Steven Spielberg celebrates ‘awesome’ 50th anniversary ‘Jaws’ exhibition at Academy Museum

LOS ANGELES AP Why would anyone keep a prop from the set of Jaws Steven Spielberg was musing about what it felt like while making his oceanic classic and how little he thought any of it would matter when shooting the now-legendary opening scene of a woman night-swimming past an ocean buoy His primary concern was keeping his job as a -year-old director amid unfolding disasters How did anybody know to take the buoy and take it home and sit on it for years he revealed That prop is among the first things visitors will see as they enter a th anniversary Jaws exhibit opening Sunday and running through July at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures The exhibition featuring more than pieces from the culture-changing blockbuster is the first full show in the four-year history of the museum that is dedicated to a single film It comes amid a bevy of celebrations of the film s five-decade life including a theatrical re-release last week Spielberg spoke to a gathering of media at the museum after touring the exhibit which takes visitors chronologically through the film s three acts with particular relic or recreation from virtually every scene I m just so proud of the work they ve done the -year-old mentioned What they ve put together here at this exhibition is just awesome Every room has the minutiae of how this picture got together Clearly this is a very historic initiative for us museum director Amy Homma mentioned before introducing the director and also communicated the museum plans a full Spielberg retrospective in What s inside the Jaws exhibit Jaws has been essential to the Academy Museum which opened in and is operated by the organization that gives out the Oscars The only surviving full-scale mechanical shark from the production feet in length and nicknamed Bruce by Spielberg after his lawyer has permanently hung over the escalators since it opened Homma commented Bruce has become an unofficial mascot that helped to define this museum The media preview was accompanied by a -piece orchestra playing John Williams count Two of the musicians played on the original The exhibit includes a keyboard with instructions on how to play Williams famously ominous two-note refrain that a generation of children learned to tap out on the piano Similar novelties include a dolly-zoom setup to which visitors can attach their phone and shoot their own face to recreate perhaps the film s majority of famous shot the zoom-in to star Roy Scheider s frightened gaze on the beach in the fictional town of Amity There is also a small scale-model of the film s mechanical sharks that patrons can manually operate as crew members did at the time And a photo-friendly recreation of the galley of the Orca the vessel that prompted Scheider to say You re gonna need a bigger boat where he Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw sat drank sang sea-shanties and compared scars and shark tales But it s the real stuff from the production that really makes the show with relics from both sides of the camera There s that buoy initially kept by Lynn Murphy a marine mechanic who worked on the film who lived in Martha s Vineyard where the film was shot before selling it to a collector in And there is a dorsal fin prop that struck terror in beachgoers in the film and moviegoers in the theater and a real great white shark s jaw used for reference by the filmmakers that also appeared on screen Film geeks can get a close look at the aquatic cameras used by cinematographer Bill Butler and his crew and a Moviola used by editor Verna Fields And they can get a play-by-play of the processes of casting director Shari Rhodes and a group of screenwriters that included Peter Benchley author of the novel Jaws a cursed production followed by triumphant years Spielberg declared for him the exhibition above all proves that this motion picture industry is really truly a collaborative art form No place for auteurs He declared the crew s camaraderie was the only thing that kept the production together Their making of the riveting film was oddly enough marked mostly by boredom endless waits because of unfavorable conditions unwanted ships in the background and broken down equipment that led to the shoot going days over schedule I just really was not ready to endure the amount of obstacles that were thrown in our path starting with Mother Nature Spielberg reported My hubris was we could take a Hollywood crew and go out miles into the Atlantic Ocean and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark I thought that was to go swimmingly People played a lot of cards Others tried to reckon with seasickness I ve never seen so much vomit in my life he revealed It would be worth it in the end The film certainly cost me a pound of flesh he disclosed but gave me a ton of career