Jacqueline Bisset’s ‘wet T‑shirt’ photo becomes the film’s most notorious—and legally fraught—publicity weapon

Scandals & Feuds4/5 wildness

Jacqueline Bisset’s ‘wet T‑shirt’ photo becomes the film’s most notorious—and legally fraught—publicity weapon

The Deep (1977) / 1970s

When Columbia mounted an unprecedented, hyper‑aggressive marketing campaign for The Deep in 1977, one publicity image eclipsed everything else: an underwater shot of Jacqueline Bisset in a thin white T‑shirt over a black bikini taken at the wreck of the RMS Rhone. The studio and producer Peter Guber pushed the photograph into the men’s media market — placing advertisements in Playboy and Penthouse and weaponizing the image to sell the movie’s sensual, exotic trappings. The campaign was part of a gargantuan promotional effort (Columbia reportedly spent $1.3 million on television buys and $1.5 million in print and the overall marketing outlay was later described as roughly $8.5 million), and the studio leaned on the Bisset image as a hook in a way that blurred the line between publicity and exploitation.