealed that there were no official records of the incident, no recollections from the local authorities who were present in the area at the time, and no reports from hospitals, medical personnel, or even morgues that anybody had suffered injuries that were in keeping with a shark-assisted murder at the time the picture was in production, not to mention no tangible evidence that José Marco existed, never mind doubled for Reynolds.
In the end, even one of the magazines that published the story as fact admitted that Shark! tale “may, it turns out, have been a hoax.” It was an inspired way to manufacture some extra publicity for a creature feature that would have otherwise slipped under the radar, even if the whole thing was faked.
