Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [144]
The release of Jaws on June 20, 1975, in the middle of production on All the President’s Men, changed American cinema irreversibly, but not in the way Pakula had imagined. Sidney Sheinberg, then head of Universal, the movie production arm of MCA, had conceived of a new idea for the wide release for movies. Until now, movie distribution was a drawn-out process, where prints were sent to an assortment of towns and cities on a one-by-one basis, then screenings were extended if box office returns indicated audience approval. Sheinberg’s plan was to amortize costs by sending hundreds of prints to all locations, coupled with a nationwide marketing campaign to raise awareness for the new movie. Jaws was the first true wide release, opening in 409 theaters simultaneously. The paradigm was proved by the receipts, which were in excess of $100 million, making it the most financially successful movie in thirty years (over its theatrical span, Jaws would earn $470 million). Two years later, employing the same now generally adopted strategy, Star Wars set a new record, establishing a precedent for a kind of box office competitiveness hitherto unknown.
Redford embraced the shift, but with reservations. Warners was happy to follow in Universal’s footsteps, and Redford embarked on his first major tour, visiting six cities across the country in rapid succession. It was to be his last press junket for years. “I was concerned about the marketing aspect. Were we at the point where the packaging was as important as the content? Jaws was a good, populist movie. But it became the flagship for a campaign that overtook American movies. It became a very slick process, advertising directed, about selling popcorn and product placement. I thought the timing of All the President’s Men very fortunate, because it was a very honest and unpolluted film. I’m not sure if we could have managed it in its purity a decade or two later.”
Redford had been working nonstop in television and film for more than ten years. There was never a day, his daughter Shauna attests, when he hadn’t a script or text for adaptation sitting on his lap. He was getting run down. “Somewhere around that time I experienced a panic attack,” says Redford. “I was on the promotions circuit. I’d flown into La Guardia and went to catch a cab. It was a frantic time, all deadlines and media and legal documents and op-eds and all the drivel of celebrity raining down. I was alone, standing at the curb, when someone pulled into the space allotted for the cabs, and someone else got aggravated, and there was blaring of horns and shouting and all the rest. But it sounded different. And I looked around at the airport building: that huge rabbit warren of impersonal lights, faces at windows, the anonymous vastness of it all. I thought, Jesus, what if this cab doesn’t hit the spot allotted to it? Does the whole universe unravel? And then I started sweating … and for a moment I slipped out of my body. What if the system fails? What if the center comes undone? Look at all the things that have to work in synchronicity just to turn a wheel! It became an out-and-out panic attack. Like, How can anything work in this world!
“I thought