Well, Richard Dreyfuss is pissed.
The veteran actor and Oscar winner gave a pretty blistering interview to Vanity Fair this week, mostly focused on his unhappiness with current Broadway sensation The Shark Is Broken, a fictionalized account of the filming of Spielberg classic Jaws. (The play is co-written by and stars Ian Shaw, son of Quint portrayer Robert Shaw, playing his late father opposite Colin Donnell as Roy Scheider, and Beeltejuice star Alex Brightman as Dreyfuss.) But while Dreyfuss (who caught a recent running of the show, dutifully posing for pictures with its cast afterward) reserved most of his ire for the comedic play itself—calling it “as false a picture as I can possibly imagine” of the making of the movie—he was also comfortable tossing some shade at Steven Spielberg and Jaws co-writer Carl Gottlieb, who he apparently holds responsible for the spread (or at least the failure to stop the spread) of rumors about an on-set “feud” between him and Shaw that makes up a large part of their characterization in the play.
“I have enormous respect for Steven’s talent as a director,” Dreyfuss notes at one point in the interview. “I guess I don’t have as much for his talent as a friend.”
Dreyfuss—who says that Ian Shaw never reached out to him while writing the play, although he grants that he has “more than any right to write whatever he wants”—refutes the idea that he and Robert Shaw shared anything but good-natured ribbing during their time on the film, and that rumors that the two men were in a “feud” only appeared some 30 years after the fact. “Thirty years after the film is over, I start to hear this thing about a feud,” he says in the interview, saying he’s angry that Spielberg and Gottlieb didn’t do anything to refute the rumors. “I don’t think they just gave it any thought that it would hurt me, and it did. I have to say that Carl and Steven knew better, knew that there was no feud. There was an ongoing kind of humor between us. If you only saw us on the set, then you might think that there was something—a feud that was going on—but it was never real. Never. And I hold that against Carl and Steven.”
As for the play itself, Dreyfuss says some incidents—a moment when Shaw challenged him to do just five push-ups—were drawn from reality, while others (a full-blown panic attack on the movie’s set) were completely fabricated. “The problem is that they made my character the fool,” Dreyfuss says, stating that he only went to see the play in the first place “to see if it really was gonna hurt.” “They didn’t do that to Roy, and they didn’t do that to Robert. And that hurt because it wasn’t true.”