I’ve been going to the movies for longer than I can remember. I’ve been told the first movie I saw was Mary Poppins. My parents loved movies, but given that Mary Poppins came out in 1964, I have a hard time believing they took me to see it when I was 1 year old. Perhaps it was still playing somewhere in Toronto a few years later. I do remember seeing Oliver! in a giant downtown theater. It came out in 1968, a little before I turned 5. I’m guessing I saw it some time in the spring of 1969, but again it could have been later. I still watch at least some of it whenever I notice it’s on TV. I must have seen The Love Bug around that time, and I also retain a warm spot in my heart for Herbie the Volkswagen Beetle.

I saw a lot of Disney live-action films in the early 1970s, and others like them. Some have been remade in recent years, but I’m not sure too many critics were impressed at the time. Still, they were fun for a young kid.

One of my first truly grown up movie was Jaws, which I saw very shortly after its release on June 20, 1975. (I also saw The Sting, which came out in 1973. I think I saw it in the theater, so it might have been my first, but I may actually have seen it a few years later.) I definitely saw Jaws with a few friends from school at a matinee a day or two after the end of Grade 6. I was 11, but some in the group were probably 12.

Jaws was terrifying, but thrilling too! I know I didn’t sleep very well that night and I distinctly remember keeping my arms and legs underneath the covers. (Everyone knows covers can save you from ghosts and bogeymen, so it felt a lot safer to keep my limbs tucked under the sheets and blanket rather than dangling off the side of the bed.) Still, seeing Jaws did NOT keep me out of the water at the cottage that summer … so take that!

Anyway, I recently watched Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story on National Geographic TV. It was great! And it reminded me that a few years ago (in the fall of 2017, it turns out), after having done a couple of books for National Geographic Kids, I wrote a proposal for them for a children’s book about the history of the movies. It fell through about a year later. But, I re-read my proposal and liked it, so I thought I’d post some of it. Here it is…

Chapter 1: The Birth of the Blockbuster
Auguste and Louis Lumière were brothers born in France in the early 1860s. Their father, Antoine, was an artist who gave up painting to take up photography. The two Lumière boys became crazy about cameras. Auguste and Louis were smart at science and brilliant at building things. By 1895, they had built a new machine they called the Cinématographe. It was a device capable of taking numerous pictures and projecting them as moving images.

The Lumières’ new device was a huge improvement over similar machines by other famous inventors. Thomas Edison had already created a machine to show moving pictures, but they could only be seen by one person at a time looking through a small viewing window into a large wooden box. The pictures shown with the Cinématographe could be seen on a screen by a large audience. The Lumière brothers were also the first people to film a fictional story. It was a 45-second movie about a boy playing a joke on a gardener. The boy stepped on the hose when the gardener wanted to water his plants, then stepped off when the gardener inspected the nozzle, causing the water to spray him in the face. Mostly, though, the Lumière brothers filmed simple things from everyday life. They made movies of workers coming and going from their factory, soldiers marching in the street, people playing cards. It may not seem like the most exciting stuff today, but people back then were fascinated by the sheer novelty of seeing pictures that moved.

On January 25, 1896, the Lumière brothers had a screening of their newest movie. It was called L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat, (“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.”) The movie was only about 50 seconds long. All it showed was a group of people standing on a platform at the station waiting for a train, which could be seen in the distance. The movie had no sound, but as the train got closer and closer (and looked bigger and bigger!), the audience – who had all seen trains in real life – could imagine the noise and the power of the locomotive. Suddenly, people began to panic. They were convinced the train was going to crash into them and they ran, screaming, out of the theater.

It’s pretty hard to believe an image on a screen – even if it did appear to be speeding towards them – could cause such a commotion among so many people. The truth is, these days, many movie historians doubt this old story about the Lumière’s train is really true … and yet you don’t have to go all the way back to 1896 to find examples of movies that scare us.

In the summer of 1975, people weren’t swimming as much as usual. Attendance was down at beaches everywhere. Especially beaches on the ocean. People were afraid to go into the water. They were scared of being attacked by sharks.

The reason? A movie!

It was called Jaws and it became the first summer blockbuster.

SHORT SIDEBAR: BLOCKBUSTER DEFINED
The world “blockbuster” was first used in 1942 to describe very large, high explosive bombs during World War II. The word came to mean anything of great power or size, particularly a book or a movie that became hugely popular and made tons of money.

Jaws was based on a best-selling novel of the same name. It’s about a killer shark attacking victims near a popular beach during the height of summer vacation. It’s very scary, and sometimes pretty gross, with lots of blood and gore and chewed-up body parts. Some people consider Jaws a horror movie, although it’s really just a super-suspenseful adventure story. It did keep a lot of people out of the ocean that summer, but it sure didn’t keep them out of the theater! Jaws became the first movie to earn more than $100 million and it changed nearly everything about the way we go to the movies.

Before Jaws, summer was traditionally a slow time for theaters. It was largely when the major studios released movies they thought had little hope for success. Winter was for the big hits. Also, a new movie wasn’t released in a lot of theaters at the same time like it would be today. It opened on just a few screens in a few key cities. The hope was, fans and critics in those places would like a movie and word of its success would slowly build a bigger audience everywhere else. There was rarely any advertising for a new movie beyond the coming attractions trailers that played in theatres before other movies. Jaws was different. It had all sorts of advertising before it was released. Almost a year before the movie came out, the art for the poster was designed to look exactly like the cover of the new paperback edition of Jaws the book. As the opening date got closer, there were more commercials on TV for Jaws the movie than there had ever been for any other movie before. When it was finally released on June 20, 1975, Jaws opened all across North America on the same day, playing at 409 theaters in the United States and 53 more in Canada.

SHORT SIDEBAR: THE THEME FOR SCARY
The theme music from Jaws was pretty simple. It’s basically just two low notes repeated over and over. It starts out slowly, but gets faster and faster as the suspense builds. All these years later, the theme from Jaws is still the sound of approaching disaster. The music helped the movie create a fascination with sharks in our popular culture that continues right to this day.

Jaws was supposed to cost $4 million to make, but there were lots of problems. Filming key scenes out on the ocean made the movie look more authentic, but it was much harder than using a water tank inside a studio. There were also endless delays in constructing the three mechanical sharks director Steven Spielberg needed to use. (There was no such thing as computer-generated images in 1975.) By the time Jaws was completed, it wound up costing more than $9 million. That would be over $40 million today. On top of that, Universal Pictures spent $1.8 million to promote the movie. It was a huge amount of money to risk back then, but Jaws turned out to be worth every penny. The movie earned $7 million on its opening weekend and in just two weeks earned back all the money it cost to make it. Before the end of the summer, Jaws broke the all-time North American box office record of $84 million. By the end of the year, it earned more than $120 million.

Today, a blockbuster movie, filled with superheroes and special effects, might earn $120 million or more in a single weekend. Their fans might not know it, but they all owe a debt of thanks to Jaws and the summer of 1975. People would eventually go back in the water, but going to the movies would never be the same!

SIDEBAR: Movie Time
Imagine a movie so scary, it didn’t just keep people out of the water in the ocean – it kept them out of the water in their own bathrooms! Psycho was one of the most terrifying movies ever made. It was a horror story with a shocking murder in a shower. Like Jaws, Psycho had frightening theme music that still sounds scary today. Also like Jaws, Psycho changed the way people went to the movies.

When Psycho came out in 1960, most movies didn’t have set start times. They might play in a theater all day long and people would just come and go whenever they wanted. Missed the beginning? No problem! Stay in your seat when the movie ended and soon it would start up again. You didn’t even have to buy another ticket. When the movie got around to the part they had already seen, people would say, “this is where we came in.” They could leave, or, maybe, they’d stick around and watch it all over again. Director Alfred Hitchcock didn’t want people to do that for Psycho. The movie had a surprise ending, and Hitchcock wanted to protect that. So, each showing of Psycho had a set start time and no one was allowed into the theater after the movie began. Theater managers weren’t sure of this new policy, but Hitchcock insisted on it. Turned out, he was right. People were willing to stand in long lines to buy tickets and wait outside the theater until the movie started. Psycho became a huge success.