HOW A DALLAS AUDIENCE CHANGED “JAWS” (THE MOVIE):
HERE ARE SOME FACTS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE UNLIKELIEST SCARY SUMMER MOVIE OF ALL TIME
“A man ran out of the theater, vomited in the lobby, then returned to his seat. That’s when I knew we had a hit.”
— Steven Spielberg
Remember how frightened we were to go to the beach? For those not quite old enough to have experienced the terror, a summer movie was released nearly five decades ago. It was expected by the studio to bomb at the box office. It was directed by a young film-o-file. Yet it also altered an entire American summer. It even ruined many vacations. After seeing the horrors of bloody shark attacks on the big screen, millions of children (and just as many adults) were terrified to swim or even set foot in the ocean, for weeks, months, and years later.
How did this craziness happen? How could a movie, which everyone understands is a purely fictional made-up story based on a best-selling book by Peter Benchley instill such mass fear?
I just read that Jaws was released 48 years ago. I still remember seeing Jaws during the opening week it came out. Long lines to buy tickets snaked around the block. In the summer of 1975, I lived in Dallas, which we later found out was director Steven Spielberg’s “screen-test city” for his earliest movies.
March 26, 1975, was the date of Jaws’ first-ever showing in front of a live movie audience. The test screening took place at the Medallion in North Dallas. Spielberg had screen-tested at the Medallion before. Spielberg thought Dallas was a microcosm of the entire country — rich and poor, land-locked, kinda’ midwestern, southern, western, and certainly eastern. Released a year earlier, his first major movie The Sugarland Express did well for a light comedy. The Dallas audience laughed in the right spots and appeared to enjoy the movie, which was then left intact and ended up turning a profit, leading to more film work for the then-27-year-old director accustomed to working on episodes of NBC’s crime series Columbo. Thereafter, Spielberg called the Medallion his “good-luck charm.” [See Footnote 1]
Oddly enough, the Jaws debut wasn’t advertised. It was haphazardly promoted with a few movie posters stapled up inside the Medallion lobby promising a free test screening that was set to run following a showing of the hit movie The Towering Inferno. Moviegoers who came to the theatre that night didn’t realize they’d get to see two films, the later destined to become one of the biggest blockbusters of all time.
The Dallas Morning News later described the test screening at the Medallion that night in these terms:
“Tales are legion about a sweaty-palmed, full-of-Valium’ed Steven Spielberg pacing the back row, terrified that his movie starring a rubber shark wouldn’t play. Legend has it the Alex Kitner scene settled his nerves: A man ran out of the theater, vomited in the lobby, then returned to his seat. ‘That’s when I knew we had a hit,’ he said.” [See Footnote 2]
The article continued, quoting Spielberg:
“(The Medallion) was where I heard the first screams caused by watching Jaws, and it was music to my ears….it was the first time I realized that the shark worked, the movie worked, and everything about it worked. The audience came out of their seats. Popcorn was flying in front of the screen twice during the movie.”
Here’s a little-known fact. It was told many years later about what that Dallas showing inspired and changed in the final cut. Afterward, Spielberg was in a production meeting with Richard Zanuck, president of Universal Studios. Both men were pleased with the test screening. But Zanuck thought the final cut could do even better. The first showing had produced two hair-raising moments of terror, but Zanuck wanted three. He wanted a Psycho “shower scene” moment. Spielberg agreed. So, with the movie to be released nationally in just a matter of weeks, another scene was shot and hastily added.
Remember the scary scene in the movie when actor Richard Dreyfuss, who plays the cocky oceanographer, goes underwater diving to dig a shark’s tooth out of the boat? Dreyfuss had only a flashlight and is looking into the hull. That’s when a dead body suddenly appears in the hole of the boat. We only see the head of the body pop out. Screams! Scariest scene ever. Well, that was shot in a Hollywood swimming pool at night.
Spielberg remembered:
“I shot that scene in my editor Verna’s pool. I had this idea that maybe when Richard [Dreyfuss] goes underwater to dig the tooth out [of the sunken boat], what if Ben Gardner’s entire head comes out of the hole? And so I shot it in her pool with a prosthetic head and a plywood boat.”
So, Spielberg and Zanuck got their third big scream, including a Psycho moment, and much, much more.
Jaws hit screens nationally on June 20th. My dad took me to see Jaws at the Esquire theatre in the Oak Lawn section of Dallas. The Esquire was one of those grand old movie houses built in the 1920s which by 1975 had seen better days. But it was one of those legendary venues that enhanced everyone’s movie experience with the ornate architecture, the upper balcony, and the smell of a popcorn machine that probably hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. We had no idea at the time that Dallas had been the test market two months earlier, and had even inspired one of the scariest moments in any horror movie added at the last minute.
Jaws cost Universal $9 million to make and market, which was a tidy sum at the time. Its profits are now estimated at nearly $500 million, not including sequels and mass merchandising which made it the first billion-dollar movie. Today, I’m not sure such an accidental miraculous thing is possible, nor would it ever happen.
While we’ve all become comfortable within our own homes watching television streams with the latest blockbusters, we do miss something vital by not sharing in the experience, even if it’s among strangers. Laughing together. Crying together. Even screaming together can be fun. It’s also infectious. One spring night at the Medallion in Dallas changed a movie, made history, and ultimately transformed a nation, even if was by scaring the daylights out of us.
Once Jaws bit us, it never let go.
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FOOTNOTE 1: Spielberg returned to the Medallion when he next released “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Again, the test screening proved to be a huge success and the movie went on the break box-office records. Eventually, Spielberg debuted “1941,” his first disaster which flopped badly at the Medallion, and later with both audiences and critics. The Dallas audience wasn’t sure what to make of a so-called “comedy” that wasn’t funny. That ended Spielberg’s use of Dallas as his test market.
FOOTNOTE 2: Another take: “…..when the boy on the raft gets eaten by the shark, this guy in the audience gets up and runs for the door. So Spielberg thinks his career is over. people are running out of the theater. But instead of leaving, the guy throws in the lobby, goes to the bathroom, and goes back to his seat. All that blood gushing everywhere and frothing up onto the shore. That’s when Spielberg knew they had a hit. And he was right.”