When Dallas Helped Launch "Jaws" And Steven Spielberg

Fifty years ago, a promising young director came to Dallas for the first test screening of the movie he was hoping would launch him into Hollywood success. This ambitious director, with the pilot of Columbo and a well-reviewed television movie called Duel under his belt, was anxious in the Medallion Theatre as he watched the first audience take in the movie that had consumed months of his life. 

The movie, based off a best-selling book by Peter Benchley, was about a shark that was terrorizing a New England coastal town during the summer. The shoot was supposed to last 58 days and went on an agonizing 100 more. The mechanical sharks that were supposed to be the stand-in for the terrifying and menacing creature short-circuited. Still, the director worked his movie magic – harkening back to the bygone days of Alfred Hitchcock to finish his movie. 

On March 26, 1975, the Medallion Theatre hosted the first public test screening of the movie that would become Jaws. The event marked a turning point not just for the career of director Steven Spielberg, but the entire concept of the summer movie.

The book Spielberg: The First Ten Years has a very candid conversation with the director and author Laurent Bouzereau about the Dallas screening (an excerpt was published in Vanity Fair). “But with Jaws, it was very, very loud and people went crazy,” said Spielberg. “This preview was the most extraordinary response I could ever have imagined.”

According to Spielberg, he initially became concerned when he saw a man hastily leave the theater and assumed he was tired of the movie. Instead, the man needed a restroom because his stomach could not handle the intensity onscreen.

Michael Schulman’s recent book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears has a section about the Dallas screening. In that book, Schulman reveals that Spielberg and several producers of the film celebrated after the Dallas feedback into the wee hours of the morning. “Spielberg and the producers celebrated until 4 a.m. with champagne in the Registry Hotel penthouse,” he wrote.

Ever since that evening, Dallas has enjoyed a special place in Spielberg’s heart. Though, with a small caveat. Kelly Kitchens, who is a Texas film publicist and classic movie fan, attended the annual TCM Classic Film Festival Opening Night Event in 2022 when Spielberg was introducing E.T.

Talking with host Ben Mankiewicz, Spielberg mentioned that the Medallion was his “good luck theater,” having hosted successful screenings of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That good luck could only last so long as the cinema magic ended when he screened the movie 1941, a comedy about panic in California in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. “I took 1941 there and you could hear a pin drop three quarters of the movie,” Spielberg told the TCM audience.

The Medallion Theatre opened in Dallas in 1969, showing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on its one screen. It would eventually expand to five screens before it shuttered in 2006. A Kohl’s occupies its current space in the Medallion shopping center. Though the theater may be long gone, the memories of the Medallion remain, especially as Jaws is gearing up for its fiftieth anniversary this summer.

Kitchens actually knew somebody who attended the fateful test screening, a projectionist from the General Cinemas named Paul Adair. According to Adair, who has since passed away, the audience didn’t know what to expect because the movie was under a working title.

Adair confirmed that an earlier shot of the shark was taken out of the final cut of the movie to maximize the grand finale of the film (and the infamous “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” scene with main star Roy Scheider).

Jaws was released on June 20, 1975. It became the highest grossing film of the year and remained the highest grossing movie of all time until Star Wars. In 2001, the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry.