Sharky's Machine (film)
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Sharky's Machine is a 1981 motion picture directed by Burt Reynolds. Reynolds also starred in the title role of Sgt Tom Sharky. The movie is an adaptation of William Diehl's first novel Sharky's Machine (1978), with a screenplay by Gerald Di Pego. Diehl, who was age fifty when he wrote the novel, saw the movie shot on location in and around his hometown of Atlanta, GA. It's cast included Vittorio Gassman, Brian Keith, Charles Durning, Earl Holliman, Rachel Ward, Bernie Casey, Henry Silva, and Richard Libertini.
It has been the most successful box-office release of a film directed by Burt Reynolds.
[edit] Plot
- Tagline: Some cops are good at opening cases. Sharky knows how to finish one.
Tom Sharky is a narcotics cop in Atlanta who's demoted to vice after a botched bust. In the depths of this lowly division, while investigating a high-dollar prostitution ring, Sharky stumbles across a mob murder with government ties, and responds by assembling his downtrodden fellow investigators (Sharky's "machine") to find the leaders and bring them to justice before they kill off all his partners and witnesses, including Sharky himself.
[edit] Trivia
- A remake of the film is in production, starring Mark Wahlberg and tentatively scheduled for a 2008 released.
- At 220 feet, the stunt from Atlanta's Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel still holds up as the highest free-fall stunt ever performed from a building for a commercially-released film. The stuntman was the legendary Dar Robinson. Despite it being a record-setting fall (only the briefest moment of the beginning of it is used in the movie), the bulk of the fall from the skyscraper as shown on film is clearly of a dummy.1
