09/14/2026
What’s in a nickname? Sometimes a good story. We got ours when a reporter called us the Shark Brothers in 2005 during field productions for a documentary about the man, the myth and at the time, living legend - the Monster Man of Montauk. That nickname belongs to Frank Mundus whose real-life exploits at the helm of his shark fishing boat, the Cricket II, provided substantial inspiration for Peter Benchley’s fiction novel, “JAWS”, its Captain Quint character and his boat, the Orca. Without the Monster Man, that story and subsequent movie adaptation would be barely recognizable. Truth is, they might never have happened at all. He never got the credit due for his role of influence on the first-ever 'blockbuster' movie. It's one of many things about him that should be known. We became fast friends with Frank; a relationship that sparked a 3-year odyssey of repossessing and restoring the Real JAWS Boat while documenting life on board with the Monster Man during the last years of his storied career spanning over a half-century. Frank, as he would say, kicked the chum bucket in 2008 at the well-traveled age of 82. Like us, he took what he did seriously, but not himself at all. We miss ya, Frank. Things are way too quiet around here without you!
- Sean Paxton & Brooks Paxton
While we're still young, with enough time and post-production funding secured, we’ll tell the rest of this true story. Frank's legacy is long and deep. He invented sportfishing for sharks in the early 1950s and later made significant contributions to our earliest understandings of sharks through his enlisted collaborations with the scientific community. He was all at once wise, endearing, funny, hated, smart, feared, fearless, respected, loathed, kind, notorious and enigmatic. Hollywood on its best day could never come up with a character as compelling or authentic as the larger-than-life Monster Man.
