Happy 50th Anniversary to “JAWS” –

I was lucky enough to be working in a design studio 50 years ago designing motion picture posters (they were referred to as “1-sheets” because that was the standard poster size used then).
We were working on developing a print campaign for this fish movie then at I was working on a few other films when one day I was at a photographers studio and he asked what else I was working on and I told him about this movie about a shark.
He was a diver and started rattling off facts about sharks: they have rows of teeth, their skin is like sandpaper, they don’t sleep, etc.
When I came back to the design studio I had the idea to make an alternate poster featuring the main image from the book cover and many interesting facts about sharks. The idea was to promote this poster as one that movie movie goers could read while getting in line.
Our copy writer at that time was Robert Chandler. He researched more info for the poster and handed that over to me to use in the poster.
The studio heads loved the idea and green lighted it along with the main poster for the film.
About 35 years later, I had an opportunity to meet with Steven Spielberg at his home and mentioned to him that I had worked on one of his films. He asked, “which one?” I told him about the Sharkfacts poster and he responded with, “Oh, yes, I had that hanging in my office for years!”
One last moment here about the film:
I was invited to see a sneak preview of Jaws by the Movie Studio and we sat in the rear of the theater. When we first saw the scene of the shark rearing up to an unsuspecting Roy Schieder, the crowded theater audience literally levitated out of their seats and screamed!!!! They screamed so load, we missed the line “You’re gonna need a bigger boat!”.
We looked around at the studio executives and they all nodded to each other as if to say, “Blockbuster!!!!”
The rest is history.
If you haven’t ever seen this film, check it out! It still holds up as a classic.
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