What else happened the week Jaws surfaced in cinema screens on June 20th, 1975?
Much the same as November 5th, 1955 was a red letter day in the world of science (at least according to Dr Emmett Brown of Hill Valley, California), June 20th, 1975 was almost certainly the day cinema changed forever. Prior to this date we’d had a whole slew of really great movies - the 70s was full of them - but until that day in late June, we’d never truly understood the meaning of a blockbuster.
JAWS was it.
It annihilated all previous records with it’s $193.7 million takings and hung on to the top spot for two whole years.
And I think we all know what happened in 1977…
But we’re not looking at Star Wars or box office takings here, we’re examining the date JAWS came out.
June 20th 1975. What else happened on that day? Was JAWS all there was?
Well, I’m glad you asked.
In the world of music, Captain and Tennille (who I can just about remember) had the Number 1 song in the US with ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’. In the UK, two stars of the comedy show ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ - Windsor Davies and Don Estelle - were sitting at the top of the charts with their version of ‘Whispering Grass’. This was the height of popular culture at the time. Depressing? Yeah, just a bit.
Right then, what else?
Other films released on that day had an interesting range of titles.
On June 25th came the Paul Newman thriller, ‘The Drowning Pool’. Nothing to do with sharks however, just a really good taut police mystery movie. On 26th of the month we got ‘The Wind & The Lion’ starring Sean Connery and Candice Bergen, Brian Keith and John Huston. The movie was directed by none other than John Milius who wrote the first real draft of the USS Indianapolis speech and would go on to direct and write the quietly brilliant ‘Big Wednesday’ which had no sharks in it, just lots of stunning ocean photography and a great tale of surfing and coming of age in California. It’s also been rumoured that John Huston, a keen hunter, was in part the inspiration for Quint.
Then on June 27th came ‘Race with the Devil’, a satanic horror film starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. As a side note, Oates had played bank robber John Dillinger in John Milius’s movie (yes, it’s that man again) of the same name in 1973. The film also starred a certain Richard Dreyfus as Babyface Nelson.
Well, Gerald Ford was US President and Harold Wilson was British Prime Minister but its not been recorded that either of them did anything especially earth shattering that day.
It was also Beach Boy genius, Brian Wilson’s 33rd birthday. Spielberg made JAWS at the age of 26, Wilson was a man who accomplished his most revered work, the album Pet Sounds, at the age of 23. By the release of JAWS however, Wilson was a recluse, living behind his mansion walls in Southern California.
Elsewhere in California on this date, a man who as an actor was perhaps most famous for starring opposite a chimpanzee in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’ (although he did have a part in the excellent Don Siegel thriller, ‘The Killers’). Ronald Wilson Reagan filed papers on this day declaring that he was intending to run for president, a position he would hold from 1981 until 1989.
There was another underwater creature photographed on this day, but it wasn’t a shark. Nessie, the famed Loch Ness Monster, triggered an automatic high speed camera on June 20th 1975. As far as anyone knows, no one’s ever been eaten by Nessie and instead of making people stay away, she’s drawn millions of tourists to the shores of Scotland’s famous body of water since first being glimpsed in 1933 - if you believe in that sort of thing.
American TV in 1975 was where you could watch ‘Little House on the Prairie’, ‘Columbo’ and ‘McCloud’, amongst others. This last series starred Dennis Weaver, the lean, stoic lead of Spielberg’s truck chase thriller ‘Duel’, the movie inspired the director to take on JAWS in the first place.
“I said, wait a minute! ‘Duel’ has four letters in it. JAWS has four letters! This is like a sequel to ‘Duel’”
The UK saw the start of ‘The Good Life’, and the premiere of seminal shoot -first-ask-questions- maybe-later-if-we-feel-like-it, police drama, ‘The Sweeney’ starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman. While the American import of ‘The Rockford Files’ starring the always watchable James Garner, began showing in Britain. One other homegrown British 70s favourite that could’ve been a lot more exciting if Bruce had turned up in a cameo, was variety show ‘Seaside Special’ - sadly he stayed away. The was a movie premiere on ITV later in the year. When the film got its cinematic release in 1962, it shook the world as much as JAWS did in 1975. That premiere was 007’s first cinematic adventure, ‘Dr. No’.
In the UK, people had to hang on until Boxing Day (December 26th) before finding out what happened in Amity over the summer. These were the days before the Internet (a dark time or a more civilised age?) so you had little or no idea what to expect and really the only time you could see a trailer was before another film at your local cinema. Word had gone round about what had happened on June 20th of course, people had heard about this near-first time director who’d been terrifying people all over America with his shark movie, but it wasn’t until that first showing that the UK got to see what all the fuss was about. I’d just turned 5 when JAWS came out so even for my movie-mad dad, I was still a bit too young for it. He waited a full two years for a rerelease to take me. Seven years old was quite the age to watch Ben Gardner’s head pop out of a boat or watch Robert Shaw get bitten in half but I survived - just.
The release of JAWS (no matter the date) was just an ordinary day. The sun came up (whether greeted by blue skies or winter clouds) we ate our breakfast, we went about our lives pretty much like we always did. But some of us were changed for ever. Some of us were swept up in the spectacle and thrill of the movie and carried it with us for the rest of our lives. So when we look at the release date of JAWS, in the context of significant world events, it’s not that big a deal. If you research the date there are a few birthdays and stuff that happened but really the only thing anyone talks about is that movie.
The house lights dimmed, the curtains drew back and there was that big dark screen.
Then the title plate appears. Seaweed wafts back and forth in the current.
We see sand and rocks on the seabed.
The music builds in intensity as something unseen moves through the water…
And then suddenly we cut to a beach party in the dunes.
A harmonica calls out and a guitar can be heard playing in the background.
Welcome to Amity.
Words by Tim Armitage
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