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In this excerpt, showing scenes from the TV ads for "Jaws" (1975) and its sequel, "Jaws 2" (1978), MGM marketing executive Robert Levin and Mandalay Pictures chairman Peter Guber explain how "Jaws" -- with its wide release and its primetime TV ad campaign -- changed the way movies are marketed and distributed.
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It was October 1974, and Steven Spielberg was 27 years old. He had stopped at a
hotel in Boston on his way back from Martha's Vineyard, where he had just
finished shooting his second Hollywood feature film, "Jaws." Instead of feeling
buoyant or elated, Spielberg suffered an immobilizing anxiety attack. According
to Peter Bart in his book The Gross (1999), Spielberg was afraid he'd
never work in Hollywood again when word leaked out that he'd lost control of his
production. The budget for the film would ultimately tip the scales at $12
million, 300 percent over what the studios originally allocated and nearly four
times as much as the average production cost for a film in 1975. Not only that,
but the shooting schedule had ballooned from 55 to 159 days to further compound
the fiscal damage. [Note: Precise figures for Hollywood budgets are, and always
have been, elusive. The budget figures cited here are based on press
reports.]
Still, by Hollywood standards, "Jaws" wasn't a big-budget movie. The
toga-and-sandals epics of the 1960s were far costlier. "Cleopatra" had nearly
bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox in 1963 with its $42-million budget. Both
"Spartacus" and "Lawrence of Arabia" boasted outsized budgets as well, and
there were plenty of other extravagant celluloid edifices built during the same
period. Adjusted for inflation, the three movies mentioned above would cost
over $200 million ("Cleopatra"), $90 million ("Spartacus"), and $70 million
("Lawrence of Arabia") in today's Hollywood. "Jaws" would cost only $40
million, nearly $15 million less than the average production cost for a studio
movie today.
Nonetheless, studio executives evoke the image of the mechanical great white
shark when they talk about what precipitated the changes in Hollywood during
the past few decades.
"The four words that start the book [Jaws] -- 'and so it began' -- are
the same four words that you could use for the change in the business. And so
it began," says Peter Guber, a long-time (some would say legendary)
studio executive who's produced such diverse fare as "Midnight Express," "The
Color Purple" and "Batman" (not to mention a few he'd rather we forget). "These
wide releases, these enormous expenditures of prints and advertising in
publicity and marketing costs and expenditures. They would create this enormous
swell of momentum that would create gargantuan box office from the beginning."
Before the summer of 1975, Hollywood studios traditionally did not advertise
their movies on network television. It was simply too expensive to do so.
Shortly before the release of "Jaws," Columbia Pictures (where Peter Guber was
studio chief) bought 42 prime-time TV spots for another film, the Charles
Bronson vehicle "Breakout." Despite the advertising expenditures, which
reportedly cost $3.5 million, the box-office results for the film were disappointing. Then, for three nights preceding the release of "Jaws" on June
20, 1975, Universal saturated the networks during primetime with 30-second
trailers for the movie. This time, for whatever reason (some combination of marketing savvy, timing, and national media exposure), it worked: The film easily surpassed the
$100-million mark at the box office and broke the previous records set by "The
Godfather" and "The Exorcist." Ultimately, the movie would gross $260 million
in the U.S. alone.
Predictably, after "Jaws," studios put much more emphasis on television
advertising. "When you're looking at your broad films with significant
box-office potential, the trick seemed to be television advertising," says Bob Levin, president of worldwide marketing and distribution for MGM and former head of marketing at Walt Disney Corp. "Nothing drove it like television
advertising. And studios got more and more enamored with the power of
television to open more screens, more theaters. ... They found television to be
this powerhouse."
"Before that, what we now call marketing departments were called publicity
departments, because it was a publicity-driven business," continues Levin. "You
can't go back and find in the early days in the movie business vast amounts
spent in advertising. ... There was a movie preview, or we call it a trailer,
but not a lot of advertising." Now, for a typical film, the total marketing
budget equals roughly half of the production budget.
The release of "Jaws" represented another significant change in standard practice:
opening a movie in hundreds of theaters at the same time. This trend was
actually set in motion before "Jaws," in the early 1970s, with the release of
Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather." Prior to "The Godfather," high-profile
movies would typically play for three months or so in only one location before
slowly moving into other major cities and then, finally, to second- and
third-run theaters in small towns across the country. Also, the first theater
to premier the film had a monopoly of sorts -- it had "clearance" over a large
area in which no other theater could play the same film. In 1972, Paramount
opened "The Godfather" in five theaters at once, and moved to 316 theaters the
following week. The studio was able to challenge the theaters' clearance
policy, and before long "The Godfather" was taking in $1 million a day and
setting box-office records.
"Jaws" opened in 465 theaters, and in an astonishing 78 days it had already
dethroned "The Godfather" at the box office. (By comparison, it took more than
25 years for "Gone With the Wind" to be knocked out of the top spot by "The Sound of Music" in 1965) "The concept was that instead of going out in a few number of
theaters in a city and then expanding more and more and more, if you went and
advertised a movie on network television and successfully interested an
audience in that movie, you could open everywhere at the same time," says
Levin. Now movies can be released on a much wider basis. This summer, for
instance, "Pearl Harbor" opened on more than 3,000 screens.
In 1975, the concept of a "summer blockbuster" was just beginning to
crystallize as well. For many years summer was considered the off-season for
the movie industry, partly because few moviegoers wanted to spend two hours in
a theater without air-conditioning. Indeed, when the late Pauline Kael, famed
movie critic for The New Yorker, first started writing reviews for the
magazine in the 1960s, she took the summers off. It was a notion with
long-standing precedent: In the 1920s, Motion Picture News reported that
most theater-owners considered summer the worst time of the year to exhibit
movies. At the time, many theaters even closed during the summer or had limited
hours of operation.
Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s (when air-conditioned theaters became
the norm), three influential movies in the scope of American cinema -- "Bonnie
and Clyde" (1967), "Easy Rider" (1969), and "American Graffiti" (1973) --
were all released in the summer. These movies were enormously popular with the
younger demographic, and studios started to realize the potential of targeting
movies to a younger crowd during the summer, when their rates of attendance
increased. "Jaws" was certainly positioned to capitalize on this trend -- and
it did. It helped introduce an era in which movies targeted to teens dominated
the Hollywood summer line-up, taking off with "Star Wars" in 1977. Now, movies released between Memorial Day and Labor Day are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the annual box-office revenue for Hollywood films.
So, while Spielberg lay awake in a Boston hotel, the wheels of the next
Hollywood revolution were spinning.
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