Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studio.

[music]

Brigid Bergin: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, in for Alison Stewart. A new play about the making of Jaws is an intimate look behind the scenes written by the son of actor Robert Shaw, who plays his own father in the show. In the play, The Shark is Broken, we learn things were far from smooth sailing during that movie shoot on Martha's Vineyard, the mechanical shark kept breaking down, the weather wouldn't cooperate, and the stars of the film, well, let's just say there was some friction.

Ian Shaw plays his father, Robert Shaw, who starred as the eccentric Captain Quint in the film. Robert was a brilliant actor and thinker, and also someone who could be combative. He was often drinking or drunk during filming. Tony nominee, Alex Brightman, stars as Richard Dreyfuss, an anxious, fast-talking actor who really grinds Robert's gears. He played shark expert Matt Hooper in the film.

Then there's the star of Jaws, Roy Schneider, played by Colin Donnell in the show. His calm demeanor helped keep Richard and Robert from coming to blows as they were stuck together on a boat between takes over the course of weeks. Just to give you a sense of how different these three men are, here's a clip from the show of Robert, Richard, and Roy mulling over what they think Jaws is really about, starting with Richard Dreyfuss.

Richard Dreyfuss: What do you think it's about?

Roy Scheider: What?

Richard Dreyfuss: This movie. This [beep] movie. It's got to be about something. Everything is about something. I think it's about the subconscious.

Roy Scheider: Come again?

[laughter]

Richard Dreyfuss: Sharks are these ancient, primal creatures, so they represent all the primal fears in all of us, all the terrors and desires that we keep hidden, all the Freudian crap that my therapist is always talking about. That's the shark. You don't agree?

Roy Scheider: It's an interesting theory.

Richard Dreyfuss: Okay. Well, what do you think it's about?

Roy Scheider: I think it's about responsibility. When the government puts profit before people, if you can't get rid of the bastards, you've got to take care of the mess yourself, even if it scares you, for the good of the community.

Robert Shaw: Wow. Deep.

Richard Dreyfuss: What about you, Robert, what do you think it's about?

Robert Shaw: It's about a shark.

[laughter]

Richard Dreyfuss: Yes, but what's it really about?

Robert Shaw: It's really about a shark. Don't [unintelligible 00:02:39] more into it. It's a killer, a machine for making money. Do you really think they're going to be talking about this in 50 years?

[laughter]

Brigid Bergin: Oh, here we go. Ian Shaw was able to draw in his father's diaries to write The Shark is Broken, which is running at the Golden Theater through November 19th. Joining me now to discuss the show is Ian Shaw, Alex Brightman, and Colin Donnell. Welcome to All Of It.

Ian Shaw: Hello.

Colin Donnell: Thanks for having us. Hello.

Brigid Bergin: [laughs] Ian, I read that you were initially reluctant to do any projects involving your father. What changed your mind?

Ian Shaw: I sketched out the idea for it and put it in a drawer for a year. What changed my mind was my dear friend, David, who was one of the original producers of the show, had a beer with me, and I mentioned that I had sketched out an idea for something, and he thought that it was a brilliant idea. Then I talked about it with other people and they all pushed me towards it. I was very reluctant. You are trying to make your own path in life, and also just the subject matter. I thought that it was fraught with danger. It was only in the process of writing it that I realized, with Joseph Nixon, who was another advocate of the idea, that it was a bit more universal than I had feared, and funnier too.

Brigid Bergin: I can say that it was very funny. Alex, I'm curious, for you, when was the first time you watched Jaws?

Alex Brightman: Probably when I was far too young. My parents raised me on older culture things, the Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar era of things. Then it was no holds barred, really, that it was just I saw movies when I shouldn't have, so probably 10 or 11, and it scared the ever living out of me.

Brigid Bergin: [laughs] Colin, what made you want to sign on to this project?

Colin Donnell: The first time that I read it, I was struck by the humor in it and I thought it was just a really funny, funny script. Then the more I read it, before I walked into the room even, I was struck by how surprisingly hurting and emotional it was. To play a character like this, that is a counterpoint or a balancing point between two outsized personalities, is always intriguing for me. It was the humor on its face, but it was really the emotional depth that ran underneath that, the currents of that underneath the humor that just-- it hit me and made me want to get deeper into it.

Brigid Bergin: Ian, the running joke throughout the play, of course, is that they are waiting around in this boat because the mechanical shark keeps malfunctioning. Are those behind-the-scenes details actually true?

Ian Shaw: They are true. I would say the majority of things in the play are widely known. Spielberg talks about it, Dreyfuss, my dad talked about it before he passed away, and Roy Scheider did as well. There are bits that we think are spiritually true. We tried to stay as close to the very interesting backstory that there actually is. Carl Gottlieb has written about that as well with The Jaws Log, which is just a wonderful book for anybody to read about filmmaking in general. Yes, I don't think we're that far away from what happened.

Brigid Bergin: Part of what you do in the play is you show your father as a talented actor, a brilliant man, but also someone who was struggling with drinking, who is aggressive and argumentative. How did you think about approaching some of the more complicated aspects of his career and character?

Ian Shaw: Well, very carefully. I sent the script out to my own family as well, of which there are a number. He had 10 children. I got back a lot of support from them. They're very honest, as he was. He didn't shy away from the truth, I don't think, in any sphere. The difficulty that me and Joseph had was to examine these difficulties and his caustic personality at times, but also hopefully to present him with the good side as well. He's much beloved by the Shaw family.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. Did it feel cathartic to do that?

Ian Shaw: I think it did, yes. I thought I'd finished the process of grief many years ago, but there was a little bit of grief just in trying to understand him better. I read everything that he wrote and all the interviews that he gave, and I came away with a much deeper portrait of him. I feel I do know him much better. Of course, when you walk a mile in somebody's shoes, you always feel like you are closer to them. That's what actors do. We empathize.

Brigid Bergin: Alex, you play Richard Dreyfuss a lot like the Jaws character, very anxious, neurotic, intelligent. What did you read or learn about Richard that really helped inform your performance?

Alex Brightman: I think there is a lot of complexity to Richard, even to this day. I feel like there's, I would say duality, but I think there's about a dozen other things that come into play. The duality that I saw a lot, and the main theme of him was he's an incredible actor doing incredible, thoughtful, emotional feeling kind of work, which was that generation coming up, the method, having to feel before acting.

At the same time, had incredible imposter syndrome with this idea of every movie could possibly be the last. The last movie, he didn't feel he was very good in. It was this impossible bear trap of, am I good with everyone calling what I'm doing good, but by my own standards, I'm not good. It is this conundrum that goes back and forth that amplifies his ego and narcissism, I think.

Brigid Bergin: You certainly see that play out in that-- one point he's talking about the next epic failure. Then he's also looking forward to his next opportunity to be in a big Spielberg movie, which was a great little scene. Do you have any sense of what actually the real Richard Dreyfuss thinks of the show, has he seen your performance?

Alex Brightman: No, unless he was there secretly, Ian. I think he's aware of it. I think we've been made aware that he's aware of it as well as Spielberg. We've had a couple Jaws people from Jaws 1 and 2 come see the show. All of them loved it, which is great.

Brigid Bergin: That's great.

Alex Brightman: I'm hoping that everybody involved, as many people as possible that were involved with Jaws behind and in front of the camera will come see it. That includes Richard Dreyfuss and Steven Spielberg.

Brigid Bergin: Alex, you've become known for some of your delightfully big musical theater performances from Beetlejuice to School of Rock. What was it like tackling a straight play on Broadway?

Alex Brightman: This is Bliss for me. I've done musicals for a decade and a half with nearly no stopping, which is such a grateful thing to say and such a privileged thing to say. The next privileged thing I'm going to say is that what I wanted to do was a play, desperately. I wanted to do something with no net, no crutch, which sometimes you can with a little song and dance. If you feel like things aren't going your way, you can always use other weapons in your belt.

I'm just having to flex new muscles here. Richard is still big and over the top and there are parts of myself that I brought to other things that I think work here, but this is truly a really hard thing. It continues to be hard, which I think is great because I felt a little more comfortable doing musicals, so I feel wonderfully uncomfortable here.

Brigid Bergin: Ian, why can't Robert resist picking on Richard and just riling him up?

Ian Shaw: Richard winds Robert up, that's the thing.

Alex Brightman: Hey, wait, don't [unintelligible 00:12:32] the blame game here.

Ian Shaw: They're two men with different outlooks at different stages of their career. We forget because Richard Dreyfuss became so enormously famous and successful that in 1974, he really wasn't a household name, whereas Robert was well known and had all the experience and felt that Richard was chasing after fame rather than being an artist, I think. The other theory, of course, is that Robert was giving him a hard time to get good chemistry out of him, which they definitely did achieve, but I don't know whether that's true or not.

Brigid Bergin: I like that. I like the opposing theories. Colin, as you mentioned, Roy Scheider, he's the pacifist in the group, the one who helps keep everyone calm, maybe wants to catch a few rays when there's a moment of peace. How was he able to stay out of the fray for the most part?

Colin Donnell: I think that Roy was the consummate professional. He was the one who knew what the job was and knew what it took to get home at the end of the day. He found himself in this role of playing peacekeeper a bit between these two guys. It speaks to his level of his attitude towards the profession. He showed up to work, he did his job, and then he went home at night. I don't think that he was immune from frustrations, and we see it a bit in the show. I've heard stories of other jobs that he was on where frustrations sometimes got the better of him.

That was his role, and it's a delightful thing to be able to play because, in terms of our story, I get to be immensely involved in what is happening on stage and really connected to all of the action spoken, unspoken, everything between Alex and Ian, Robert and Richard. It's delightful to feel like I'm really in the middle of this tennis match that's going on.

Brigid Bergin: Is there a detail that you learned about Roy that really helped you grasp his character and then enable you to portray it on the stage?

Colin Donnell: Sounds funny, but it's a costume piece. The glasses help immensely. It's something about the way they change the shape of my face or whatever it is. There's a great interview. I know that all of us have gone back and watched all these interviews, which thankfully there are a ton because they were such well-known actors. There's this wonderful interview that Roy does on the Graham Norton Show, and just keying into the physicality of him and his humor and his intelligence and the way that he spoke, it was really wonderful for me to be able to have those touchstones to be able to develop who he was in the context of our story.

Brigid Bergin: How do you think Roy feels about Robert? He doesn't seem to get as easily bothered by him as Richard does.

Colin Donnell: They are of a certain generation of actor. They are essentially contemporaries. Roy was a bit younger than Robert at the time, but they came up in the same club of actors. I think that Roy has an immense respect, and we say it at the end of the play. It's an honor working with you. I think that there is so much to that. I think he sees through Robert a bit and knows what he's doing with Richard, but you can't deny the outcome of it all. There's an ultimate respect for what kind of person that Robert is and what kind of actor Robert is, especially.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. Ian, I know you had access to a drinking diary your father kept. What did reading his diary reveal to you about him that you didn't really know otherwise?

Ian Shaw: It's a moving portrait of somebody who wanted to quit. He wanted to concentrate on his writing and it was really affecting that. There would be a few days where he was successful in not having anything to drink and then there would be a moving entry where he'd fallen off the wagon, essentially.

Brigid Bergin: Your father died when you were very young, just eight years old. Do you have some fond early memories of him?

Ian Shaw: I have very fond memories of him, lots of fond memories.

Brigid Bergin: Any that stand out that you can share with us?

Ian Shaw: He was very funny. He would make me laugh and he was very playful and he loved children. I remember playing with him. I remember I had a little golf club and I would play golf with him. He was naughty and he encouraged me to be defiant in a strange way. I would sit at the end of the table and I would bring a joke book along, a long table because we had all these other children, and there would be other people at the house. I would be telling jokes at the end of the table and interrupting the grownups. He would walk down occasionally to the end and pick me up and just put me outside the door quite gently and just close the door on me, which sounds a little bleak, but it was funny.

Brigid Bergin: You were just a kid when he died. Did you understand his drinking and that it was a problem or did that understanding only come later?

Ian Shaw: It was later. It didn't interfere with our lives. He was a functioning alcoholic in that respect. Certainly, it didn't affect me particularly at all.

Brigid Bergin: Alex, throughout the play, it seems that the actors involved have no real sense that they're working on a movie that's about to become a smash hit. Do you relate to that feeling in any way of not knowing something you're involved in is going to be good while you're in it?

Alex Brightman: I think every actor, and I can speak for a lot of them, because I've done a lot of readings and workshops of shows that are to then try and go the distance, whether it's on Broadway or even regionally to try and come to Broadway. You being in it, you have to be this kind of optimist in a way because you're in it. To have any negativity or pessimism about it, I think isn't helpful.

I think I've become more keen to the idea that if I'm involved in something, especially if it's a week-long thing just to help out some writers, I'm always able to find a silver lining in what it is because it was written and I have massive respect for anybody putting anything on a page and getting it done. I think there's extreme vulnerability doing that in front of friends. I think I've become more keen to go, "I think this is good. I don't know if it's great yet." I think it's always a yet thing because I think everything has potential. I think the last number of things I've done whilst in it, I was like, "I think this is pretty good."

[laughter]

Brigid Bergin: Let's hear another scene from the play in which Richard Dreyfuss talks with Roy Scheider about Steven Spielberg.

Richard Dreyfuss: Say, what do you think of Steven?

Roy Scheider: Oh, well, first thing is that I think people underestimate him. He may be just a kid, but he's an old head on young shoulders. Having said that, I think he may be clinically insane.

[laughter]

Richard Dreyfuss: Really?

Roy Scheider: Yes. He's shooting on the ocean, man. Nobody shoots on the ocean. How many water tanks Universal has? You know what it's like. You work your butt off all day. You're at the mercy of nature, wind, rain, tides, sun, overexposure to all of them. Jews should stay away from water. Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water.

Richard Dreyfuss: Didn't Jesus walk on water?

Roy Scheider: Yes, and look what happened to him.

[laughter]

Brigid Bergin: Colin, we know what Richard thinks. How do you think Roy feels about Spielberg?

Colin Donnell: The truth is that Spielberg was a kid when he was doing this. The gumption of what he was doing was so-- It was insane. The fact that it was a movie being shot on the water for the first time out on the open ocean. It speaks to Roy's character that he just went along with it. He's like, "Yes, sure. Let's do this." I think it's the same. Like Alex was saying, when you do something, whether or not you're doing it for the artistic integrity or the money, in which case, we were maybe trying to do it, you get the job done. I think that's where Roy's head was at, was, "Let's get this done. There'll be other movies after this. I'll do more, but I'm going to make it the best thing that I can while I'm here."

Brigid Bergin: Ian, what do you know about how your father felt about the movie Jaws? Was he proud of his work on that project?

Ian Shaw: I think it was afterwards. It was one of those things that's like they talk about Casablanca. It's when you're in the midst of it. You haven't got the music. You haven't got Verna Fields's incredible editing. You are just seeing these little bits. He saw glimpses of genius from Spielberg, I think, as it went on, his respect grew and grew to the point where they were going massively over budget and he thought, "I will defer my wages if they'll accept a point or a quarter of a point." Which they didn't give him. They just gave him his wages back down the line.

He definitely saw something. I think he had great respect for the technicians. Mike Chapman, who was a cinematographer in his own right, was the camera operator. Bill Butler was a genius as well. The trouble is that the shark was broken and the script wasn't great. That was the problem [crosstalk]

Brigid Bergin: It was hard to have all the confidence.

Ian Shaw: It was hard to have all the confidence. Even at the end of it all, Zanuck and Brown said that they went into the theaters when the film was finished, and they weren't quite sure whether people would laugh at the shark or be horrified. They were very gratified when it was the latter.

Brigid Bergin: Was it ever for years and years and years to come? Ian, one of the big scenes you have to do in the play is your father doing the famous monologue about the USS Indianapolis. Let's hear a bit of it from the movie.

Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was coming back from the island of Tinian to Leyte, just delivered the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. 1100 men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger, 13-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail.

Brigid Bergin: Ian, what was your approach to this scene? Did you want to get it as close to your father's performance as you could or did you want to have your own spin on it?

Ian Shaw: I wanted it to be like my father's, but at the same time, you are performing in a theater, so it has to be slightly different. We wanted it to look like it was the moment. I'm obsessed with that. Actually, people have asked me about how the play came about and I have said, "Perhaps the starting point was when I looked in the mirror and I had a mustache for another role, but I looked like Quint."

I really think that it's probably to do with the Indianapolis speech in a way because the myth of that-- It's a moment-- You really shouldn't be putting that in a film in a way because you're supposed to show things, not tell them. Also, my father's involvement in writing it along with Sackler and Milius just meant that I was always intrigued about that particular event in Jaws and just wondered what would it be like if we did that speech in a theater? It does feel electric when you're doing it, for me as well as the audience.

Alex Brightman: As the other actors on stage with you.

Colin Donnell: It's really fun.

Alex Brightman: It's very fun.

Brigid Bergin: I'm wondering, we could talk so much longer about what this play talks about, what this means in terms of the relationships among all three of you on the stage. It is so dynamic to see you there. You barely leave the stage, I think. Even when you're transitioning scenes, I don't remember you being fully off stage except for just a few moments when one of the actors has a monologue. In our final few moments, what are you hoping audiences are thinking about or talking about as they leave the theater after seeing the show? I'd love to hear from each of you an answer to that. Why don't you start, Ian?

Ian Shaw: First of all, I hope that they are entertained, they come along and they're laughing a lot, which makes me very happy. I'm also hoping that they're moved by moments in the play and that they're stimulated. It's a short play. It runs at 90 minutes. There's plenty of time for them to have a drink afterwards and I hope that they have conversations.

Brigid Bergin: Alex, how about you?

Alex Brightman: I really hope that people come away with it laughing. I hope people come away with it thinking about their own family. My big thing right now that I keep coming back to here is that these big personalities didn't just appear in the world as they were. They came from places. I think this idea of figuring out and dissecting where you came from and how you came about is such an interesting thing for me.

Brigid Bergin: Colin, last word for you.

Colin Donnell: Golly, the last word. First and foremost, being entertained and laughing, but I want people to be surprised. I want them to have that same reaction that I did of experiencing some wonderful humor and feeling like you got blindsided by some really deeper emotional experiences. It's fun.

Brigid Bergin: I will report it is fun. We're going to leave it there for now. My guests have been Ian Shaw, Alex Brightman, and Colin Donnell, they all star in The Shark is Broken now running on Broadway at the Golden Theater through November 19th. Thank you all so much for joining me on All Of It.

Alex Brightman: Thank you.

Colin Donnell: Thank you.

Ian Shaw: Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.