“We previewed the film at the Medallion Theatre in Dallas, Texas. It was the first time the public ever saw ‘Jaws.’”

Steven Spielberg
Director
.…on showing the first-ever public screening of “Jaws” in Dallas, via Vanity Fair’s excerpt of Spielberg: The First Ten Years.

The Medallion Theatre closed in 2001, but the Dallas moviehouse—formerly located in the Medallion Shopping Center at Skillman and Northwest Highway—hosted a key moment in film history. On March 26, 1975, it offered the first-ever public preview screening of “Jaws,” the monster hit that invented the summer blockbuster. Now, with April here and summer looming, some are looking back at the screening that helped change Hollywood forever.

“I’d had only one experience prior to this with “The Sugarland Express,” where the preview audience just kept quiet the entire time,” Spielberg recalled in Spielberg: The First Ten Years, which was excerpted in a 2023 Vanity Fair article. “But with “Jaws” [at The Medallion in Dallas], it was very, very loud and people went crazy. This preview was the most extraordinary response I could ever have imagined.”

Writing for the nonprofit newsroom The Texas Signal Media Foundation, Jessica Montoya Coggins recently looked back at that 1975 screening in Dallas, noting, “Ever since that evening, Dallas has enjoyed a special place in Spielberg’s heart.”

But that came with a caveat, she writes: The Medallion was Spielberg’s “good luck theater” after it hosted audience-loved screenings of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” But even that lucky theater was no match for his epic comedy bomb “1941,” starring John Belushi (“You could hear a pin drop three quarters of the movie,” Spielberg told Ben Mankiewicz in 2022.)

Kelly Kitchens, a Texas film publicist and classic movie fan, told Montoya Coggins she knew someone who was at the 1975 Medallion “Jaws” screening. You can learn more about what happened that night by reading the Texas Signal Media Foundation story here.

For more of who said what about all things North Texas, check out Every Last Word.

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