50 years since Jaws, the film that changed Spielberg's life: "I thought my career was over after that."

While on a boat for hours, with half his production team vomiting, Steven Spielberg had the nauseating feeling that he would never make films again. "I thought my career was practically over halfway through production," he confessed this Wednesday to a packed theater at the Academy Museum in Hollywood. "I remember them saying to me, 'They'll never hire you again. This movie is way over budget and over the allotted shooting days. You're a real danger as a director.'" It turned out to be just the opposite. Jaws , which just celebrated its 50th anniversary since its release in the United States, became the first film to surpass $100 million at the box office in the United States and the definitive accolade for the career of one of the greatest geniuses of universal cinema. On Sunday, the museum opens a large-scale exhibition dedicated to that film: Jaws, The Exhibition.

Spielberg was 26 years old at the time, with only two low-budget films under his belt. With Jaws, starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, he was taking on his first major project, a summer project that was supposed to have cost four million dollars and ended up costing twelve . In shooting days alone, they went 100 million over the initial estimate. "I just wasn't ready to endure the amount of obstacles that came our way, starting with Mother Nature," explains the three-time Oscar winner. "I really thought my dream would be to go 12 miles out into the Atlantic with a Hollywood crew and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark. I thought it would all go swimmingly," he remarked, sparking laughter from the audience.

The reality is that the shark's mechanism—nicknamed Bruce by Spielberg's lawyer—was so broken that it forced the director to suggest the animal's presence rather than show it directly. There were so many problems that Spielberg was offered the option to cancel and forget about the project. "But no one wanted to give up. No one wanted to stop," he admits. "What helped us all was being together. That was the key, the camaraderie that comes when you're trying to survive. It brought us even closer. I've never been so close to a crew or a cast."

The director of Schindler's List is still amazed that the film became such a mass phenomenon, the same one that gave him the opportunity to make a movie that years earlier no one would have given a dime for, Close Encounters of the Third Kind , and which forever altered the experience of swimming in the sea for millions of people. A key role in this was played by the sinister crescendo of the cello cadence of the film's main theme, composed by John Williams.

All of this is condensed into a meticulous tour of the film across several galleries at the Academy Museum in Hollywood, which has tapped into its powerful vault of film memorabilia to display 200 related to the 1975 film. There's the red buoy clung to by Chrissy Watkins, the first girl killed by the great white shark; the police badge of Amity Island police chief Martin Brody—played by Schneider, who won the role ahead of Paul Newman and Charlton Heston—and the wooden chair used by Quint (Robert Shaw), a shark fisherman, aboard his aging boat, the Orca. The jewel of the show has been in the museum since its opening: the only surviving full-scale model of the great white shark.

The exhibition also includes the first edition of Peter Benchley's novel that inspired the film, produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown. Also included are two of the three Oscars that Jaws won that year, for best editing, soundtrack, and sound . It was nominated for best picture, an award that went that year to Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . Spielberg was particularly upset that he was not nominated for best director. Years later, he would win twice, for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan .

"I'm very proud of the film," he concludes. "It certainly cost me an arm and a leg, but it gave me a huge professional boost. Its success gave me the opportunity to make any film I wanted afterward. It gave me a career I'll never forget." In 2028, the Academy Museum will once again dedicate an exhibition to him, this time covering his entire career in film.