The music being played over the cinema's speakers was from the Jaws soundtrack. It was common practice for cinemas to play music related to the film beforehand, presumably to get the patrons into the right frame of mind. Earlier that same month Stanley Kubrick, who was releasing his masterpiece Barry Lyndon, had written a letter of detailed instructions to the country's projectionists, and in it he included information about the music to be played before the movie and during its interval:
"Hopefully, you have been supplied with an LP record or a tape of the film score.
a) Please use Side 1 for the pre-film music
b) During the intermission, play Side 2, starting with Band 2. You can play this as long as you want, to the end of the record.
c) If you play music after the film, repeat what you did on the intermission."
Spielberg's involvement in the release of his movie did not involve such near-obsessive attention to detail. In fact, much of the promotion of Jaws (in the UK, at least) was done by producers Zanuck and Brown. Having had a big recent hit with The Sting, they were being touted as the power behind the creative throne of Hollywood's latest and biggest blockbuster.
The hype surrounding the film had been building up since the film had opened six months earlier in America on 20th June. With no internet and no social networking to spread the word, the hype of the Seventies was built around word of mouth. Hollywood had not yet realised that the marketing of its products could become a revenue stream in itself. There were no such things as teaser posters or EPKs. Films came out and people went to see them, and then they were gone until they reappeared on television.
Jaws, of course, changed all this. The studio adopted an aggressive marketing campaign, releasing the film in 465 cinemas across the US on the back of saturation television advertising. This went against the Hollywood grain of giving a film a limited initial release in big cities before opening in other locations. In fact, Jaws was not the first movie to break with this tradition. The Godfather had opened in 316 cinemas in its second week of release, and The Exorcist had repeated the pattern. These pictures were big hits, but Jaws managed to surpass them both, most likely because Mafia movies and demon-child movies appealed to a more limited demographic than shark-hunt movies. Certainly, Jaws helped to break the movie marketing mould, and theatrical release patterns have now become a science. Perhaps the main reason it has gone down in history as the game-changer is that Jaws was the first film to pass the $100 million dollar mark (and that was back in the day when $100 million dollars was worth something).
I had added my own small contribution to the bulging Jaws coffers, and now the moment had arrived. The music faded out (which, I remember with Kubrickian accuracy, was in the middle of Side 1, Band 3). The large polyester curtains (pink with gold stitching) parted. The lights went down until the cinema was in complete darkness, except for the green glow above the exits.
It's now time to watch the movie again, and over the next few months I'm going to work my way through it, scene by scene and frame by frame. I may need a bigger blog.
