How JAWS crushed Cannes like Quint

Well before JAWS opened wide on US cinema screens on June 20, 1975, the JAWS PR machine was already cranking into gear at the legendary Cannes Film Festival.

Somewhat suitably for a film about a killer shark which is not fully revealed until later in the film, it wasn’t the film that travelled from Martha’s Vineyard to the very different coast of the south of France and Cannes, it was its producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, as well as the film’s young director, Steven Spielberg, and the books author, Peter Benchley.

They were all there to help whip the world media up into a frenzy about the shark film like the fourth of July beach scene, which was recounted in an article that first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter in 1975.

It shows how Zanuck and Brown decided to take the film to Cannes, though not as a festival entry despite numerous invitations to do so.

Richard Zanuck said: “We went to the Cannes Film Festival almost a year early because the press is always there looking for a story.”

The JAWS producers also visited the largest publishing firm in France and met with the executives of Pan Books about the British distribution of the Peter Benchley book.  

Words by Dean Newman

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