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Crazy Fact of the Day: An Enemy of the People Edition

Sometimes we all just curl up in bed on a Saturday afternoon and dick around on the internet reading about plays, right? No? Just me?

Well then. This article is going to be all the more important and life changing for the rest of you, now, isn’t it? Because I just learned the most awesome and ridiculous thing this weekend, and I’m about to share it with you. Prepare yourselves to be edumacated.

Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People — a new translation of which opens on Broadway next week, starring Boyd Gaines and Richard Thomas — was, in part, inspiration for the blockbuster flick Jaws. That’s correct, an 1882 play by a Norwegian dude, about political battles between two brothers over the baths in a small Norwegian town, served as inspiration for one of the world’s first summer blockbusters about a Great White Shark terrorizing a seaside town and eating people and shit.

So. It turns out Henrik Ibsen was at least  responsible for causing your nightmares even before you got to college and majored in English literature and you didn’t even know it! (No, just me again? Okay.)

The internet tells me that apparently, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb and director Stephen Spielberg thought of Jaws as Moby-Dick meets Enemy of the People.” Pretty cool, huh? Also, totally weird but totally awesome. And, something you’re for sure going to drop at your next Sondheim-esque dinner party to impress people with your vast, genre-spanning cultural knowledge. You are welcome.

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