Steven Spielberg was 27 years old when he watched the first test of his $250,000 mechanical shark for Jaws. Its eyes crossed, its teeth were too white, its jaws wouldn't close properly, and it had a dimple that made it look like Kirk Douglas. On its first day in the ocean, it sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound. Spielberg, stuck on Martha's Vineyard with a prop he called 'the great white turd,' was forced to improvise. He realized: show less, scare more. The shark appears on screen for roughly four minutes in the entire film. The broken prop transformed what Spielberg called 'a Japanese matinee horror flick' into the first summer blockbuster.