The Deep’s greatest publicity sensation came from an image Jacqueline Bisset had not approved: her character, Gail Berke, swimming underwater in a thin white T-shirt and black bikini bottom. The photograph, taken near the wreck of the RMS Rhone, was circulated in men’s-lifestyle publications including Playboy and Penthouse as Columbia Pictures mounted an enormous promotional campaign for the 1977 adventure film. Executives and marketers treated the image as a commercial asset, even though Bisset’s permission had not been obtained for the opportunistic use of the still. Plans to turn it into a poster went further, prompting Bisset to threaten legal action and forcing the studio to abandon that particular piece of exploitation marketing.
The episode exposed the unequal power dynamics of late-1970s movie publicity: Bisset was the film’s leading actress, but the studio and its producers could redirect a technically impressive underwater adventure toward the male gaze through a single publicity photograph. Producer Peter Guber later boasted that the shirt had “made me a rich man,” crediting the image with helping turn The Deep into a major box-office success. The film opened to approximately $8.1 million on 800 screens, eventually earning about $47.3 million in North America and more than $100 million worldwide. Its success therefore validated the campaign financially, but the poster dispute and Bisset’s threatened lawsuit remain a pointed example of how studios could commodify an actress’s image without her approval.
