When JAWS Premiered; or, the Hottest and Coolest Weekend on Record
“The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.” — Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK (1851)
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Friday, June 20, 1975. Newspapers report the assassination of mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana. Gerald Ford authorized his campaign to start fundraising for his presidential bid. Postal workers picketed in Washington, D.C. The House of Representatives passed an energy conservation bill.
Oh, and the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws forever changed Hollywood.
Make no mistake. I’m talkin’ about change. I’m talkin’ about forever. And I’m talkin’ about sharkin’.
So call me Ishmael, and call this story Fish Tale.
Most writing about Jaws understandably details its troubled production. “We fought weather, we fought the sea, we fought the tide,” producer Richard Zanuck claimed, with co-producer David Brown adding, “We [also] fought electronics,” meaning a prop shark that didn’t always behave properly.
The result cost $8 million, a one hundred percent budget overrun. MCA-Universal was worried. And while lost on the ocean blue, Spielberg feared his new career was already over.
Yes, Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws had been a bestseller. But what would moviegoers make of its costly film adaptation? Would it float to the top, or would it sink like a stone, down to 20,000 leagues?
On March 28, 1975, Zanuck and Brown screened a sneak preview of Jaws in Dallas, Texas. “We wanted to get away from the saltwater,” Zanuck joked, when asked why they chose a landlocked city.
3,000 people came out in the midst of rain and a cold front to see the movie. Audience response cards came back at 98 percent excellent. Boxoffice reported that audible gasps “punctuated the action from the opening moments on.”
Zanuck and Brown gave an impromptu second screening in Dallas that night, with audience response cards equally positive. The same was true of a preview in Long Beach. Universal had dipped its toes in the box-office water, and it felt good, really good.
Joe Alves, Jaws’ production designer, attended one of the previews, and recently told me, “I didn’t know if the audience would laugh at the shark, because the crew used to, making funny noises and everything. After the shot was done, they’d laugh. So when I went to the first screening, my first thought was I hope they don’t laugh. But they started screaming. And Lew Wasserman [the head of MCA-Universal] said, ‘We’ve got to rethink the distribution.’”
Some of Universal’s distribution plans were problematic, to the extent that the U.S. Justice Department warned the studio against accepting blind bids from exhibitors in order to screen Jaws. The studio relented, urgently showing the movie for those who were originally told they had to book it sight-unseen.
One theater owner was so angry that he announced he wouldn’t book Jaws until “Hell freezes over.” After seeing the movie, he sent a telegram admitting, “Hell has just frozen.”
For the first time, Universal made exhibitors “responsible for bearing a proportionate share of the national ad cost above and beyond their investment in local cooperative advertising.” They had to agree to that investment before bidding on Jaws. Some exhibitors balked, but they gave in, hook, line, and sinker, even though their split on the film for the first twelve weeks was 90/10, favoring Universal.
Without a doubt, though, the most important and influential aspect of the Jaws distribution strategy was its wide release.
In my interview, Jaws’ screenwriter Carl Gottlieb recalled, “It was the first time that a film opened on more than fifty screens. That was unheard of at the time. It was an industry precedent, because normally audiences didn’t see films until weeks or months after they were released.”
In 1975, David Brown explained, “The old idea was to make a class film, which we hope Jaws is as well as a mass film, and open it first in New York, probably at an East Side house, then in Westwood, and then let the media percolate to the peasants of the world that it’s a great hit.” Such was the chum line of the traditional slow release.
Zanuck described their new approach to distribution: “Jaws has gotten a massive release in about 500 theaters with a very intensive television campaign, probably the biggest, I would say of all time. The deals Universal has made are extraordinary.”
Brown added, “It has become apparent to distributors today that they can get their money back faster and satisfy the demand to see a film by adopting a broader release pattern. When you have a film like Jaws, why make audiences wait six months or a year?”
In retrospect, that logic seems, well, very logical. But Gottlieb remembered that Lew Wasserman questioned the strategy even after it was developed, maintaining that the best film advertising was a photograph of long lines in New York City, with the rest of the country put on hold, having to wait with baited breath.
Nevertheless, Universal put the revolutionary strategy into practice. The card dealers at the Universal casino clearly told America to Go Fish. Jaws would open at 409 American theaters on Friday, June 20, 1975.
In mid-April, as Universal began preparing an “unprecedented” TV blitz, the “ultimate move in saturation advertising,” Variety referred to Jaws as a “potential blockbuster.”
More than anything else, the centerpiece of the ad campaign was Roger Kastel’s artwork for the Jaws movie poster: a single, salient, image that encapsulated the entire film’s story, as evocative as it was unforgettable.
And yet, the irony is that Kastel didn’t create his image for the film. Instead, he painted it specifically for the Bantam paperback of Benchley’s novel, thinking up the idea after he read the book.
Kastel recently told me, “After doing a quick sketch for the art director, his direction to me was, ‘Make the shark larger.’ After that, I was on my own with no other direction, and the painting was left up to me. After the publication of the paperback book, Universal Studios bought the rights to the cover from Bantam, and it was used for the poster. I had no contact with Universal about the movie poster.”
Kastel had no contact with the studio, but everyone in America soon had contact with him, through the medium of his artwork. Like a shark, Kastel’s painting was really a miracle of evolution, of cinematic evolution. It remains one of the most profound images in film history.
As for the movie, near-record advances began to shore up at Universal by early June 1975. The number totaled $20 million by the middle of that month, enough to cover the film’s budget and marketing. (“For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.”)
Yes, indeed. Jaws would make millions: that was the word in the days just before it premiered at the Rivoli in New York City on Thursday, June 19. Proceeds benefited the Boys Club of New York.
The weather in Manhattan that weekend was sunny and not too humid. (Come on in. The water’s fine.)
Jaws quickly took a bite out of the Big Apple. Its first three days at 46 theaters brought in $1 million, “outdistancing everything in sight,” Boxoffice reported, adding, “Jaws is destined for the record books.”
The New York Times jokingly worried the film would result in “frayed armrests in local movie theaters.” And Roy Scheider described his shock at the sheer number of moviegoers who mobbed him in the streets.
While Jaws played New York, a night-flying helicopter flew a “40-foot electrically-illuminated billboard to help promote the film.” Swimmers were no longer safe at the beach or in the sky.
There wasn’t much variety in what Variety would report about Jaws’ first, monumental weekend. It made “whopping” money in Philly, and went “stratospheric” in Detroit. It was a “wow” in Minneapolis and a “smash in Buffalo.” It was the “biggest success story ever at the Memphis box-office.”
“Getting right to the point, Jaws is an artistic and commercial smash,” Variety’s review declared. Boxoffice praised its “relentless impact, molding strong characterizations, stunning special effects, and an underlying sense of pure probability into a fully satisfying experience.”
Amity came from many other critics as well. Consider these reviews, all published on June 21, 1975:
“Jaws is a tremendous horror film, maybe one of the best ever.” — New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Jaws, the shark thriller … is eating its way into the ranks of classic films.” — Omaha World-Herald
“A slick, powerfully scary, jump-out-of-your-seat and gnaw-at-your-knuckles fish tale, Jaws is potent enough to temper your enthusiasm for saltwater beaches this summer.” — Boston Herald-American
To be sure, there were a few negative reviews, like the bilgewater that swirled in the pages of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and the Chicago Daily News. (From hell’s heart, we stab at thee.)
Of course, the important point is that the weekend of June 20, 1975 didn’t really end on Sunday night, June 22, not when it came to Jaws. The Orca was unmoored, adrift in a sea of acclaim.
By the end of its first week, Jaws had made approximately $14,310,000. Its New York gross totaled over $2 million. (“Not a bad record for this vicinity.”)
MCA’s stock jumped to a new high. And Boxoffice announced, “Universal Pictures set a worldwide industry record for a single week’s theatrical film rental with billings of $17,942,000 for June 20–26 … Primary contributor to the seven-day record was the phenomenal opening weekend business of Jaws.” (Note to MCA: You’re going to need a bigger bank.)
Of course, it is worth remembering that Jaws’ bite radius wasn’t as large as we might at first imagine. Though it did open wide — so very, very wide for its time — many moviegoers still had to wait to see it. Not long, mind you, but another week or two, or even a month or two.
The result did indeed become something of a long weekend, a very long weekend where audiences kept reeling in the same shark, over and over again.
Joe Alves recalled, “I went away on a rafting trip, and we were up in the Sierra Nevadas, and we came to this small town. There was such a long line of people, and we wondered what was going on. It was a theater showing Jaws. ‘Oh my god,’ I thought. I guess it’s doing well.”
‘Twas, ‘twas. My parents saw Jaws in my small hometown of Ardmore, Oklahoma, after it anchored at the Video Twin on August 15, 1975. A frightened woman in front of them jumped so hard during one scene that her soft drink ended up drenching Mom. Splish, splash, time for wrath.
I was far too young to attend a PG-rated movie, but I distinctly remember being scared that a shark at the bottom of my bed would bite my feet. Silly? Probably, or maybe I was just swimming in the same waters as Saturday Night Live, which would introduce its “Land Shark” sketch later that autumn.
But hey, we’re still in the summer of ’75, a time when Jaws was chomping on new cities and towns, and new viewers had a chance to chew things over for themselves:
“Technically brilliant; all the better — more mesmerizing — for its stark reality.” — Geoffrey Chapman, The Bennington Banner (Bennington, Vermont)
“No contest! This is the picture of the year and one of the top ten in the history of American film.” — Brian A. Higgins, WSMU-TV, Worcester, Indiana
“Nothing compares with it in the history of film.” — Jack Kelvie, Viking Films, Hopkins, Minnesota
Steven Spielberg later said, “The reactions of the public showed me that the film worked and was touching the primeval fears of the audience. The greatest thing a director can achieve is a film that works on a very fundamental level.”
Carl Gottlieb told me that he and his wife were also extremely pleased with the audience response, including how they reacted to the scene in which Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) sees a head floating in the depths below.
“I knew the manager at one of the theaters where Jaws was playing,” Gottlieb remembered, “so we knew that when the head appears at the bottom of the boat, and if you are at the back of the theater, you can see the entire audience jump at the same time. The whole audience levitates and then sits back. We’d go out for dinner, somewhere in Hollywood, and say ‘Hey, its time for the head,’ and so the manager would wave us in, and we would stand at the back at the theater. We saw the magic at work.”
But Gottlieb wasn’t the only person who kept going back to Jaws. “There was another phenomenon that no one counted on,” he explained. “Jaws was the first time that 18–35s would go multiple times to see the same movie. They’d go again and again: thirty million, coming back three and four times, which increased the size of the audience exponentially.”
Jaws and its distribution strategy were indeed new, but that didn’t keep exhibitors from relying on some good, old-fashioned ballyhoo to promote it.
A theater in San Antonio featured a “live shark display” in a lobby aquarium. A theater in Dedham, Massachusetts displayed various shark jawbones. A theater in Milwaukee sold tickets through a “large cutout of the shark’s toothy likeness.”
And a theater in Portland, Oregon held a swimming pool contest that judged how long folks could hold their breath underwater. The winner received a one-year free pass to the theater.
Best of all was the real, live shark given away to a winning contestant in Milwaukee. A woman from Racine won, having thought of the word “McMunch” to complete the phrase “Jaws Legend _______.”
In Newark, theaters were projecting the film continuously, seven days a week, to meet the demand. “Hundreds upon hundreds of customers are still being turned away from many showings at most houses,” Boxoffice reported.
The same wonderful problem happened in Houston, where the Champions Village Twin added midnight screenings to help with overflow crowds. A kind gesture, really, to the good folks who helped make Jaws the theater’s all-time biggest hit.
In Raleigh, would-be viewers became irate when the theater announced tickets had sold out. According to Boxoffice, “The crowd was indeed furious, the manager said. In fact, one man told him if he had a gun, he would kill him. Even those who had tickets tore the ropes from the hooks in the theater lobby and disregarded all attempts to get them to enter in an orderly fashion.”
Then a female patron at a Milwaukee theater literally bit the hand of the ticket-taker, apparently believing it was someone trying to steal her ticket. The ticket-taker needed a tetanus shot. Surprisingly, the patron didn’t get arrested; she should have been hung up by her Buster Browns.
Of course movie theaters weren’t the only place to see Spielberg’s shark that summer. A Jaws T-shirt sold 500,000 units in eight weeks. Readers devoured Carl Gottlieb’s book The Jaws Log. Approximately 200,000 film buffs bought LPs of the Jaws soundtrack. And demand for souvenirs like real shark’s teeth was never bigger.
By late July, on the Jersey shore, an ice cream dealer rechristened two of his popular flavors “Jawberry” and “Sharklate.” And the Commodore Restaurant in Dayton, Ohio served shark fillets to all of those brave enough to order them. (“Little shakin’, little tenderizin’, and down you go.”)
Everywhere one turned, it seemed, Jaws was there, and so was Roger Kastel’s iconic painting. Kastel recalled, “I was surprised that the movie poster had such widespread popularity. One of the things that was most surprising was the number of editorial cartoons about the poster. I continue to be amazed by the attention my Jaws image had then and continues to have to this day.”
The fish were jumping, and the sharks were biting. Tourist bureaus in places “from Maine to Miami” were probably the only folks who weren’t happy, believing that Jaws was scaring people away from the beaches. A lawyer advised them to “seek to have a disclaimer run with … Jaws, pointing out the rarity of a shark attack on the Atlantic coast.” Surf’s up, but profits down.
No matter. By early September, Jaws took “the biggest bite of all,” Boxoffice reported, having grossed $124.3 million in less than eighty days, thus becoming the number one movie hit of all time. By that time, the film was playing at nearly 1,000 theaters, including one near you.
At the annual Universal luncheon in October, “Jaws fever” was making everyone’s temperature happily rise. Spielberg had already signed a four-picture deal with the company. The tide was with them.
Jaws had indeed become the “summer blockbuster,” as Variety appropriately and memorably dubbed it, the word “potential” no longer needed.
As Robert Shaw’s Quint might say, “This shark, swallow you whole.”
“The thing that happened with Jaws is that it just sort of grew,” Joe Alves told me, “and we were somewhat dumbfounded with its success. Surprise, disbelief, and of course being very proud.”
So many reasons to be proud, so very many, from Gottlieb’s script and Spielberg’s direction to Alves’ production design and Kastel’s artwork, from the stars’ acting and Bill Butler’s cinematography to Verna Fields’ editing and John Williams’ score. “It was,” as Gottlieb has rightly affirmed, “the perfect popcorn movie.”
It is impossible to overstate the impact Jaws would have on film distribution, making the wide release not only acceptable, but also inevitable, at least when it came to blockbusters. In this way, as in so many others, the film continues its enormous influence.
Nevertheless, all weekends — even long, summer weekends — must finally come to an end. And so it is now time to sing, “Farewell and adieu, to you fair Spanish ladies.” Or perhaps a simple “fin” will suffice.
(The author would like to thank Joe Alves, Carl Gottlieb, Steve Joiner, and Roger Kastel for their kind assistance)
