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BreakingNews.ie
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- BreakingNews.ie
First official Jaws documentary to examine film's impact 50 years on
The first authorised Jaws documentary is to examine the film's impact on the perception of sharks to celebrate the film's 50th anniversary. Jaws At 50: The Definitive Inside Story will feature interviews with director Steven Spielberg, Ian Shaw, the son of Robert Shaw – who played professional shark hunter Quint, and Lorraine Gary who played Ellen Brody, along with other cast members, when it airs on National Geographic and Disney+. Advertisement The 90-minute documentary will also feature home videos and rare outtakes from Spielberg and writer Peter Benchley's personal archives, and a behind the scenes look at the making of the movie, including its malfunctioning animatronic shark and Spielberg's fears the film would end his career. The feature will also look at the wave of shark fear from the public following the movie's release, and will look at the novel which started the story through interviews with Benchley's wife, ocean policy advocate Wendy Benchley and their children. Famous fans including JJ Abrams, Emily Blunt, James Cameron, Cameron Crowe, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, Guillermo del Toro and Robert Zemeckis will also speak about the film along with marine experts. Jaws At 50: The Definitive Inside Story will be directed by Laurent Bouzereau, and will be produced by Spielberg's Amblin Documentaries and Nedland Films. Advertisement The documentary will be released on July 11 (Universal Studios/PA) The documentary frames Jaws, released in 1975, as the 'first summer blockbuster', with the movie being the highest-grossing picture of all time until the release of Star Wars two years later. Jaws tells the story of a man-eating shark, named Bruce by the film's crew, that attacks beachgoers at a resort town on Amity Island, and the attempts of police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and professional shark hunter Quint (Shaw) to hunt it down. The film, based on the 1974 novel by Benchley, was followed by three sequels, and has inspired theme park rides at the Universal Studios theme parks as well as video games. The documentary will premiere on July 11th at 8pm on National Geographic and will stream the same day on Disney+. Advertisement
Irish Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Shark Is Broken review: Ian Shaw is uncannily like his father in this inventive, irreverent play about the making of Jaws
The Shark Is Broken Gaiety Theatre, Dublin ★★★☆☆ Jaws, Steven Spielberg's film from 1975, was a notoriously chaotic production, riddled with mishaps and other stumbling blocks that paradoxically coalesced into the birth of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. 'Bruce', the shark, one of three malfunctioning mechanical models, seldom worked in the seawater, leaving the film-maker to rely on shadowy glimpses and John Williams's tremendous score. That same iconic soundtrack is playfully referenced in Adam Cork's score for this inventive making-of stage production. In Spielberg's film the mismatched personalities of the shark hunter, Quint (Robert Shaw), the police chief, Brody (Roy Scheider), and the marine biologist, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), form a reluctant camaraderie in their quest to kill the murderous fish. The Shark Is Broken merrily mirrors this dynamic in its clever re-creation of the many weeks of downtime that the trio endured. Together they bicker, booze, bond and vomit overboard. READ MORE Ian Shaw, one of Robert Shaw's nine children, plays Robert, investing meaning and metatextuality in the material. (He also cowrote the play, with Joseph Nixon.) The younger Shaw's uncanny approximation of his father is met by the jocular precision of Dan Fredenburgh, playing Scheider, and Ashley Margolis, as Dreyfuss. No tic is unmined. [ Ian Shaw: 'I used to see Dad drink. I was often playing under the table in Irish pubs' Opens in new window ] Over a series of vignettes, stomped out on Duncan Henderson's thrilling re-creation of the Orca, the three actors shift register between Oedipal soul-searching, buffoonery and banter. Fredenburgh's Scheider is the sincere, socially conscious son of a garage mechanic who has nightmares about images emerging from the Vietnam War but loves a good tan. Shaw is a knot of braggadocio, hilarity and wounds. Margolis brings heart and good humour to the swaggering, coke-snorting Dreyfuss – only 26 at the time – who ends up with many of the play's best zingers: 'Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water,' he laments. Bobbing along in Nina Dunn's immersive digital re-creation of the stretch of Atlantic Ocean just off Martha's Vineyard where Spielberg expensively shot the film, the prophetic meta-jokes come thick and fast. 'There will never be a more immoral president than Tricky Dicky,' Scheider says of Richard Nixon. Acting as a movieverse Cassandra, Shaw warns that cinema will descend into a muddle of sequels and remakes. Heartfelt and intimate details, ranging from the suicide of Robert Shaw's father to a shout-out to the actor's adopted home in Tourmakeady, Co Mayo, are counterpointed by top-notch film buffery and broad physical comedy. A wealth of research is parlayed, roughly at times, into a proudly commercial three-hander. For all its historical heft, both personal and cinematic, the writing and direction wisely lean into irreverence throughout this 80-minute crowd-pleaser. The Shark Is Broken is at the Gaiety Theatre , Dublin, until Saturday, May 17th
RTÉ News
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Quint's ghost: Robert Shaw resurrected in The Shark Is Broken
There's a common misconception that the credit and blame for blockbuster cinema rests with Star Wars. That the classic movie age died on May 4th 1977, with the release of George Lucas' space opera upon an unsuspecting public. As far as the Hollywood studios were concerned it didn't happen until the following November, with the release of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Only then did they realise Star Wars wasn't an anomaly: it was a trend. The greenlighting of big-budget bombastic spectacle cinema began in earnest, and arguably has never ceased. In retrospect, it's clear the die was cast two years earlier, when a cloud appeared on the horizon of the beautiful resort community of Amity ('Amity' means 'friendship, you know). A cloud in the shape of a killer shark. The term 'blockbuster' had been around long before the release of Jaws; but it became cemented in the public lexicon forever after the summer of 1975, when people queued around the clock and around the block several times to watch - Steven Spielberg's cinematic rollercoaster scarefest. Watch the original trailer for Jaws Honestly, I don't think it's possible to understate how popular Jaws remains to this day. Arguably, more than Star Wars, there is an all-inclusive, multi-generational love for this film. That's some achievement for one picture (the numbered sequels don't count). No TV shows, billion-dollar mini-series, prequel trilogies: just one two-hour movie. Despite their tidal wave of popularity, none of those franchises have inspired a play about their production. But Jaws has: The Shark Is Broken by Ian Shaw & Joseph Nixon opens at The Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on May 13th. If, as they say, 'success has many fathers but failure is an orphan', the grandfather of Jaws' impact was Robert Shaw and his iconic performance as the gruff shark-hunter, Quint. A world war two veteran with a back-story as thick as his jaw. Shaw himself, a veteran British stage actor, was also the defining James Bond henchman in From Russia With Love, an Oscar-nominated king in A Man For All Seasons, and gave Newman and Redford a run for their money in The Sting. The man had been an intellectual and physical nemesis to some serious players. Now, out in Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Cape Cod, he would face his greatest challenge: boredom. For like the title says, the shark is broken - again. It was much of the time, going by the legend of the movie's production. Watch: Ian Shaw on his play The Shark Is Broken One man who heard these tales directly from the, well, shark's mouth: Robert's son, Ian Shaw, co-author of the play and starring on stage as his father, alongside Dan Fredenburgh as Roy Scheider and Ashly Margolis as Richard Dreyfuss. The elder Shaw was cast as Quint during a fallow period in his film career. Though never out of work, he took the stage more seriously, along with his writing (Shaw authored several best-selling novels during his life). Movies were a means to support his ten children (mostly from two marriages). During the movie's production, the broken shark's now minimal screen time worked in the film and Shaw's favour, with Quint's dark portents and foreboding monologues on land and sea, bringing a tangible primal fear to the now more often than not, invisible threat. Watch: Richard Dreyfuss breaks down after meeting Robert Shaw's granddaughter on The Late Late Show, circa 2010 Shaw's personal nemesis had been alcohol. Being a writer, he kept drinking diaries. One of which, kept during the picture's production in 1974 and re-discovered a few years ago, inspired his son Ian to write the play and inhabited his father, whom he closely resembles. The worldwide success of Jaws made Shaw a wanted man in Hollywood. Some of his post-shark films were pretty good, such as Black Sunday and Robin & Marion. The Deep and The Buccaneers, not so great. But his pay cheques were. This allowed him to take care of his extended family on his farm in Tourmakeady. Co. Mayo. Rober Shaw was barely fifty-one when he died from a heart attack driving home from the shops one afternoon in August of 1978. Spending much of his filmography playing intense, stoic, veteran men of war, sea, politics and whiskey, he was truly a man of all seasons. But in Jaws, a movie for the ages, I venture it's his grizzing Shark-hunting moustachioed Quint, who will be tying sheep-shanks in the audience's collective consciousness for as long as there is cinema. Singing "Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies… Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain… For we've received orders for to sail back to Boston… And so never more shall we see you again."
