Titanic and the Art of Financial Risk
“I figure life’s a gift and I don’t intend on wasting it.”
IF THERE was ever any doubt to the power of nostalgia, James Cameron’s Titanic practically breathes it onto your face with its icy breath throughout its 194 minutes. A film that uses fictionalized nostalgia as its narrative hook is now itself a form of factual nostalgia 23 years later. My memory of watching Titanic on 23rd January 1998 is extraordinarily vivid, which for the media-saturated 12-year-old I was, remains a formative and distinctly adult cinematic experience, a sincere emotional event that was prepared to leave the modern trend of fashionable, post-Pulp Fiction irony behind. Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, told Roger Ebert back in 1997 that with Pulp Fiction, cinema was “leaving an existential age and entering an age of irony.”
“‘The existential dilemma,’ he said, ‘is ‘should I live?’ And the ironic answer is ‘does it matter?’ Everything in the ironic world has quotation marks around it. You don’t actually kill somebody; you ‘kill’ them. It doesn’t really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it’s only a ‘baby’ and it’s only a ‘car’.”
Paul Schrader, 1997
And yet by December 1997, we were back, in a full bore existential crisis on a ship that we already knew was going to sink. James Cameron reminded us that it was worth living, even amongst the great events we can’t control. It is now forgotten how genderless the Titanic cinema experience was. More often today I hear Titanic described as a chick flick, a derogatory way of degrading the emotions involved as lopsided and manipulative to one side of the gender line. In reality, Titanic became the most financially successful film of all time not because of a singular focus on a particular audience demographic but because a remarkably large proportion of all movie-goers in 1997 and 1998 connected with the film enough to see it multiple times over 9 months. In the first screening I attended the audience was varied and multi generational. It was an event the general public knew, for better or for worse, would define cinema for the next 12 months. In many ways it should have been a disaster, another Heaven’s Gate.
Initially budged at $100 million dollars, by release the investment had doubled to $200 million dollars, now shared across two separate studios to mitigate the financial risk. Both 20th Century Fox and, to a lesser extent, Paramount were doing what so few do today: take a gamble on original material because they trusted the talent behind it. During casting calls, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were not bankable Hollywood stars (Baz Luhmann’s Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t be released until October 1996, 5 months after Titanic was greenlit). It was well known in Hollywood circles that filming on water was then and still is a certifiable production nightmare, a perfect storm of technical conundrums and logistics headaches that only result to drive up costs and slow down a shooting schedule. Merchandising also wasn’t an option for a story involving the tragic death of 1500 people. But By January 23rd 1998, word was already out – it wasn’t Heaven’s Gate.
The financial risk was considerable. Hollywood had recent history to prove it. Waterworld (1995) was a case study to consider. Running over budget at $172 million, it made a disappointing $264 million worldwide, hardly covering production costs after marketing and theatre proceeds, and this was with a proven Hollywood star. Even 20th Century Fox’s Bill Mechanic said in 1998 that investing in Titanic wasn’t a good business proposition. Speaking to the LA Times in early January 1998, he said, “The truth is, you don’t want to be in this kind of business…it’s un-economic.”
At the time he seemed content that the film may break even. Undoubtedly there were many arguments and many sleepless nights until the profits starting trickling in. The profit timeline for Titanic was sustained income rather than overnight success. Even by January 1st 1998, Titanic’s domestic gross was still almost $80 million short of its total production budget. It had no doubt made a special impact on audiences, but there was no indication that it had the staying power it did.
Bill Mechanic’s then boss at 20th Century Fox, Peter Chernin said, “I assumed I was going to get fired, but I was ready to be fired for it.”
ONCE principle photography started on Titanic in July 1996, the shooting schedule and budget kept growing at an unprecedented rate. As the financial pressure mounted on 20th Century Fox, a great deal of credit should be given to Mechanic for having such stringent faith in the talent of James Cameron, who by that point had built a new production studio in Baja, Mexico just to film the movie. Mechanic had multiple arguments with Cameron about cutting the shooting schedule down to save money. He once visited the Baja studio and gave Cameron a list of scenes he wanted cut from the script to reduce the cost. It was 3 or 4 in the morning and the two men where inside the director’s small trailer. Cameron was furious and non-compliant. “If you want to cut my film, you’ll have to fire me. And to fire me you’ll have to kill me.”
By then Mechanic knew that the only way to save the studio from financial turmoil was to trust Cameron, for he would fight to the end for his vision. Hollywood has plenty (too many) stories of directors putting their careers on the line for their work, and too often Hollywood is content to put best business practice first. But Cameron was different for one reason – considering the size of the production, the young cast, the cutting-edge technology, and the pressures within, both Mechanic and Cameron knew that he was probably the only person in the industry that could pull it off. Today it remains a remarkable feat of artistic trust.
Bill Mechanic’s then boss at 20th Century Fox, Peter Chernin said, “I assumed I was going to get fired, but I was ready to be fired for it.” It’s nearly impossible to think a Studio Head would actually risk their job for a single production. Titanic again remains an exception to the rule. “But it was hell,” he said. “Hell on a level unimaginable.”
Sometimes the biggest risks reap the biggest rewards. Cameron was difficult and unrelenting. Winslet said, “He has a temper like you wouldn’t believe…He’s a nice guy, but the problem was that his vision for the film was as clear as it was.” During production she chipped a small bone in her elbow and accrued a range of deep bruises all over her arms. “I looked like a battered wife…the first day started at 5 a.m. and went on to 1 a.m. Nothing could have prepared me for it.”
Danny Nucci said “[Cameron’s] passion for detail was maddening, but it produced the film we’re talking about 20 years later.”
The result was a film that captured the zeitgeist of 1998. Rob Friedman, vice chairman of Paramont said, “I’ve never seen a phenomenon like this.” Of course, the reason it worked is because the ship itself is simply a microcosm of the world we all know too well and the power structures that exist within it. You don’t spend $200 million dollars on the movie without the knowledge that it has the potential to engage anyone from any cultural background. And from this tumultuous future where we now reside, the experience remains, like many Hollywood epics, a western experience, yet a remarkably universal one. Romeo and Juliet, written over 400 years ago, was the appropriate template for Cameron to follow in order to achieve the one accomplishment every filmmaker craves the most: posterity.
Cameron knows that emotionally he has you, because he’s telling the truth.
The moment you see the hierarchical structure of the Titanic – 1st Class hubris and 3rd class humility – you relate to all of it. You can’t spend a day without seeing these archetypes played out among your peers. The business man who made it rich. The artist who survives by selling one painting at a time. Then there’s the Irish party, which depicts strong community bonds between people of the same lower-social economic class, whilst in 1st Class there is a lack of personal connection, a distinct lack of community, a detachment from reality that keeps characters emotionally separated from one another.
Although undeniably painted with a thick brush, there is a truth to this economic disparity that cannot be ignored. We see the outcome of 1st Class greed play out each day in news coverage that depicts corrupted power and its fallout across the minefields of both social stature and gender inequality. As soon as you see the disparaging treatment of young Rose by the social norms that surround her, as you see the class discrimination of Jack being utilized which such ease by Titanic’s antagonists, Cameron knows that emotionally he has you, because he’s telling the truth. These are the same themes we’ve seen play out all our lives. Cameron’s relentless pursuit of perfection was his way of earning the right to manipulate us. If he could gain our trust, then we would go anywhere he wanted. And all it took was $200 million dollars.
