Midnight – which was simply a terrible, badly written, howlingly miscast and miserably executed sex-and-violence potboiler – sank without a trace in a then conventional slow-motion, region-by-region release. So confident was Fox, indeed, that the company insisted that theaters leasing Midnight also take on a project for which they had far more modest hopes: Star Wars, a little space opera with no stars from the director of American Graffiti. So what about The Other Side of Midnight, released two years later, in 1977? It was developed by 20th Century Fox as its banner tentpole movie of the summer, similarly using a bestselling novel as its launchpad. We all know what became of Jaws: box office champ of all time (for two years), instant suspense classic, its power and magic undimmed by the passage of decades. But going wide a fortnight before the Fourth of July weekend, Jaws got the attention of anyone who planned to be near a beach that summer, as the novel soared to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there all year.
In those days, a gradual release was still the norm: you would have heard about New York and Los Angeles releases of, say, The Exorcist or The Godfather long before they showed up in your own neighborhood theater. The screen adaptation, however, finessed its narrative problems and begat a sleek and vividly thrilling movie from the then unknown wunderkind Steven Spielberg.Īgainst all the conventional wisdom of the then prevailing mindset of the studios’ marketing bigwigs, Universal Pictures – with a new monster on hand to match such signature Universal properties as Frankenstein and Dracula – decided on an unprecedentedly wide immediate opening in an era when the move was still largely a ploy to defang bad early word-of-mouth by vacuuming up all the available ticket-buyer money before the bad news got out (actually, this still holds good now). Jaws, the book, was a middling thriller with some fine suspense sequences, and not highly rated when it was published in 1974. The second, to which we shall return in a moment, was Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight. Let us flash back, then, to the summer of 1975, and the fate of two huge bestsellers and the movies derived from them. A Star Wars fan dressed as an imperial guard attends Lightsaber Battle LA in Pershing Square.
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