Back in 1975 word of mouth was literal, not viral, but the fact that there were only newspapers and terrestrial TV to spread the word did not stop Jaws from becoming a pop culture phenomenon. Tom Shone gives an account of Jawsmania in his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.
Living in the UK, I was mostly unaware of the media feeding frenzy until Jaws opened in December. In those days it was common for a six month delay between the US and European release. There was no risk of piracy as there were no digital downloads or mobile phones with video cameras. If you had wanted to get an illegal copy of the film, you would have had to break your way into a projection booth and steal the cans of celluloid. The standard length of a 35mm motion picture reel was a thousand feet and, running at a speed of twenty four frames per second, would have lasted about eleven minutes. So Jaws - at a running time of 124 minutes - would have been just over eleven reels in length. It just wasn't worth the bother.
My first visual sightings of the movie came in the form of an early on-set article in Photoplay and a two page photo spread in Films and Filming. The January 1976 edition of Photoplay, which hit the newsstands in December, put the film on its front cover. The photos that were published avoided showing the mechanical shark in full although there was one picture that gave a sense of the size of the man-eating fish with a traditional fin-slicing-through-the-water shot.
Clips of the film prior to release were rationed to three. BBC 2's film magazine programme Film Night showed the shark's first attack on the Orca, ending just as Quint is about to fire his harpoon. Children's Saturday morning TV screened the less intense scene at the town hall where the fisherman introduces himself. ("Yall know me. Know how I earn a living."). There was something about the way it was staged and filmed - the low angled tracking shot across the room - that imbued it with a sense of foreboding.
The third clip, which was of the most interest to teenage boys, was the opening scene in which Chrissie Watkins goes swimming. It started with the tracking shot of her running along the sand dune and ended with underwater POV shots of her treading water. Fading out before the shark struck and showing nudity only in silhouette, it was a tease in every sense of the word.
As Christmas approached (the film was set for a nationwide release on Boxing Day, December 26th) newspapers were swamped with images of the poster whilst ITV ran thirty second commercials between its seasonal programming. The shot I remember from the TV ads was the one of the departing Orca viewed through the jawbone of a shark and it remains one of my favourite images in the film.
Curiously, I have no memory of seeing the full theatrical trailer in the cinema. I went to the pictures pretty often - two or three times a month - and, in retrospect, in seems unusual that I can't remember seeing it. In those pre-multiplex days cinemas were operated by competing chains and so wouldn't advertise their rivals' upcoming attractions. As I used to go more often to the Odeon and Jaws was shown at the ABC, it may simply have been that I missed the opportunity.
