Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss has a problem with The Shark Is Broken. The play, which centers on the troubled production of Jaws, depicts him in what he thinks is a very unfair, negative light, drawing on third party accounts of a feud between Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, who played Quint opposite Dreyfuss’s Matt Hooper in the movie. Rumors of a feud have circulated for over a decade, with Dreyfuss blaming Steven Spielberg and Jaws co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb for spreading them. He claims that there was no such feud, and that almost every example of a disagreement between the two was either over quickly, or the result of one or both men joking around.
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Dreyfuss also thinks he was treated unfairly in specific, with his character coming off as “a big jerk” and “a fool.”
“It was pretty awful,” Dreyfuss told Vanity Fair. “Ian [Shaw]—who has more than any right to write whatever he wants—never called me and said, ‘Give me some background.’ Or, ‘Give me your take on this and this.’ And they just decided to make my character a big jerk.”
According to Dreyfuss, the only time things got really heated was when he threw Shaw’s bourbon over the edge of a boat; Shaw reacted by blasting Dreyfuss with a hose for such a sustained period he felt like he was going to drown. Ironically, that anecdote does play into Shaw’s characterization in the play as an alcoholic, and Dreyfuss’s characterization as neurotic.
“There were people on the crew who said, ‘What’s this Richard Dreyfuss–Robert Shaw show that’s going on here?’” Dreyfuss told the magazine. “When we were surrounded by lots of other people, Robert would take digs at me, and I would take a dig at him. But that was only to make the hours go better, faster. We didn’t take any of that seriously.”
“The problem is that they made my character the fool,” Dreyfuss added. “They didn’t do that to Roy, and they didn’t do that to Robert. And that hurt because it wasn’t true.”
While documentaries have previously been made about the subject, the stage production The Shark Is Broken is set to make its premiere on Broadway after having already earned acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and on London’s West End. The play was written by Joseph Nixon and Ian Shaw, with Shaw being the son of Jaws star Robert Shaw. Shaw is joined in the production by Arrow‘s Colin Donnell as Roy Scheider and Alex Brightman as Richard Dreyfuss.
