Chadwick H. Saxelid's Blog: Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Long-Leggedy Beasties, page 9

The Fly (1986) - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - August 15, 1986
This makes for a terrific double-bill with Together , of course.

Alien (1979) - Trading Card #80

 

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.

Don't Go in the House (1979) - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - August 14, 1980
Here was a release that managed to provide a memorable blip on my pop culture radar in 1980. That blip consists of my making a comment on how scary the ad made the movie look, to which my mother shot back it was just about torturing women in horrible ways and not the least bit scary. Just gross and cruel.

My mother's scathing commentary only made the concept of Don't Go in the House all the more frightening and disturbing to my thirteen year-old mind. What the hell was happening in that house? When I did manage to see the film on home video, it served as an example of a movie living up to the hype and hatred surrounding it. It was a genuinely unsettling film.

On a side note, this was one of a plethora of Don't titled movies that inspired my favorite fake trailer from 2007's Grindhouse.

Lady Death: Dark Alliance - Trading Card #10

Birds of a Feather
Bad Kitty and Chastity - one uses weapons, the other is the weapon. Both born pain and tragedy, these two ladies have learned that they have more in common than either ever imagined. 

Cat's Eye (1985) - Soundtrack

After his score for Romancing the Stone (1984) garnered positive attention, and just before his score for Back to the Future (1985) would make him a sought after A-list talent, Alan Silvestri was hired to score Cat's Eye (1985). "[Silvestri] was getting his start at the time that we did this," director Lewis Teague points out on a DVD commentary track. "Which is the only reason we could afford him!"

While there was a soundtrack album released by Varèse Sarabande in 1985, it did not make into my collection. Not until 2015, that is. When Intrada released this expanded presentation of Silvestri's original two-track stereo session recordings.
Massive changes were made to Silvestri's score during post-production, of course. Album producer Douglass Fake, in his liner notes, shares how several cues were disassembled, chopped into disparate pieces, and then reassembled, spliced together with unrelated cues.
Rather than attempt to recreate the film's score presentation in exacting detail, Fake and company sequence these original recordings "in the overall picture sequence." Which works for me, since I have not watched Cat's Eye in decades.
For the temperamental purists out there, like me, who might notice the absence of four chords connecting Track #1, Cat's Eye - Intro, to Track #2, Cat Chase, the film edit version is included as a bonus track.

The Skeleton Key (2005) - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - August 13, 2005
Sometimes I get excited for a movie and look forward to seeing it on the big screen. Then it opens and my excitement deflates. This happened with The Skeleton Key. A movie that seems to have all the spooky shenanigans and gothic trappings I enjoy in partaking, yet I just could not motivate myself to get out and see it.

Still have yet to watch it, to this very day.

Alien (1979) - Trading Card #79

 

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) / Curse of the Faceless Man (1958) - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - August 12, 1958
I remember reading comments and commentary, some positive and some negative, about the obvious debt that Alien (1979) owed to It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958).

If I were to dig back into the fanzines of the late 50s and early 60s, would there be comments and commentary about the obvious debt that It! The Terror from Beyond Space owed to The Thing from Another World (1951)? The chances of that having been the case might range from "Perhaps" to "More than likely." Because if there is one thing fandom loves more than enjoying and engaging with genre output, it is bitching and moaning about how that very same output is being done wrong.

Lady Death: Dark Alliance - Trading Card #9

Alive? But for how long? After returning to her mortal form, Lady Death found that all of her old enemies wanted her dead. Guided by a ghost of police officer, and watched over by Death itself, the Diva of Death took on all who challenged her.