"I intend to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all of this", James Cameron's Titanic released 25 years ago today

Cafe Society
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Gonna destroy two decades of built-up SDMB cred to do a 25th anniversary appreciation thread about one of my favorite movies, the only movie I paid full price to see 5 times, and… up until Tarantino’s Grindhouse… was the most “communal”, if that’s the word, I’ve been with a movie theater audience.

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At the time, I was far more into entertainment (movie) news than I am now, and like many here, was a massive Big Jim fan - and with a track record that included Terminator, T2, Aliens, and True Lies, few 30 year-old men at the time weren’t.

But a costume drama? A romance? Not at all what I go to see James Cameron for. But… it’s Cameron. And it’s the Titanic, and since A Night To Remember was the first adult book I read (about 25 years prior), I’ll go and see what he can do. The sinking - ought to be exciting! Thrilling! Fun! Lord knows I loved my disasters, have since I was a kid lugging around a book called, IIRC, “Mankind’s Greatest Disasters”. Floods! Exploding ships! Volcanos and firestorms! All of it was exciting and I couldn’t wait to see what sort of entertainment Cameron had waiting for me.

So my wife and I sit down. And I realized my mistake in the above assumptions literally within, God, what? 45 seconds? The movie opens up with the sepia toned film of the launch (you can see these images later in the film), Sissel’s singing, and then it transitions to the dark water, and the title appears.

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And that was all it fuckin’ took: I was already choked up. Goddamn… this is going to be sad. Not a damned line of dialogue had been spoken, nothing had even happened, but the overall tone of the film had been… for me… successfully set. This wasn’t just a romance. Or an action film. It wasn’t going to be fun, not at all.

Titanic was going to be a tragedy.

And I wasn’t the only one, judging by the sniffles. Or perhaps it was the season, this was December 19th, 1997 after all.

I started crying rather late in the movie - there were, IIRC, two consecutive shots that showed the pain and futility of those in the ocean. The ship goes down, hundreds of people in the water screaming… and I knew they would almost all die… and then Cameron makes a cut, wide-screen, showing just how minor, insignificant all this drama was compared to the ocean which would kill them.

Just lost it.

It was transformative. I can’t think of another word for it, but it was transformative. I didn’t start re-evaluating my life and all that, let’s not be silly, but Titanic did make me realize that the numbers, the enquiries, the stats and details, all of this which I had focused on from childhood-onward re: disasters, helped me hide the larger human toll from myself.

I, too, was Brock: I never let it in. And, when it came to tragedy, I had been Brock my entire life.

Dammit.

So many moments - Kate Winslet’s reveal, when she gets out of the car. The dinner scene, where Jack flips his matches to Cal. Kate, jumping out of the lifeboat, back on to the Titanic. The final sinking. That masterful scene where they tell you what you’re about to see, then they spend 2 hours showing it. The final scene, where Rose goes back to the place she felt most alive. That transition shot…

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We left the theater, sat in our car for five minutes processing, and promptly saw it again the next day.

And here it is, 25yrs later. Cameron has made just two films since then, which… for any other director… would be a failure. But I saw Avatar 2 today, purposely on the 25th anniversary of Titanic’s release, and goddamn if he didn’t do it again.

This film has its detractors (I can see y’all in another thread, thx), but it genuinely was one of the finest movie-going experiences of my life, one worth remembering, and posting about, a quarter-century later.

I’ll never let go.

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I thought the film was fin and glad I saw it in the theatre. Bonus points for having a Wisconsin connection (even if Lake Wissota didn’t exist until 1917)

Brian

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Only five times? Lightweight. Are you sure you’re a fan? :slight_smile:

My car got stolen at one showing. Got it back but it was never the same.

I start to get weepy at the opening soundtrack. Not many films do that.

I have about a dozen film frames

Including the framed backlit ones:

I used to have this liquid paperweight with two fluids and a miniature Titanic and iceberg. I thought it was both cool and in poor taste. Eventually the chemistry and buoyancy changed with time, and the Titanic sunk. But later, the iceberg sunk, too. Vengeance!

I have tons of books. I have the VHS, DVD and Blu Ray. The soundtrack. A one-sheet movie poster. A puzzle of the one-sheet poster. a reprint of the menu. A reprint of the poster advertising the first return voyage to England.

But I hate every scene with Brock. I wish I could make a Phantom Edit without almost every present day (25 years ago! OH MY!) scene. And I don’t like Cameron’s not at all subtle hatred of the “rich”. Personally, between the two, I’d rather hang out with the “stuffy” first class than the drunken brawling Irish.

By the way, I love that retro “night to remember”-ish poster in the OP! I’ve never seen that. Gives the movie a different tone.

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I remember years ago listening to the cricket commentary when Australia toured India. Aussie commentator David Hookes was talking about his visit to a cinema the previous night. He had seen Titanic and was raving about what great fun it was because the Indian audience didn’t sit passively but treated the movie like a stage melodrama - booing, cheering, crying out in anguish and carrying on.

The Indian commentator Harsha Bhogle said the experience would have been better had Titanic been made by an Indian director. In that case the movie would have ended with the vessel rising from the bottom of the ocean and all the formerly dead passengers engaging in a song and dance routine. Genius.

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That’s okay, I’ll take the third class party any day. It’s a ceildh (pronounced KAY-lee), or an often impromptu party that just pops up in Irish/Scottish tradition, where people play whatever instruments they have, and dance. And drink–gosh, having been to a few ceildhs myself, drinks are necessary. And I’d be right there with the band, playing my spoons or my bodhran, of course. Or both, but not at the same time, naturally.

I love it too. Reminds me of a 1940s design (cf. Casablanca). Was it an official poster issued by the studio, @JohnT , or did you do it yourself (in which case, you are an amazing designer), or was it a custom design that you found someplace?

One thing I find interesting about it, as one who dabbles a little in design myself, is that all the characters portrayed, are looking off to the left–except for Spicer Lovejoy, Cal’s bodyguard. He’s looking to the right, which is fine, as it “balances” the art. But I wonder what some might make of it (“He’s the bad guy!”), especially given that people pounced on Paul being out of step on the Abbey Road LP cover and scooching his legs to his chest on the Sgt. Pepper inside fold of the LP, as somehow indicating that Paul was dead.

I don’t think the artist was indicating or implying anything here, except a wish to “balance” the work. But it’s great to see; thanks for posting it!

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That poster? It’s actually a movie tin you were able to buy @ Walmart:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Titanic-Movie-Tin-Logo-Vintage-Poster-Cinema-Cafe-Home-Bar-Garage-Club-Wall-Decoration-8x12-Inches/484338971

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Thanks for the beautifully written OP, @JohnT. I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments. I’ll just throw in a few random comments of my own.

One unique memory I have of the film when it was in theaters was convincing my elderly mother, then in her 80s, to come out to see it. I doubt she had been to a movie theater since “talkies” had taken over silent films. I’m sure she enjoyed it but as someone who had a lifelong fear of boats and water, I suspect she found the whole experience rather overwhelming.

I don’t remember if I saw it more than once in the theater, but as an avid video collector I greatly looked forward to its release on DVD. Some of you may remember the disappointment of the first DVD release. It was poorly mastered and wasn’t even anamorphic, meaning that it was physically, literally letterboxed, which was a disaster for those with a widescreen TV or projection system. Later DVD releases and of course subsequent Blu-Ray and digital releases were exceptionally good, and reflected the film’s excellent technical quality. I’ve watched it in that format many times and I think I’m about due to watch it again.

Here’s a YouTube video about the impressively massive exterior set of Titanic that was built at Baja California Norte in Mexico. Very few if any films could indulge in such extravagance today:

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I will join the chorus of appreciation on this. Titanic is a great movie, full stop.

Others have already described the design, the spectacle, and other elements, so I’ll comment on the screenplay. People who don’t know anything about moviemaking usually equate the script to the dialogue, and they say Titanic has a bad script, with clunky, obvious speechifying. They’re not exactly wrong, but they fail to recognize that it’s of a piece with the old-fashioned romantic-melodrama tone of the movie, and that if the movie works, the dialogue is doing something right.

But more than that, this is a common misunderstanding of what a movie script actually is. A screenplay is not dialogue. A screenplay is structured story. With extremely rare exceptions, dialogue is the least important element of a script. And the structured story in Titanic is brilliantly built. In particular, the modern-set framing device superficially appears to be a way of building pathos through flashback, so we understand that Rose survives and that this experience changed her and her life as a survivor had real meaning.

But I contend that the bookending of the movie really exists to give us the technical information about exactly how the ship sank, how multiple compartments were compromised and then the ship tipped forward and broke in half, etc. That’s all critically important information for understanding exactly what’s happening after the ship hits the iceberg, and by frontloading it in this way, the audience is already prepared. The movie doesn’t need to slow down during its climax to explain the details of the sinking; we already know. This is a masterful stroke by an experienced filmmaker, the kind of insight into the effect of story structure that a lesser screenwriter/director might have overlooked. Exposition during an emotional climax will kill a story’s momentum, and Cameron comes up with an amazing solution for solving the problem.

More broadly, I fully believe that a lot of the backlash against the movie over the years is inherently sexist, in that Titanic has a devoted female audience. Film Bros hate when icky girls are influential in the movie landscape, and for several years after Titanic other moviemakers launched projects or changed course on movies in progress in an attempt to chase its blend of romantic historical action (e.g. Pearl Harbor), which male movie fans viewed with profound annoyance. (It didn’t help that most of these movies were crap, e.g. Pearl Harbor). So even today, when you mention Titanic, a particular brand of dudely filmgoer will wrinkle his nose and wave his hands with dismissive contempt. It’s just a girl movie, he says, how good, how important, can it be?

It’s not just good. It’s great, and it’s important. And the film-bro types who reject it for being a chick flick can go pound sand.

My older daughter is 12. It might be time for her to take a look at this. And I’ll happily watch it with her.

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I used to watch it every April 14 evening, ending about 12-1 am, depending on when I started.

I, too, took my mother to see it. She watched films all the time, but hadn’t been to the theater in decades. Getting her back into it with a 3 1/3 hour movie was a risk, but she made it through the whole thing. She later went to see Contact, another 3+ hour movie.

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Uh, did you go into the movie without having read any spoilers beforehand? :smile:

I was a bit of a Titanic buff at the time the movie came out. I had been playing a video game called “Titanic: Adventure Out of Time” which was full of Titanic lore and featured a very high-quality (for the time) graphically recreated interior of the ship that you could explore from the top deck to the depths of the engine room.

The historical story is a tragic metaphor for humanity in general: the maiden voyage of a ship containing all strata of society, from the very richest and most privileged to the poor and humble, barely able to afford a third-class ticket. The all-too human hubris on display in believing that the ship was unsinkable (the original ad copy actually said ‘virtually unsinkable’, but everybody disregarded the ‘virtually’ part). Failing to install enough lifeboats because they’d affect the aesthetics of the ship. And the captain speeding through an area he knew contained icebergs, because, got a schedule to keep, and hey, unsinkable.

So I was primed to enjoy the movie, and it didn’t disappoint. It was historically accurate (very unusual for a Hollywood movie) and packed full of Titanic lore, but Cameron was smart enough to wrap what was essentially a 3 hour Titanic documentary around a love story, to give the movie something for everybody.

Same here- looked much more fun than hanging out in the stuffy smoking room.

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One of my most regretted movie going decisions was not seeing this on the big screen. Based on the preview I saw I assumed, like the aforementioned “bros” that this was some dopey love story. What a fool :woman_facepalming:t5: :woman_facepalming.

I don’t have John T’s eloquence, but I sure agree with all his excellent points. I actually love “My Heart Will Go On” and now that it’s fairly rare to hear it, it can still make me tear up. I sure hope there will be screenings in the theaters to celebrate the anniversary.

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Actually, unless I’m mistaken, Cal is facing left but looking right.

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I forgot to mention that we also have this in common. I, too, read it as a kid and was enthralled by it. Long before Ballard discovered the actual wreck, there were fanciful beliefs that because of the cold, lifeless ocean at the depths in which she rested, the Titanic might be discovered in a pristine state just as she was the night she went down, frozen in time, as it were. The nature of the ocean at those depths was not well known at the time, but it’s surprising that the first-hand evidence that the ship had broken in two didn’t prevent the widespread view that it was sitting at the bottom completely intact.

Anyway, the book inspired a lifelong interest in the Titanic story. I have a small collection of Titanic artifact reproductions, like an advertising poster and several menus. The extravagant dinners of the Edwardian era are part of the fascination. I also have wonderful book (now out of print, unfortunately) called Last Dinner on the Titanic that attempts to reproduce some of the recipes, and also has lots of historical anecdotes:

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The first time I watched Titanic was on my first flight from India to the US in 1998 (actually it was on the second leg of my flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta). There was this big screen on which we watched (I hated tear jerker movies back then and would have never watched it in a theater). It was a magical experience on the flight though !!

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I remember reading Raise the Titanic! (“a Dirk Pitt adventure”) back in high school. Dumber than hell, and I knew it at the time, but Cussler knows how to write a page-turner.

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I remember reading articles about the production of the movie before it was released, about the giant tank James Cameron was using and how much it all cost and how it was sure to be a giant money loser. And then after the success of the movie, there was talk in a couple of countries of building a replica ship.

Incidentally, in a recent interview to promote his new movie, Cameron said he commissioned a study to prove that the wooden door could not have supported both Jack and Rose.

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Arthur C Clarke also took that approach in Imperial Earth.

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Huh. Did they study this photo? :wink:

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Graham Norton had Kate Winslet on his show recently, mentioned the story and showed the photo. But I think it appears that Leo is leaning on the side of the door, not lying atop it. So perhaps Cameron is correct?

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My point is that it appears bouyant enough to support 1 person, and 2 partially submersed people, with no trouble.