JAWS: You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Theater.
Every summer arrives with at least a half dozen hopeful blockbusters grasping for our dollars, like beggars in designer clothes. And I’m old enough to remember before films presented themselves with such audacity; a time when movie studios assumed that we preferred to spend our summers on vacation, at the cottage or the beach, when the weeks before and after Christmas were when you booked big budget productions in every movie palace and neighbourhood theatre that would show them.
It was a long time ago, and it all ended with a movie about a fish.
But what was happening at the beginning of the summer of 1975 that made us so desperate for distraction? Well, the Watergate trials were finally ending with sentencing and imprisonments, and that episode would get capped with the release of All the President’s Men in theatres a year later, freeing baby boomers to forget Nixon and start thinking about real estate and the stock market. South Vietnam was conquered by North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, but since Nixon ended the draft two years earlier nobody but veterans seemed to care much, and the “domino theory” was yesterday’s political rhetoric.
When June began, Israel removed its tanks and troops from the Suez Canal, the UK voted to stay in the European Community, the Soviets sent the Venera probes to Venus, Pelé signed with the New York Cosmos, the first crude was pumped from the North Sea oil fields and Sam Giancana was shot before he could testify in front of Congress.
A day later Jaws opened nationwide. It made its budget back two weeks later and by the first week of September it had outgrossed The Godfather, and it would sit at the top of the all-time box office records (unadjusted for inflation) until Star Wars unseated it two years later. The film’s production woes had been in the news for much of the previous year, with stories about malfunctioning mechanical sharks, plus budget and schedule overruns. (A 55 day shoot schedule ballooned into 159 days.) It was presumed that Jaws would tank and probably end the career of its young director, Steven Spielberg – best known for a hit TV movie (Duel) and a modestly successful crime picture (The Sugarland Express) – before it had really begun.
That alternate future died with the film’s opening scene.
Read the whole thing.
Exit quote:
Although as Rick McGinnis writes, “The problem with this meme is that there’s every reason to believe that the Mayor was reelected because everyone did vote in November. I live in Canada, you see…”