This blog is dedicated to my number one movie obsession, Jaws. I'm not one of those clinically-obsessed fans - I don't have any memorabilia, I've never been to Jaws-Fest and I don't dress up as Quint. However, I have seen the movie more times than I care to count (I was a teenager when it was originally released in 1975) and it holds an endless fascination for me. I think we all have a movie like that - one that we encounter at a young age, and which we remain loyal to ever after. If I had been a few years younger, it would have been Star Wars, and if I had been born a little earlier, it might have been .... what? Well, in fact, before Jaws there weren't any movies that people really obsessed about. Maybe The Exorcist, but that wasn't for kids. For me, Jaws was an integral part of my movie education.
By 1975 I had already become one of those annoying know-it-all movie buffs who could quote you lines of dialogue and always sat through the credits. Back then TV (and I mean terrestrial TV, which in the UK meant three channels that closed down at about 11.30 p.m and broadcast test signals for much of the day) actually showed a lot of old black and white movies and through my early teens I watched classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Sullivan's Travels and Citizen Kane. I developed an early interest in Hitchcock after the BBC ran a lengthy season of his work.
In 1973 I bought my first copy of Photoplay magazine. I got it because it had a picture of Roger Moore as James Bond on the cover and I was really into 007. I was too young to have seen the Bond movies come out in the Sixties, but my parents had taken me to several double bills (Dr No and From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball) that were released periodically before the series was eventually sold to TV. I loved the music, especially the twanging guitar riff of 'The James Bond Theme'. Whilst my contemporaries were listening to Queen and Pink Floyd and Elton John, I started building up a collection of John Barry tunes. The first cassette tape I got was called The Best of Bond and had a picture of a blonde (smoking a cigarette and wearing only a trilby hat) artfully concealed behind a strip of film, each frame of which showed a still from a different Bond movie. My movie soundtrack collecting had actually begun a year or two earlier with a series of Music for Pleasure discs recorded by Geoff Love and His Orchestra. The very first one I had - this must have been in 1969 or 1970 - was Big War Movie Themes, which I first heard at a friend's house. There were others - Big Western Movie Themes Vol 2 and Your Top TV Themes - and in 1976 Geoff Love cashed in on the Jaws phenomenon with Big Terror Movie Themes, which was the last of his discs I bought. By then my film score tastes had been refined, thanks mainly to the RCA series of Classic Film Scores, which have recently been reissued.
My two main interests as a teenager were watching old movies on TV and listening to film music, both pretty solitary occupations. So it was no surprise that Jaws - which married modern Seventies film making with a classic Hollywood story structure and an old-school orchestral score - should blow me out of the water.
