This coming week will mark 50 years since the birth of the summer blockbuster movie arrived via the classic film “Jaws.” The thriller opened on June 20th, 1975. Before the release of “Jaws”, movie companies never gave much thought as to who would be seeing their celluloid products and when. Me and my mom and dad saw the movie that first weekend, on a Sunday at the Yorktown Cinema. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s rewind back to a Sunday in late April of that year. After church, my mother and I stopped at Dominick’s for a grocery load up. While mom moved her cart around the store, I checked out the books and magazines stand. I saw this paperback with a cool looking cover and the word “Jaws” splashed across the front. I had not heard of this book when it was introduced in hardcover but after reading the synopsis on the back, I asked my mom to buy the book for me. She agreed and ponied up the cash for it.
Who could blame me for wanting to read this book?
When we got home, I went to my bedroom to dive into this book. Like Captain Quint hunting the great white shark, I was hooked on this tale and read half the story that day. I was so into “Jaws” that the next morning I asked my parents if I could stay home from school to read the rest of this wild and tense book. They let me do it.
Fast forward two months and while there was very little hype about “Jaws,” I heard a radio report saying folks were standing in line to see the premiere of the film. They noted the sex side story that was in the book was not in the finished movie, so they could land the PG rating. I urged my mom and dad to do a Sunday outing that weekend to see “Jaws” at the Yorktown Cinema and they were up for it.
That Sunday, I convinced my parents to get us to the theater an hour before the first showing. They thought I was nuts but rolled with my request. After buying our tickets, we sat on a bench in the theater lobby while mom kept asking why we showed up so early for the movie. I insisted a crowd was coming and twenty minutes later the whole lobby was filled with filmgoers. Then mom stopped whining. Ha!
This was the daily scene during the summer of ’75. Folks lined up to see “Jaws.”
The movie sold out, we got to our seats and for the next two hours were wrapped up in the tale of a great white shark terrorizing the resort town of Amity, Long Island, New York. The hunt for the shark was a thrill and so was the tension between Rober Shaw as Captain Quint, Richard Dreyfus as shark expert Matt Hooper and water phobic Amity police chief Martin Brody played by Roy Scheider.
For the rest of the summer of 1975, the American movie going public was caught up in the “Jaws” phenomenon. Anything shark related was big news on TV and there was no stopping this crazy juggernaut. Anytime we’d drive by the Yorktown theater all I saw were long lines of folks trying to get into every sold -out showing of the first ever summer blockbuster. I didn’t end up seeing the movie for a second time until that fall when the York Theater finally got to show “Jaws” for a few weeks. My dad wanted to see it again and we loved it as much as the first time we caught it back in June.
Chief Brody was about to get a peek at the hunted great white shark. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
As the years passed, we learned more about the making of this movie. Its director Stephen Spielberg made a major name for himself in Hollywood. One irony to the “Jaws” explosion. Actor Richard Dreyfus thought the movie was going to be a bomb and the end of his acting career. Well, “Jaws” remains a classic film that made untold millions and Dreyfus did O.K. for himself. He only went on to star in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and win a Best Actor Oscar for “The Goodbye Girl.”
This all went down fifty years ago. Yet my memories of Jaws-mania remain as clear as if they just happened yesterday.
Next Blog: When I know, you’ll know.