Forty-eight Junes ago, summer changed. A twenty-seven-year-old, as yet unknown Steven Spielberg released a shark movie, and thanks in part to some stunning casting choices-Roy Scheider as a decent police chief, Richard Dreyfuss in peppery scientist mode, the flinty British actor Robert Shaw as the Ahab-like fisherman Quint-the result ate the box office. "Jaws" shifted Hollywood, which shifted the culture as a whole. At sea, when a whale dies, it can fall to the ocean floor and decay into a nutrient-rich structural reef, the basis of a food web that can last for decades. When "Jaws" landed in 1975, it generated its own ecosystem, too. The modern movie industry, with its summer tentpoles, youth-oriented programming, and marketing blitzes, was born in its guts.
"The Shark Is Broken," a play by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, now at the John Golden Theatre, also takes shelter in the "Jaws" skeleton: it's a behind-the-scenes comedy that imagines frequently irritable chats among the movie's three main actors as they wait around for weeks, delayed by the movie's malfunctioning rubber-skinned star. Scheider (Colin Donnell), Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), and Shaw (Ian Shaw, both writing about and playing his own father) idle away the time on the set's lobster boat, which bobs in the ocean off Martha's Vineyard. They talk about everything under the New England sun, like Dreyfuss's yearning for fame and Shaw's constant boozing, and we see how desperate the eager pup (Dreyfuss) is to impress the salty dog (Shaw). There's also a certain amount of meta-theatrical ironizing, subtle as a harpoon. "Do you really think anyone will be talking about this in fifty years?" Robert Shaw scoffs at the two younger men. Thunk.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة August 21, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة August 21, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
