Key Sentence:
- A new piece on the production of the hit issue “Jaws” drew a sea of five-star reviews when it premiered in Edinburgh in 2019.
- The answer made it clear to producers: We needed a more significant theatre.
Shark Broken, soon relocated to London’s West End, provides a glimpse into the tense relationship between the three stars in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film. The jaws are tough to make. It was over budget, production fell behind schedule, and the often-used mechanical shark collapsed, which ultimately inspired the work’s title.
The delay made the three main actors often sit unreachable and wait for filming to resume. And that long gap will add to the tension. The conflict between Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus became one of Hollywood’s biggest feuds.
“This is a legendary story for people who work in film and Shark Is Shattered have an interest in film,” said Ian Shaw, who co-wrote the play and starred in it as his father, Robert. “In the documentary about the making of Jaws, Steven Spielberg speaks openly about it, as does Richard Dreyfus. “We checked the source material and did as much research as possible – documentation, clippings, books, whatever we could find.
My own family has a story to tell, especially my stepmother Virginia because she was there.”
For anyone unfamiliar with Jaws, here’s a quick recap: Man-eating sharks roam freely in the waters around the coastal town of Amity Island. Police chief Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider) tries to close the beach after a shark kills several swimmers. But the local mayor insists that the beach stays open because the local economy depends on it.
Oceanographer Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) is hired to assess what a shark is and its danger. Meanwhile, a somewhat confused local fisherman named Quint (Shaw) offers to catch him and kill him for $10,000.
The film’s first half takes place mostly on land, with locals and tourists alike becoming increasingly anxious as the bodies pile up. But the other half sees the three men set off together on Quint’s boat. Determined to find and kill the shark.
The scenes that follow are the hardest to shoot – it’s very ambitious to make a big film so far on the water.
The intense working conditions exacerbated what Shark Is Shattered Spielberg would later call the “Great Shaw-Dreyfus feud” – the pair didn’t see each other face to face, and the former often mocked the latter between holes. Dreyfus described Shaw as a “big personality” in the 2010 documentary Jaws: The Inner Story. “He is the nicest, gentlest, funniest person you will ever meet, obsessed with evil trolls who would make me his victim.”
“[Shaw] thought Dreyfus needed a slap [that he] was a young punk with no stage experience,” Scheider recalled. “This is ugly,” Spielberg insisted. “But Quint and Hooper also experience this relationship as Shaw and Dreyfus.