Titanic (1997)

Titanic is a 1997 dramatic movie released by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. The bulk of the plot is set aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic during her maiden voyage in 1912. The movie won 11 Academy Awards on March 23, 1998 including best picture of 1997. As of 2005, Titanic has the highest box office take in movie history. The 1997 film should not be confused with the Titanic movie made in 1953.

Making the film
The film was directed by James Cameron and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Frances Fisher, Kathy Bates, Eric Braeden, David Warner, Danny Nucci, Gloria Stuart, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Bernard Fox, Ioan Gruffudd, Suzy Amis and Bill Paxton.

When this epic disaster film was not finished in time for its scheduled July 1997 release date, it sent shockwaves throughout Hollywood: studio execs began wondering if they might have another Heaven's Gate on their hands. The two releasing studios, 20th Century Fox (which handled the international distribution and actually had movie rights to the Titanic name) and Paramount Pictures (which had the U.S. rights) panicked. By the middle of 1997, Titanic had become the most costly film ever made (its reported cost hovered in the $200 million range) and the bills were still coming in. When director James Cameron finally delivered the film to Paramount, it ran over 3 hours and it was anyone's guess whether he would ever work in Hollywood again. But Cameron stood his ground and threatened edit-happy studio executives with the message: "You will cut my film over my dead body."

Moved to a crowded release date of December 19, 1997, the film opened with little promotion, and returned a relatively weak $28 million in ticket sales on the first weekend. Within a week the gross tripled. By New Year's Day, the film had hit $100 million and showed no sign of slowing down. It held a virtual lock on first place at the box office for nearly four months and would become the highest grossing film of all-time with more than $1.8 billion in ticket sales worldwide.

Cameron, who fought extremely hard to finish the film, was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Director.

Plot summary
It is 1996, and a treasure hunter and his team explore the wreck of the RMS Titanic in their submersible. A safe is brought to the surface and is opened. It contains, not the fabled treasure the adventurers had hoped for, but only papers. One of them is a nude pencil portrait dated April 14, 1912, and signed "JD". It shows a beautiful young woman reclining with casual modesty on a couch. On a necklace around her neck is the diamond they seek: The Heart of the Ocean.

Rose DeWitt Bukater, an ancient but still lively woman of 101 years, watches a CNN report of the treasure hunt and sees the nude portrait. She phones the treasure hunter Brock Lovett and informs him that she knows of the diamond, the Heart of the Ocean, and also the identity of the beautiful young woman in the portrait: "Oh yes. The woman in the picture is me." Rose, accompanied by her granddaughter, flies out to the recovery site and proceeds to tell the treasure hunters of her experiences on the Titanic.

Rose, just 17 years old in April of 1912, boards the ship with the upper-class passengers with her mother and her fiance, Caledon Hockley. Rose clearly does not feel very much for Caledon, but her mother pushes for the marriage for financial security, to maintain their current lavish lifestyle and bolster their social cachet among the Philadelphia elite. Meanwhile, a drifter and artist named Jack Dawson wins third-class tickets to the ship in a poker game.

Rose is so unhappy about her forced engagement, as well as her endlessly shallow life, that she attempts to kill herself by jumping off the back of the ship. Jack sees her and intervenes to prevent her suicide. Rose's company finds the two and Caledon reluctantly invites Jack to dine with their party the following evening in the first-class dining saloon as a thank you. In the meantime, Rose and Jack soon strike up a tentative friendship as he shares tales of his adventures in traveling and she expresses her own hopes, and he shows her his sketchbook of artwork. Their bond deepens when they later ditch the first-class formal dinner party for a much livelier gathering belowdecks in third-class.

Jack is clearly falling in love with Rose, but Rose is inclined to ignore their growing affection because of her engagement and their different social standings. But eventually she decides to throw caution to the wind and offer her heart to Jack. Rose asks Jack to sketch her wearing nothing but the Heart of the Ocean diamond, the same portrait the treasure hunters will find 84 years later. They later consummate their relationship in the backseat of a car in one of the ship's cargo holds.

In the meantime, Captain Edward J. Smith and his crew have been seemingly ignoring many warnings about upcoming ice fields in the ship's path, and the Titanic maintains the high speed suggested by White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay even as the ship heads into the night. On the night of April 14, 1912, the two lookouts see an iceberg directly in the Titanic 's path. Despite the many efforts of the crew and engineers, the ship strikes the massive berg, flooding the lower compartments past their "unsinkable" capacity and causing the ship to begin its unstoppable descent to disaster.

Caledon discovers the relationship between Jack and Rose and gets even by framing Jack for stealing his diamond. Even though she has the chance to escape the sinking ship early on with her mother, Rose runs away from Caledon &mdash; and her chance at getting into a lifeboat &mdash; to find Jack. She frees Jack and they try desperately to make their way back above decks to escape the rapidly sinking ship. They find many obstacles, including locked gates that are used to keep the third-class passengers from reaching the upper decks to safety, as well as Caledon's violent temper that forces them back to the lower decks. They finally make their way to the top deck, but the lifeboats are gone and they, along with hundreds of terrified passengers, have no choice but to try to stay on the ship for as long as possible before the titan sinks completely into the water. The bow of the ship sinks deeper and deeper until the pressure on the hull causes the ship to split completely in half, before the two halves finally go under at 2:20 AM on April 15.

Rose and Jack stick together and wait with the hundreds of other passengers thrashing helplessly in the water, shouting desperately for those in lifeboats to row back and rescue them. By the time one of the officers decides to row back and help those in need, almost all of the passengers have died of hypothermia in the freezing Atlantic. Rose is heartbroken to realize that Jack has succumbed, as well. She bids him goodbye, then manages to get the lifeboat's attention to come back and rescue her. The survivors in the lifeboats wait for hours until the RMS Carpathia, the closest ship to answer and heed the Titanic 's radio distress signals, arrives to save them. Upon arrival at New York, Rose discovers she still has the Heart of the Ocean tucked into the pocket of Caledon's coat.

As an old woman in 1996, Rose now goes onto the deck of the salvage ship and throws the Heart of the Ocean into the ocean where Jack died.

Back in Rose's room, the viewer see pictures of her life's achievements, including a photograph of her riding a horse at the Santa Monica Pier, just as she and Jack had planned to do together. Rose lies in bed nearby, a scene where some fans have debated whether she is asleep or had passed away. Underwater, the Titanic looms out of the darkness and everything turns new again. A Steward opens the doors from the promenade deck to the Grand Staircase, where all those who died on the ship smile in greeting. At the top of the staircase, Jack turns and smiles at Rose, a young girl of 17 again, smiling back as he helps her up the last few steps. They kiss as the crowd applauds at the couple.

Historical inaccuracies
The "romantic" story is improbable as the rules of the ship ensured complete segregation of first class, second class and third class passengers. They were not merely separated for reasons of social class. Steerage class passengers did not have medical certificates to show that they were free of disease, so they had to pass through Ellis Island when they landed. This was common practice on the ocean liners of the time. Any contact between the different classes would have nullified this arrangement.

Some contend that the film has strong anti-British elements, portraying the British officers and crew as unethical and the Americans and Irish as heroic. For example, the film was criticised for its portrayal of a historical character, the ship's First Officer, William McMaster Murdoch. In his home town of Dalbeattie in Scotland there is a memorial to his heroism and a charitable prize has been established in his name. In the film he is portrayed as taking a bribe, killing passengers and finally committing suicide. 20th Century Fox admitted that the baseless slurs on his character were included only as story decisions, and contributed $8,000 to the prize fund.

Another aspect of the film, the way in which the third–class passengers were completely fenced in below decks, has been described as a myth. There is controversy on this point. It is true that lower percentage of third class passengers survived, but that could be simply because they had farther to go to get to the lifeboats. At the American Inquiry Harold Lowe, the Fifth Officer, said that all women and children, even from the "sixty-seventh" class, had an equal possibility to get into a rescue boat. There is no evidence for closed, locked gates. The quality of the accommodation in third class was only just below that in second class. The White Star line had a policy which demanded that crew members treated all their clientele with civility and respect.

As is common, Hollywood failed to differentiate between English accents, despite the fact that many of The Titanic's crew were from Southampton. Every English character in the film has either a Cockney accent or a well-to-do London accent. There are no regional English accents in the film at all.

The 1958 William MacQuitty and Roy Ward Baker film A Night to Remember starring Kenneth More as Second Officer Charles Lightoller is considered by some to be a more historically accurate film, mainly for its documentary–style depictions of historical scenes, (though the 1958 film does not show that Lightoller was partly responsible for not filling all the life-boats).

The radio system in use at that time was based on spark transmission and so there would have been no clean morse code SOS or CQD beeps.

Several commentators have observed archly their conviction that Cameron must have been very familiar with the Nazi propaganda film Titanic (1943) when writing and filming his own movie of the same title. Several story aspects are in both films but not in any other Titanic version: e.g., the salt of the earth non-British Hero orders his girlfriend into the lifeboat, she complies and then watches her love disappear behind the railing as the lifeboat is lowered; a stolen jewelry subplot; a character locked up in a flooding jail cell and has to be rescued with axe; etc. Additionally, many of the scene compositions and camera angles are uncannily similar.

A geographical error is the reference to Lake Wissota, a man–made lake in Wisconsin near Chippewa Falls (where Jack grew up). The lake was only filled with water in 1917 when a power company built a dam on the Chippewa River, five years after the Titanic sank.

Soundtrack
Cameron originally intended Enya to compose the music, but after she declined, he approached James Horner. Their relations were cold after their first cooperation in Aliens, but the soundtrack of Braveheart made Cameron overlook it. Horner composed the soundtrack having in mind Enya's style.

Céline Dion, who was no stranger to movie songs in the 1990s, sang "My Heart Will Go On", the film's signature song written by James Horner and Will Jennings. At first, Cameron did not want a song sung over the film's credits, but Horner disagreed, and without telling Cameron, went ahead and wrote one anyway, and recorded Dion singing it. Cameron changed his mind when Horner presented what he proposed and the song won a Best Original Song Oscar. The song was also a hit worldwide, going to the top of the pop charts around the world, another stellar financial success of its own.

Other artists were invited to submit songs for the movie including contemporary Christian artist, Michael W. Smith. He mentions in the liner notes to the song In My Arms Again from his 1998 CD, Live the Life, "Inspired and written for the movie Titanic, Grateful for the opportunity to send them a song; grateful it landed on this record."

U.S. awards
Titanic won Oscars in just about every category it was nominated in except for the acting and makeup categories. Titanic was nominated in 14 categories and won 11, being the second movie to win that number (the first was Ben-Hur with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King matching the record in 2004). It was at the time also the only movie of which both two people playing the same person (Kate Winslet as Rose and Gloria Stuart as Old Rose) were nominated (remarkably, the second film to be so nominated, Iris, also starred Winslet):


 * 1) Art direction &mdash; Art Direction: Peter Lamont; Set Decoration: Michael Ford
 * 2) Cinematography &mdash; Russell Carpenter
 * 3) Costume Design &mdash; Deborah L. Scott
 * 4) Direction &mdash; James Cameron
 * 5) Film Editing &mdash; Conrad Buff, James Cameron, Richard A. Harris
 * 6) Music (Original Dramatic Score) &mdash; James Horner
 * 7) Music (Original Song) &mdash; "My Heart Will Go On," music by James Horner; lyric by Will Jennings
 * 8) Best Picture &mdash; James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
 * 9) Sound &mdash; Gary Rydstrom, Tom Johnson, Gary Summers, Mark Ulano
 * 10) Sound Effects Editing &mdash; Tom Bellfort, Christopher Boyes
 * 11) Visual Effects &mdash; Robert Legato, Mark Lasoff, Thomas L. Fisher, Michael Kanfer

It also received the following nominations:


 * 1) Best Actress in a Leading Role &mdash; Kate Winslet
 * 2) Best Actress in a Supporting Role &mdash; Gloria Stuart
 * 3) Best Makeup &mdash; Tina Earnshaw, Greg Cannom, Simon Thompson

Box office
When corrected for inflation, the U.S. domestic gross is actually the sixth highest of all time, immediately behind The Ten Commandments (The Movie Times). Similar figures for the global box office are not readily available, but the international box office grew in significance for Hollywood movies in the 20 years between Star Wars and Titanic, and it is at least plausible that its worldwide gross of $1.8 billion is the largest all time even if inflation were accounted for.

It differs from most films released since the late 1990s in that it took fifteen weeks for its weekly gross to drop by 50%. Typically films drop by about 40% a week.