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America – young and old – went to
see
Jaws
. Consequently, the film
took an astonishing $129 million
($600 million in today's money) in
domestic rentals on its first run.
One of Spielberg's primary
aims for his film had been to make
America's beaches as empty as
motel showers were after Alfred
Hitchcock's
Psycho
was released.
His scary shark shocker certainly
made bathers question whether
or not it was safe to swim in the
ocean. The movie's influence on
popular culture is undeniable. John
Williams' first two ominous notes
of the film's iconic music score is
still instantly recognisable today.
The poster advertising the movie
– now probably the most famous
in cinema history – became a
massive merchandising product
in itself. Steven Spielberg's man-
eating shark thriller initiated the
era of the 'Summer Blockbuster'.
Two years later, George Lucas's
Star Wars
(1977) surpassed
Jaws
as the highest grossing
movie of all time. Those two movies – plus
Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977) – made an unprecedented impact at the
box office. They also provided Hollywood with a
vision of the future; a new formula for making
and marketing movies. This gave the industry
an opportunity to end its short-lived embrace
of the auteurs' personal but more niche art
movies and their wildly uneven box office
performance.
Martin Scorsese extrapolated "
Star Wars
was
in, Spielberg was in. We were finished." The
truth was that the original "movie brats" had
lost their way making increasingly obscure and
costly movies. This resulted in their audience
simply deserting them. That was more than
confirmed with Coppola's ultra expensive and
near catastrophic
Apocalypse Now
(1979),
which took years to recoup its staggering
production costs, and Michael Cimino's mega-
disastrous
Heaven's Gate
(1980) – the latter
becoming a symbol for a now discredited,
director-centric system.
In 1981, Spielberg and Lucas began their
historic partnership with
Raiders of the Lost
Ark
. Both keen film fans, they plundered the
stories and images of the classic Hollywood
genres – especially the 1940s science fiction
and action adventure serials – for filmmaking
ideas. But unlike their auteur colleagues,
they reverted back to the original storylines
of good always defeating evil that resonated
with a wider cross-section of cinemagoers.
Combining their stories with spectacular visuals
and stereophonic sound effects frequently
resulted in excited audiences cheering and
applauding particular scenes. They reinvented
the old movie serial format by introducing
sequels and prequels. The Star Wars movies
along with Indiana Jones,
Poltergeist
,
Gremlins
,
Back to the Future
and the
Jurassic Park
series
became extremely profitable franchises. They
also created marketing precedents with a
plethora of consumer merchandising products
and theme park rides directly associated with
their films.
Spielberg and Lucas introduced and honed to
perfection the summer blockbuster era, which
still endures today. And ironically, it has done
so for almost twice as long as the Hollywood
Classic Golden Age it replaced.
To be continued...
FEATURE
EXTRAS
Indiana Jones? No its Charlton Heston in the
1955 jungle movie
Secret of the Incas
. Spielberg
and Lucas copied Heston's appearance for their
eponymous hero
Spielberg and Lucas introduced and honed to perfection
the summer blockbuster era, which still endures today
Movie wunderkinds Steven Spielberg and George Lucas