STACK #153 Jul 2017

FEATURE EXTRAS

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

Movie wunderkinds Steven Spielberg and George Lucas

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.

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

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-

Spielberg and Lucas introduced and honed to perfection the summer blockbuster era, which still endures today

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.

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,

To be continued...

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