The Shark Is Broken by Ian Shaw & Joseph Nixon - Review

As much as I would have loved to have seen a performance of The Shark Is Broken during its limited Broadway run, it was not to be. 

A long planned international trip in the late summer of 2023 necessitated that our more or less annual Broadway crawl take place in July that year. The Shark Is Broken would not open on Broadway until August. The best I could manage was to take a photo of the marquee of the John Golden Theatre, where the production would be housed during its painfully brief (for me, at least) engagement.

New York City - July 8, 2023

Two years later a friend gifted me The Shark Is Broken book for my birthday. A celebration that not only coincided with the 50th anniversary of my favorite film of all time, but also the 50th anniversary of my seeing it for the very first time.

Yeah, I am that old.

Over the last two or three decades I have read a good baker's dozen or so books detailing the film's trouble-plagued production. Troubles that have become the stuff of legend and myth. So I cracked open The Shark Is Broken eager to see what facts made it into this fictionalized and comedic interpretation of Jaws notorious production woes and personality clashes, versus what creative licenses would be taken by writers Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon to ensure an engaging and entertaining 90 or so minutes.

Well, from my admittedly limited perspective and foreknowledge, that answer seems to be six of one and half dozen of the other. 

At the very beginning of The Shark Is Broken, the fictional Roy Scheider repeats something that the real Roy Scheider said in a behind-the-scenes interview during the making of Jaws, "It's not the time it takes to take the take that takes the time... It's the time it takes between the takes that takes the time to take the take."

Translation: Behind every second of screen time rests hours, days, weeks, and perhaps even months of work. Work that devours time and patience. 

That means every production set, no matter how smooth or chaotic it might be, will have actors sitting and waiting, struggling to fill that time between those takes. It is within those long, boring stretches of time that The Shark Is Broken takes place. Right smack dab in the center of that ever widening gulf of 'free time' between takes are three frustrated, bored, and often overwhelmed actors trying to maintain their sanity.

The dynamic between the trio mirrors and echoes the dynamic of the characters they are playing in the film. Robert Shaw (Quint) is an irascible and sharp tongued drunk, quick and relentless in doling out scathing comments capable of drawing blood. Richard Dreyfuss (Matt Hooper) is a young and hungry talent, who vacillates between outbursts of prideful determination and neurotic self-doubt. Between the two sits Roy Scheider (Martin Brody), who, by default, becomes something of a stabilizing everyman tasked with anchoring, or reining in, the volatile Shaw and Dreyfuss during their intermittent emotional outbursts.

I do think there is a brutal honesty fueling The Shark Is Broken. Underneath the mundane and day-to-day grind of the film's trouble-plagued production lurks an existential dread. The trio of actors cannot help but start to feel that they have become trapped by the difficult film shoot and, as the days drag on and on and on, begin questioning, and oft times regretting, their decision to work on this stupid film. 

Shaw's contemptuous dismissal of the film as a shallow, meaningless, and quick to be forgotten cinematic trifle serves as an ironic reminder to its audience that there was a period of time when few, if any, that worked on Jaws would dare to think it could be anything more than a goofy thriller about a giant shark.

I do not know when, if ever, I will be able to see The Shark Is Broken performed on stage. But, having read it, my desire to do so remains undiminished.