The image on the billboard is of a tanned girl in an orange bikini splashing about on a yellow sun lounger. Like Chrissie Watkins, she has long hair and seems to have drifted too far from shore. She looks directly out of the picture, laughing invitingly at the viewer. Two sailboats drift in the background between her and the distant shoreline. In the top left hand corner of the picture a cartoon yellow sun wearing orange-tinted glasses smiles benignly down. The picture has a frame in the same shade of primrose as the Brodys' kitchen.
The billboard provides us with information about time and place, just as the sliding graphics of Psycho anchor the opening of that picture to a precise moment and location. Amity's regatta is due to start on the fourth of July, a resonant date in the American calendar and one around which the action of the film pivots. The image also tells us that the community is dependent on its summer visitors whilst the wording of this public service message ('Amity Island Welcomes You') emphasises the group over the individual.
Interestingly, the narratives of both Jaws and Psycho take place over more or less the same compressed time period of just over a week. Psycho starts on a Friday (11th December) and ends nine days later on a Sunday (20th December) whilst Jaws starts on a Friday (27th June) and ends eleven days later on a Tuesday (8th July). Both films actually play fast and loose with their own time frames. In the penultimate scene of Psycho a wall calendar clearly displays the day's date as the seventeenth, and - with the exception of the Christmas decorations in downtown Arizona in some early plate shots - there is no reference made to the imminent holiday. In fact, the only reason Hitchcock put the date at the start of the picture was to explain away the presence of those street decorations, which had already been put up when the second unit crew filmed background for the studio process shots in December 1959. It would have been too costly to go back and reshoot them in January and it was too late the dress the Bates motel with fairy lights and a Christmas tree (a trick missed by Gus Van Sant in his spooky shot-for-shot remake).
There are a few wormholes in the time scheme of Jaws, as well. According to the report Brody types up, the first attack takes place on the first of July, whilst the second one takes place on Sunday June 29th - a circumstance made doubly impossible by the fact that that date fell on a Saturday in 1974. By the end of the picture any pretence at accuracy is abandoned when Hooper is unable to name the day of the week ('It's Wednesday. It's Tuesday, I think.'). None of this, of course, has any underlying thematic significance although it probably reflects the sense of dislocation experienced by the film cast and crew as weeks of location shooting on Martha's Vinyard stretched into months, and the concept of time began to lose all meaning.
