HALF A CENTURY OF JAWS How Spielberg changed the movie industry
We are this year celebrating 50 years of a masterpiece that will be re-released in cinemas over the summer in a remastered version. Many new generations will discover what a movie spectacle actually is for the first time, but also how the phenomenon we today refer to as the blockbuster first emerged I t was way back in 1939, with the advent of colour film and the re- leases of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, that it be- came evident that – apart from producing mid-budget studio films - Hollywood also had the capacity to at- tract worldwide audiences and profit on universal love stories.
with the help of marketing, which led to a war between the studios and an end- less struggle for box office supremacy. Two years after the release of The Exor- cist, Steven Spielberg, then still an un- established director with only three films to his name, proposed – togeth- er with producer Richard D. Zanuck – a risky project to Universal Studios: Jaws. Universal’s producers, who didn’t believe fully in Spielberg’s vision, were sceptical about releasing the film during the sum- mer. They approved a small budget of nine million dollars. And once they saw how the film looked, they had the idea of releasing it in 450 cinemas (a then re- cord number) and investing in an ag- gressive marketing campaign. Jaws caused fear among audiences, even prompting a slight decline in beach vis- its over the summer tourist season, but the world ultimately went wild for the movie. It wasn’t only that demand for tickets was high – the public was even queuing around the block. By the end of its cinematic life, including sever- al re-releases, Jaws had earned 477 mil- lion dollars, equivalent to 53 times its budget. Spielberg had thus created the first blockbuster in the history of Amer- ican cinema, and ushered in a complete- ly new approach to Hollywood produc- tion in terms of the distribution and marketing of commercial films. Encour- aged by the huge success of Jaws, nu- merous studios expressed great inter- est in the director’s next projects. Given that the studio system that had previ- ously locked directors and actors into completing a predetermined number of projects for a specific studio no longer existed, Spielberg was able to cooper- ate – in addition to Universal – with Co- lumbia Pictures, Paramount and Warn-
Next came Fantasia in 1940, though commercial film production would on- ly begin its real expansion in the 1950s. The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur became global hits, and American mov- ies started being directed increasing- ly towards the global market – not only through spectacular historical epics, but also through Westerns, musicals, ani- mated features and adaptations of lit- erary classics. Interest in American cin- ematography boomed in Europe and around the world in the 1960s. The dec- ade was marked by legendary films like West Side Story, Cleopatra, Doc- tor Zhivago, The Sound of Music, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Mary Poppins, The Graduate, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Love Story, the James Bond franchise and many more... And yet, something was still missing. Although Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor was the number one box office hit in America in 1963, the cost of pro- duction almost bankrupted 20 th Centu- ry Fox. In contrast, the early ‘70s was marked by two low-budget films that achieved incredible success among both audiences and critics alike: The Godfa- ther and The Exorcist. Audience num- bers continued to rise and new mov- ie theatres sprang up across the U.S. at lightspeed. Hollywood also began in- vesting increasingly in projects that they thought could achieve record ratings
„Ajkula“ je oterala ljude sa plaža i naterala ih u bioskope The Jaws chased people off the beaches and forced them into cinemas
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