It’s 1975 again and I don’t like it.
Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans recently debuted at The Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews before going on to take the event’s much-coveted People’s Choice Award. The dean is back on the awards circuit.
As I noted here recently, when complaining about something else, The Fabelmans gives us a version of the young Spielberg as he discovers the power of film while growing up in postwar Arizona. A decade or two after the events depicted, he would redefine the art of popular cinema.
I haven’t yet seen the film. So I can’t comment on how the story references that period in American movies. But in one sense The Fabelmans will certainly remind older viewers of how the business worked until the end of the last century (or so). After a little more festival action, the film is set to go before the US public on November 23rd — just in time for Thanksgiving. We have become used to seeing big Hollywood movies at more or less the same time as Americans get their peepers on them. Top Gun: Maverick arrived everywhere on May 27th. Jurassic Park: Dominion (remember that nightmare?) hit both sides of the pond on June 10th. But Irish and British viewers will not see The Fabelmans until January 27th. That’s more than two months! We could all have frozen to death by then.
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It is at this point that aged veterans of earlier cinematic wars emerge to point out that kids today don’t know they were bleeding born. In the time of Spielberg’s first sensation, it was not uncommon for movies to open here more than six months after their first commercial screening in the United States. Jaws was released in the United States on June 20th, 1975. It was high summer inside and outside cinemas the picture developed into something more than a mere phenomenon. We read about it in the newspapers. Barry Norman covered its mounting triumph on Film ‘75. Yet nobody in Ireland could see the film until St Stephen’s Day.
Norman’s eventual review was loaded with weary references to the chatter preceding its eventual European release. “The big Christmas release is, of course, Jaws,” he said. “Which everyone, including myself, has kept repeating to the point of tedium has already taken more money than any other. You must know already, but I’m going to tell you anyway, it’s the tale of a killer shark ...”
There exists a class of fatuous old bore who will tell you audiences savoured the long period of juicy anticipation
There was a similar delay for Star Wars two years later. And again for ET: The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. All three of those world-conquering films were summer releases in the US and Christmas releases in Ireland. And you may not have even been able to see them in every corner of the country before new year. It was still not uncommon for distributors to first release films in big cities and only later send them out to the “provinces” (as they probably did say in head office).
There exists a class of fatuous old bore who will tell you audiences savoured the long period of juicy anticipation. The same maniacs who last week yelled at Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield for not enduring a 12-hour queue before filming a report on Queen Elizabeth’s lying in state will surely argue you need to earn your pleasures by waiting for aeons in ill-fitting shoes. And, yes, it may be true that one savoured the reports on the coming releases as one savoured the toy commercials that arrived before Christmas. The United States then seemed a lot further away — literally and physically — and we were prepared to accept that modern life took a while to make it back to the Old World.
On balance, however, as Norman’s tetchy introduction confirmed, the release delay was always a pain in the bottom. It soon proved so for the studios as pirated VHS’s landed in Europe before the official film prints arrived. You would, in the autumn of 1982, see handwritten posters around colleges and universities advertising scratchy, snowy showings of ET on rudimentary video projectors. A little over a decade later, when Spielberg yet again broke the box-office record, the release window was tightening fast. There was just over a month between the US and UK releases of Jurassic Park. That gap had more or less vanished by the millennium and the arrival of internet piracy.
Don’t fret. Delays such as that holding back The Fabelmans are currently an occasional awards-season aberration. By an odd coincidence, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, the last film to win the People’s Choice at Toronto, was also a coming-of-age-through-the-movies story that opened here two months after its US debut. But Black Panther: Wakanda Forever lands planet-wide on November 11th. Avatar: The Way of Water will be everywhere on December 16th.
Hollywood learned its lesson. We are not really going back to 1975.
