Deborah Hicks had an important job at the Maplewood Theater in the summer of 1975 — answering the phones, which were ringing off the hook. It was the year “Jaws” premiered and the theater had secured the exclusive rights in the region. Hordes of moviegoers were trying to get to this small-town movie house for the first time and the box office just couldn’t keep up.
“This was before the days of good old GPS,” Hicks laughed. “I was sitting there with road maps laid out on the desk, giving directions on how to get to Maplewood.”
Hicks, a teenager on summer break from college at the time, was helping out her father Carroll Brooks, a Columbia High School teacher who moonlighted as the manager of the Maplewood Theater.
“There was such a mob outside that he would take a popcorn cup, knock out the bottom of it, and use it as a megaphone,” Hicks recalled.
This year marked 50 years since Jaws was released and local residents have been having fun with the anniversary. The troupe at the Barn Theater posted a montage of their favorite lines and catch phrases in the movie.
South Orange resident Mary Kaiserman, who saw the movie twice in one summer, asked members of a local Facebook group for stories about seeing the movie at Maplewood Theater, and was flooded with memories still vivid.
“You know the scene when the head pops out of the underwater boat? Everybody in the theater screamed,” Joseph Coll shared. “I screamed a millisecond after everyone else because my sister Diane, who was sitting next to me, dug her long nails into my arm.”
The movie hit such a fever pitch that Hicks even recalled one crazed fan attempting a heist of the “Jaws” movie reels from the projector booth. “What they didn’t know was the last reel was still in the projector — so they got the movie but they didn’t get the end,” Hicks said. “This movie made people nuts.”
Part of the reason that made “Jaws” such a massive box office hit is that it came on the heels of Peter Benchley’s bestselling book that preyed on our primal fear of this ancient Leviathan. It is considered to be the first blockbuster and set the stage for other movie-based manias, such as the one for “Star Wars,” which came out two years later. The film made a star of former Columbia High School grad Roy Scheider and turned director Steven Spielberg, then 27 years old, a household name.
The popularity of the movie came at just the right time when many local movie theaters were beginning to struggle. Maplewood Theater, at the time, was still a 1,000-seat auditorium and hadn’t yet been divided into smaller theaters as it is today. The theater was not originally intended to show movies — it actually was founded as a summer-stock playhouse and drew top-notch Hollywood actors like Paul Robeson and Tallulah Bankhead.
The partitioning of grand movie palaces was happening across the nation and was considered the only way to save industry. Hicks remembered seeing the Maplewood Theater for the first time after it was converted into a multiplex. “It just broke my heart,” she said. “There was so much grandeur to the architecture and they just destroyed it.”
Nowadays, the industry is facing a similar existential crisis, and many believe a business based on ticket sales and concession sales is no longer profitable for small independent theaters. Theater owners are beginning to team up with nonprofit operators. This is what happened in the case of the Claridge and the Bellevue Theater — both historic movie houses are being operated by Montclair Film.
The collective nostalgia on the anniversary of “Jaws” is a reminder that a good movie can become a core memory. For the members of the Maplewood Film Society, it also unscores the importance of ensuring the Maplewood Theater survives in some form. The theater is now the subject of a redevelopment plan and the town government held a community meeting in August.
At that meeting, Angela Matusik, cofounder of the Maplewood Film, read directly from the redevelopment plan that ended up saving the Bellevue Theater, which mentioned the “extinction” of movie houses and the importance of saving both the architecture and function of a theater.
“They say it can’t be done,” Matusik said. “It can be done.”
