The Lines That Sold the 1970s, From Five Easy Pieces to Alien

That decade gave film marketing two lasting habits: the warning-and-dare line of exploitation horror, and the heavy television campaign that Jaws made normal. The list is in date order, and the stories follow it. Other eras are in the taglines by decade section.

1970s movie taglines in date order

The lines come from a Filmsite collection of film taglines. Where an IMP Awards poster page prints the line, as it does for Jaws, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever and Alien, the poster wording replaces the collection’s. Spoken lines and opening text stay out unless the poster printed them.

Some films carry a second line. Jaws also has “See it before you go swimming.” and “Don’t go in the water.”, and Jaws 2 has “One good bite deserves another.”. The Godfather and Enter the Dragon are left out: no poster-line listing we could read prints their wording.

The warning and the dare

Exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s sold with a line that served as a warning and an overt dare. The Last House on the Left promised fainting: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie’ …”. The line was not new. It had been used for Color Me Blood Red in 1964 and for Strait-Jacket the following year, and it worked well enough that other Hallmark releases, such as Don’t Look in the Basement and Don’t Open the Window, re-purposed it.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre premiered in Austin on October 11, 1974, and its false marketing as a “true story” helped it find a broad audience. A second line for it ran: “What happened is true. Now the motion picture that’s just as real.” It eventually grossed more than $30 million in the United States and Canada.

Others sold with a joke or a boast. The Day of the Dolphin ran with “Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States.” Suspiria claimed that “The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.” Dawn of the Dead ran with “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

Jaws changed how a film was sold

Jaws opened across North America on June 20, 1975, on 464 screens, 409 of them in the United States. Universal spent $1.8 million marketing it, including an unprecedented $700,000 on national television spot advertising. About two dozen 30-second advertisements aired each night on prime-time network TV between June 18, 1975, and the opening two days later.

The poster showed a shark approaching a lone female swimmer, painted by Roger Kastel, and the Seiniger Advertising agency spent six months designing it. Its own line was “The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 best seller.” Jaws was key in establishing a wide national release backed by heavy television advertising, in place of a slow release that built support market by market. It is a common misconception that Jaws was the first to use that approach. The Library of Congress calls Jaws the landmark horror film that created the “summer movie”, and it stayed the highest-grossing film in history until Star Wars two years later.

Star Wars went the lean way. It opened on May 25, 1977, in 32 theaters. Fox gave it little marketing support beyond licensed T-shirts and posters, and marketing director Charley Lippincott made deals with Marvel Comics and Del Rey Books. The artist Tom Jung painted the US poster, starting from the phrase “good over evil”, and it carried “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” across the top.

Superman went big. Warner Bros. spent $6–7 million on marketing, and the film premiered in Washington, D.C., on December 10, 1978. Its line, “You’ll Believe A Man Can Fly!”, promised flight.

Two lines with a story

Alien (1979). Copywriter Barbara Gips wrote “In space no one can hear you scream”, replacing the teaser’s “A word of warning…”. The Library of Congress quotes the line in its 2002 National Film Registry notice, and AFI ranks the film seventh among sci-fi films. The rest is on the Alien tagline page.

Jaws 2 (1978). Andrew J. Kuehn, who made trailers for the first Jaws, is credited with the line, and his 2004 obituary counts it among his best. It beats the first film’s own line, which was accurate but not especially cool or memorable; it leaves the threat unspoken, and the unspoken part carries the real threat. The 1996 film Flipper parodied it with “This summer, it’s finally safe to go back in the water.” The story is on the Jaws 2 tagline page.

Famous 1970s lines that are not taglines

A tagline is a short text designed for dramatic effect, usually printed beside the title. A famous line of dialogue is another thing: it is spoken in the film and quoted afterward.

AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes, which favors American film quotes that circulate through popular culture, ranks these lines from the decade:

• “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (The Godfather) is number 2.
• “May the Force be with you.” (Star Wars) is number 8.
• “You talking to me?” (Taxi Driver) is number 10.
• “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” (Apocalypse Now) is number 12.
• “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” (Love Story) is number 13.
• “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” (Network) is number 19.
• “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” (Jaws) is number 35.
• “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” is number 74.

The two lists touch. Hardware Wars sold itself with “May the Farce be with you”, a one-letter swap on the line that is number 8 on AFI’s list. The listings blur it in the other direction too: Filmsite prints “The horror…the horror.” as an Apocalypse Now line, but those are the words Kurtz whispers as he dies in the film, so the table leaves them out. The lines in the table were written for the static posters and newspaper ads where taglines traditionally appeared. For the genre that dominates the table’s dares, go to horror movie taglines.