For a movie as legendary as Jaws, every little detail has been pored over and researched in the 41 years since the film’s release, up to and including Matt Hooper’s wristwatch. Thankfully for Jaws obsessives, Gary and Christian Stock not only share a love of Amity Island, but are watch aficionados. They tracked down the make and model of the wristwatch that Matt Hooper laid down the money for, the money he’d been counting with those city hands all his life.
According to a 2010 article in WatchTime, the make and model of Matt Hooper’s diver is an Alsta Nautoscaph by the Alstater Watch Company. For years, it was assumed that the watch may have been an Omega or a Seiko. The piece details the Stock brothers’ quest for watch information, including getting in touch with Dick Warlock, the stuntman who went into the cage with the shark in the water, and stunt coordinator Ted Grossman, as well as a letter to Richard Dreyfuss himself. But Dreyfuss never responded and Warlock and Grossman were as in the dark as the Stock boys.
After rifling through old skin diving magazines and Cooksey Shugart’s Complete Guide To Watches, the brothers eventually got ahold of the vintage dive watch for $100 off of eBay and paired it with the proper “porthole” bracelet to have the watch appear as it did in the original film. The article is an interesting read for Jaws aficionados and watch collectors alike, going into extreme detail not only on the search, but the inner workings of the watch itself. Although Gary and Christian Stock now have a screen-accurate Alsta Nautoscaph—perfect for cosplay on Martha’s Vineyard—what happened to the actual watch that Dreyfuss donned during the 1974 shoot remains a mystery.