10 Famous Movie Scenes That Came From On-Set Issues

Despite transforming the film industry as the first major summer blockbuster, the production of Jaws was famously a miserable experience beset by multiple major blunders and accidents. The three mechanical sharks used malfunctioned constantly, causing delays and costing repairs, shooting on the ocean required dozens of retakes to make sure the camera wasn't tilted by the waves, and one of the main actors even had to leave set regularly in order to deal with tax problems.

The original script to Jaws closely followed the book it was based on and included a scene where Richard Dreyfuss's Hopper was torn in half by the shark biting its way through a shark cage. Because the fake sharks were borderline unusable, Spielberg sent a camera crew to Australia to capture B-footage of Hopper interacting with real sharks. When they return, Spielberg was amazed by the footage he saw that he knew he had to incorporate as much of it as he could into the film.

In order to do so, he cut Hooper's death scene from the script and tacked one at the end where he returns to the surface and helps Chief Brody paddle back to shore, ending the film with them swimming into the sunset like a pair of oceanic cowboys. The scene would never have happened if the mechanical sharks weren't essentially useless.