Why would anyone keep a prop from the set of “Jaws
Steven Spielberg was musing about what it felt like while making his 1975 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 26-year-old director amid unfolding disasters.
“How did anybody know to take the buoy and take it home and sit on it for 50 years?” he said.
That prop is among the first things visitors will see as they enter a 50th anniversary “Jaws” exhibit opening Sunday and running through July at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
at the aquatic cameras used by cinematographer Bill Butler and his team, 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 team of screenwriters that included Peter Benchley, author of the novel.
Spielberg said for him the exhibition above all “proves that this motion picture industry is really truly a collaborative art form. No place for auteurs.”
He said 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 100 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 said. “My hubris was we could take a Hollywood crew and go out 12 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 said.
It would be worth it in the end.
“The film certainly cost me a pound of flesh,” he said, “but gave me a ton of career.”
