WHAT WENT WRONG - Titanic

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

I'll never let go, Jack... unless I really, really have to pee. This week, Chris & Lizzie sink into a production laced with PCP, James Cameron's addiction nearly drowning, and why Leo nearly forked himself on set.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong. We hope that all of you are staying safe out there, social distancing, and listening to lots of podcasts like ours, five stars, five stars. This week, we are diving into a slightly different type of film that is the third most financially successful film of all time, a critical darling that won 11 Academy Awards and a movie that I had not actually seen all the way through until I watched it in preparation for this podcast. Yes, that is a stunned look on Lizzie's face. Lizzie, what movie is that? That movie is Titanic. What's wrong with you? I watched chunks of it on VHS at a friend's house when I was young,

mostly just the scene where Kate Winslet's being drawn by Leonardo DiCaprio. And we were 11. And then I never, like, found the time to watch all three hours and 15 minutes in a row. So I'd seen sections of the movie because I never sought in theaters. I wasn't allowed to. So it's three hours and 14 minutes. So I see that I didn't have all of my stats ready to go prior to this recording. But I can say, I really liked it.

It's great. And I'm super excited to figure out what went wrong because when you watch it, it still holds up really well. Oh, it looks amazing. So before we dive into this, because we know Titanic as such a huge success in a movie where everything went right, I want to just give you a little teaser, a little taste of where we're going to be headed in this episode. This is a movie where it went over budget. It went massively over its shooting schedule. Actors were injured.

People got sick. And of course, one of the most interesting stories I've ever come across thus far, a disgruntled crew member allegedly spiked some chowder with PCP. So that's where we're going. Sounds like a fun time. And a good time was had by all. So Titanic was written and directed. by James Cameron, who we have previously covered on an episode about the abyss.

I'm not going to tell you what the final box office is to date, but it was the number one movie in the U.S. for 15 straight weeks, which is crazy. It was also the first movie ever to make $1 billion at the box office, which is a feat that's since been broken by 45 other movies, but at the time, that was a huge deal. It's actually also one of the few movies to make more money the longer it was in theaters, because I had a lot of repeat viewings, which at three hours and 14 minutes is surprising. Yeah, it's really impressive that it made that much money at the box office because they can't fit as many screenings in a day because of how long it is. And that's something the studio was very worried about. It was from the get-go incredibly expensive.

The studio thought that this was going to be mathematically impossible for it to make its money back. They were like the most successful three hour long movie of all time was dances with wolves. There's no way Titanic is going to beat Kevin Costner and some wolves. But let's look at what went wrong in the production of Titanic, which ultimately led to it going very, very right at the box office. But let's just start with James Cameron. We all know that he loves deep sea diving. By the way, if you guys would like a quick catch up on sort of the background of James Cameron, where he came from, what he had done before this.

You can listen to our episode on The Abyss, which actually does have a lot of similarities to Titanic. But let's just recap the movies that he has made prior to Titanic. He's made, of course, his magnumopus, piranha two. Which he jumped in for the director who had been fired previously. But he's made The Terminator. He's made The Abyss. He's made Terminator 2 Judgment Day.

And he's made True Lies. Oh, and aliens. Aliens, yeah. The best one of a lot. All right. So to understand where James Cameron got the idea for Titanic, we're going to dial it all the way back to 1987. He's watching a National Geographic Doc about the first man to dive down and get footage of the Titanic. Now, he wrote some notes after watching that, and this is what he wrote down.

Do story with bookends of present day wreckage scene, intercut with memory of a survivor, needs a mystery or driving plot element. That's it. He did exactly that. Yes, he did. That's the whole movie. That's it. That really is the whole movie. Smart guy. Yeah. So he's been thinking about this since 1987, but he has a bunch of other movies to make before he actually gets here, which kind of makes sense because Titanic is actually quite a tough sell. He's not selling a sci-fi blockbuster. He's not really selling it as an action movie, even though the second half of it, that is what it is. He is selling this as a romance set aboard a sinking ship.

So 1995, he decides, you know what, now's the time, I'm going for it. He wants to see the wreck himself, which had only been discovered 10 years prior by the guy they did the National Geographic documentary about. So he goes to Peter Chernin. Oh, it was only discovered in 1985? I'm not sure if it was discovered. It was only like filmed or shot photos of. Got it, got it, got it.

In 1985. I mean, it's in there. It's real deep in there. Hard to get to, let's say. Yeah, it was. like two miles down, basically. So he goes to Peter Churnan at 20th century fox and he asks for $2 million to do an exploration to the wreck of the Titanic. This is not the exploration that you see in the feature film Titanic. This is just for James Cameron to go down and poke at it. But he gets it.

They give him the money. So he goes down. He does this first dive. He comes back up and he's like, Peter, I have a plan. It's Romeo and Juliet on a boat. I want $125 million. for it. Peter Chernin's like, no, you can have $110 million, as we will learn that is nowhere near enough. So here's where things get sticky, basically immediately before this thing goes anywhere. 20th century Fox has signed up for $110 million for what James Cameron ends up describing as a chick flick. So 20th Century Fox is immediately like, we're not 100% sure about this. Let's start looking for another studio to co-finance the project. And by the way, they should have known what they were getting. Cameron had overspent on every movie since The Abyss. So they initially approach Universal,

who immediately gets cold feet about splitting the bill because they had just made another water-based movie. Chris, what do you think it is? It has to be Waterworld. It's Waterworld. Kevin Costner of Dances with Wolves. Yeah. So that didn't go great. And Universal's like, you know what? No thanks. However, Sherry Lansing, CEO at Paramount, gets a hold of the screenplay. She's like, I want this.

Paramount jumps in and offers to split the bill. Very quickly about Fox's relationship with Paramount, they don't love them because they had just worked together on Braveheart and Paramount had actually quote unquote forgotten to file the paperwork correctly, so Fox

was left out of the best picture Oscar for Braveheart. Wow. Yeah, I don't even understand how you do that. Now, we're about to talk about an EP at Fox who's going to come up a couple different times in the story. And he has the fakesest name I've ever heard in my entire life. Let's hear it. This man's name is Bill Mechanic. Okay, I know Bill Mechanic.

Really? Yeah. He's kind of the hero of this story, to be honest. He's awesome. I've only met him once. He was an advisor through the USC Advisor program. He was my advisor. We met one time.

Oh. And he's produced a lot of incredible movies. Oh, yeah. He produced the Mel Gibson War film with Andrew Garfield, the medic. Oh, uh, Hacksaw Ridge. Hacksaw Ridge. He like single-handedly got that thing off the ground. Well, he's just like, oh.

He does the same for Titanic. He's just a badass. The guy like doesn't care about credit. He just goes in and gets the job. And I met him and he was so no nonsense. He was like, listen, uh, it's a brutal industry. I don't know what I can tell you to help you. But if there's anything I can do, like you let me know.

And I just got to. to ask him some questions about the movies he'd done. He is like the real, it seems like he's the real deal. He's really cool. I think this story will back up that sentiment about our sweet friend Bill Mechanic. Bill Mechanic is the one that has kind of been championing Titanic at Fox to this point. It's kind of his baby. Great.

He is hesitant to sign on with Paramount because of what happened with Braveheart. He's like, I don't want to lose our freaking Oscar paperwork again. And I think this could be... And that must have been where he'd worked with Mel Gibson the first time as a director. because then you follow the job. Got it. Right. So somebody else at Fox is like, listen, don't worry about it. We're going to give them five days to close the deal. That's it. If they can sign the paperwork, that's nuts. They were like, if they can sign the paperwork and agree to our terms in five days to split the budget, let's see if they'll do it. And I think everybody at Fox was

probably going, yeah, we should do this because like it was already becoming clear that this was not going to be a $110 million movie. Right. Paramount is champing at the bit. They go ahead. They rush this through. Their faxing shit back and forth. They sign the paperwork less than five days. This deal is done. However, as soon as they've signed on, Sherry Lansing starts getting like budgets with all the line items in them. And she has a panic attack because she said she immediately knew that this was short by millions and millions of dollars. Well, and it seems like since James Cameron, someone who's always pushing technology, a lot of what he's doing has never been done before. So how do you even budget for it? You're just guessing. Actually, what you just said is exactly the problem with this budget. It's exactly what went wrong with Titanic.

And it's something that everyone who looked at the budget said immediately. Sherry Lansing in an interview was like, we don't even know how you do this. We don't even know how you do a kind of CGI or. suggesting for this. So there's no way to even estimate how much this is going to cost. And Fox is like, true. So glad you signed up to split the bills. Okay. So as soon as Paramount sees the budget, they're shitting their pants. And they send an executive down to Rosarito, Mexico in Baja, California, where James Cameron has begun production. Here's what Jimmy's doing down there. He has built a 40-acre movie studio just for Titanic. And

the last time anyone had done that was like, I don't know, the 30s. Gone with the wind or something like that. Yeah. So workers actually had used 10,000 tons of dynamite to blow a hole big enough for his 17 million gallon tank that would hold the ship. So the tank was bigger than the abyss tank, which was like the biggest tank up until that point. Oh, yeah. He's blown the abyss out of the proverbial water here. Because what he wants to do is he wants to build a 770, 75 foot long portion of the Titanic that is almost completely to scale. Awesome.

And he's rigged it on some sort of like hydraulic lift. Yeah. Yeah, so that he can jack it up and down and sink the ship over and over and over again. And it pays off because it all looks great. And the actors all do. It seems like they're actually terrified of falling overboard. They are terrified of falling overboard and we'll get to why. Let's just say that as with many of James Cameron,

projects. I don't know that this was fun to work on for anyone other than James Cameron. Oh, by the way, as he's starting to build everything and really getting into pre-production, he's like, you know what, I need to go dive back down to the Titanic again, please. And this time, he has his engineer brother build a film camera capable of withstanding the pressure that deep in the ocean because he's determined people should see the actual Titanic. And he does it. Like, it's in the movie. That footage, well, most of the footage you see in the movie. And it pays off. It looks great. It makes it feel very much more real. It's incredible. However, every dive down for that cost $25,000 and they could only record 10 minutes at a time.

Oh, no. And we're still in pre-production, by the way. But this is kind of, this is where he gets really dead set on making it. look and feel as real as humanly possible. Because every dive down, he goes down to the real wreck. He has a real emotional response to it, which I understand. And he's like, I need to do this justice. And in James Cameron's brain, him needing to do it justice turns into him being the most anal about every single detail on that set.

So here's where the budget just immediately goes insane. He wants everything historically accurate. He wants the wallpaper. he does not want it painted on. He wants the actual wallpaper from the Titanic. He wants the costumes to be historically accurate, which cost $8.4 million, by the way. It's a lot of extras they had to dress.

Oh, yeah. The chandelier had to be crystal and not lucite because he wanted it to like tinkle the right way when it's smacking into itself when the ship is sinking. And then my favorite thing, he wants the white star stamp on the bottom of all the china in the dining room, which you will never see.

No, you see it once. I'm convinced. It all, every detail feels right and great. And one great thing about making an expensive movie is it feels like you're watching an expensive movie. And as an audience, it's really enjoyable. It's amazing. So to kind of wrap up this sort of a tale of two studios situation, Paramount is pissed. They've gone down there and they're like, this is nuts.

They feel like Fox has invited them onto the literal Titanic to go drown in the middle of the ocean. Well, I mean, they feel like Fox has hoodwinked them to a certain degree. I mean, their comment at the time was like, there is no way that you looked at the same budget we looked at and you thought it was going to cost $110 million. So they actually threatened to sue Fox. Oh, wow. And Fox is like, oh, hey, just kidding. You know, don't, don't sue us. We'll cap your investment. So they cap their investment at a quote unquote, worst case scenario of $65 million for Paramount. Okay, so 130 million.

Yes. That's it. We're done. We're not spending another dime after that. And Fox agrees to that, although they're not stoked about it because less than halfway through filming, Titanic has already blown three-fourths of its budget. Fox is furious because they're now fully aware that they are going to be left paying for most of this.

So who gets in his car at 2 a.m. and drives down to Rosarito Mexico to talk to James Cameron. I really hope it's Bill Mechanic. It's Bill Mechanic. Oh, this is great. We have a hero. So Bill Mechanic is like, all right, I'm going to fix this. I have a list of scenes. I think we can cut from this thing.

We don't need this. We don't need this. So this is a direct quote from Bill Mechanic about that experience of going down to James Cameron's trailer to tell him what scenes he should cut. Oh, man. He said, Jim exploded. It was three or four o'clock in the morning. And if he'd had a gun in his trailer, he would have shot me. The gist of it was, if you're so fucking smart, you direct the

picture and he walked off, he stormed out of his trailer, pulled his chauffeur out of the car, and sped off. He was screaming. I said, shut down the shoot until he calls me. I got in my car and drove back to L.A. They eventually come to terms. However, it's worth pointing out, those scenes don't get cut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're in the movie. So poor Bill Mechanic. I would love to see that list at some point. I feel like some of them could have gone, if I'm being honest. Maybe. Yeah, I would just love to know.

I'm just really curious. It'd be very interesting. The scene where they're on the board and the water, that could go. Okay. You know James Cameron went on Mythbusters later? And he finally had to admit that, yeah, it could have held up Leo, but he needed Leo to die. So technically he probably should have made the door a little smaller.

So it didn't make Gate Winslet seem like she was being selfish. Yes. So Bill Mechanic and Jim are. just at blows. They are. And also, Bill Mechanic is kind of becoming the whipping boy for this entire production. Right. Fox is distancing themselves.

Paramount is pissed at him. James, he's trying to save it, so James Cameron's pissed at him. Right. He's the one guy that's gotten this movie to happen. And yet he's the one guy who's getting shit on by everyone. A hundred percent. He's getting... It's really...

Dumped on so hard. And honestly, Bill Mechanic does not get enough credit for what he did on this production. everybody just give some thanks for Bill Mechanic. Yeah, exactly. So let's go ahead and take a step back now for a minute and talk about the casting. One of the big things about this movie is that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, they were not huge stars prior to this. Yeah, I didn't think, I wasn't sure, but I didn't think they were. Like, Kate Winslet, I know she did like heavenly creatures. Yeah, she was smaller. So of the two of them, Leonardo DiCaprio was definitely the bigger star. he had developed a following on growing pains.

He'd actually already been nominated for an Oscar for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which he is amazing in. They're super young. She's 20 years old when filming begins. He's 22. I, for the longest time, thought she was older than him. Well, she looks, yeah. She looks older than him in the movie, and I always assumed he was like five years younger than her. No, yeah.

He's two years older. He's very boyish, obviously. Yeah. Interestingly about him, he apparently actually didn't want this part. Well, whoever. told him to take it. Good on them. It's James Cameron. I mean, apparently, so they were not the first choice by the studio for this at all. I heard Jeremy Sisto read across.

Jeremy Sisto did read. Some other people that actually came very close to having the parts were Matthew McConaughey and Gwyneth Paltrow. While I would love to see that movie, I'm glad that they stuck with these two. Other ones, I think Uma Thurman and Winona Ryder were all. also considered for Rose. Oh, interesting. And then Tom Cruise was evidently thrown around for Jack, which is hilarious. Wouldn't he have been like 40 years old on the, anyway, I don't know how old Tom Cruise is, ageless. Um, Leonardo DiCaprio said he'd always been drawn to like darker, more brooding roles. That's what he wanted from this. He kept asking James Cameron, like, can we give, can we give Jack some

demons? Can we give him like, you can't? He's like, you can work with Quentin Tarantino later in your career. Yeah, James Cameron was like, no, you can't. Like, he really does just have to be this sort of bright, shining creature. So Kate Winslet has been in heavenly creatures, sense and sensibility, and Hamlet. And then a couple other smaller movies and TV credits. Neither of them are a box office draw whatsoever. Yeah. There were concerns from the beginning that they were not famous enough to carry the movie.

Now, to give you an idea of what it was like to be an actor on James Cameron's set, he had the aforementioned ship built to scale. And then he had another part of the ship, the poop deck, that he could tilt up to 90 degrees. This is the section you see going straight up when the propeller guy falls off. The propeller guy. Yeah, that's what I remember is everyone going like, oh, propeller guy in the theater when he would hit the propeller.

No? You really missed out on this moment. I didn't see it in the theater. I don't know what pop culture is. It's that one guy that just dings off the thing. I know, I remember him dying in the movie. It was a real comedic beat in my youth. So when asked how James Cameron was keeping his actors and his hundreds of extras safe at the angle,

now remember, this is the scene where you're seeing the ship start to tilt up, you're seeing people sliding down the deck, dangling off of the railings. He said that they had to wear harnesses. And then he goes on to say, quote, I wish I could do it in every scene. Tether the extras so they can't go to the bathroom. You know, he knows what he wants. I love him.

And he knows how he's going to get it. So here's where stuff starts going wrong. Those extras got extremely banged up in those scenes. Specifically, that one where you see them sliding. A lot of those people are not stunt performers. And on just one night of shooting, two people broke ribs and others sprained their ankle. And this is while journalists were there. So who knows what was happening?

when journalists weren't there. Yeah. Also, most of this movie takes place at night because more than half the movie is the ship sinking. So what does that mean, Chris? Can't shoot it during the day. Yes, it's all night shoots. So they were really shooting outside.

Yes. Yeah, it's truly outside. He literally blew a hole in the Mexican coastline and just put a fake Titanic in it. According to Kate Winslet, the first day of shooting started at 5 a.m. and ended at 1 a.m. And then they did that for about seven months.

Sounds like a lot of fun. Yep. During her time on set, she chipped her elbow, had constant black bruises all over her, and a favorite of James Cameron, almost drowned. I am guessing I know the scene. When they're in the hallway below deck, and she's like saving Leo from the master of arms.

So the scene that Chris is referring to, she's just released Jack from the handcuffs and they're racing trying to get to a higher deck. And if you'll recall, there is a massive wave of water that starts gushing down this hallway towards them. And they rush up to what appears to be a closed gate at the top of the stairs. That was really happening. Like none of this is fake. They really were rushing a wave of water towards them. They really did have to get through that gate and get out.

What happened in one take was that that long, beautiful coat. that she's wearing, it got caught on the metal at the bottom of the gate. So Leonardo DiCaprio just skitters free and swims up to the surface. Kate Winslet's coat gets caught and she said she thought she was going to drown. She was stuck underwater. She eventually manages to slip out of the coat and get out. But that was her first almost drowning experience. There's another one.

She was also weighted down 12 feet underwater in the segment where they're filming both of them underwater when they've jumped off of the ship. And they're kind of flailing around. Their way that they got that footage was they essentially just tied her feet to the bottom of the tank. She did not have a respirator. She didn't have an air tank. After three takes, she said she was never doing it again. Did she not do it again?

She did not do it again. Good for her. But James Cameron's response was she was never in physical danger, but she perceived that she was. It's all about perception. Classic. Also, the actors got off lightly. She talked about the way that he interacted with the crew saying, quote, I think Jim knew he couldn't shout at us the way he did to his crew because our performances would be no good.

One of his favorite things to say to crew members on set was reportedly, quote, any idiot could figure this out. Which when you're dealing with a freaking, you know, massive replica of a real ship tipping into the water, I have some questions about that. An example of this is that when the ice blocks arrived that was going to make up the iceberg, the crew is sort of staring at them like, what are we supposed to do with these? James Cameron runs away, comes back with an axe and just runs at the block of ice and starts hacking at the block of ice himself. And that's a Cameron move.

He's got a good, uh, can do attitude. Some other quick facts here. Uh, for the majority of the shoot, the actors were unable to wear wetsuits. Because if you're looking at them, they're in period. costumes, like, how would you even have something on? The only times they could have them on were in the wide shots. So they were freezing their butts off for a large portion of this project. Also, apparently, the tank itself was filthy. According to Kate Winslet, she literally says that they would take turns in between takes, just going, swimming a little bit farther away and

peeing. You know, the extras aren't even bothering to swim farther away. Yeah, everybody's peeing. Yeah, it's got dirt, there's stuff being blown into it because this is not a secure tank. Like you said, this is open to the air. I mean, essentially it's secured from like the rest of the oceans. They're not going to get eaten by sharks. But like it's not, it's not enclosed space. So apparently a lot of the actors actually got kidney infections. Oh, God.

Good times. She said for the first time in my life on a film set I was thinking, I wish I wasn't here. please God, let me die. And in case you're thinking she was the only one who had a bad time, you're incorrect. Lina DiCaprio also famously did not particularly enjoy his time on set. Reportedly in the scene where he's at the famous fancy dinner with Kathy Bates, he leaned over to her during that scene, pointed out all the knives on the table and said, which one of these do I use to lobotomize myself?

A reporter asked Kate Winslet when she might consider doing another movie where Water played a major role and she replied, never, which, as we know, she may have spoken too soon because she has signed up for Avatar 2. I feel like James Cameron

might have a Stockholm syndrome effect on people. I think that's true actually because a lot of his crew members are returning James Cameron veterans. Speaking of the crew, they're not super happy throughout this process. And here's where we're going to get to the PCP incident. Now, tell our,

tell our non-drug-doing audience. Chris, what is PCP? It's fensiclidine, a mind-altering drug that may lead to hallucinations, a profound distortion, a person's perception of reality. It can be color, sounds, self, and one's environment. It was developed in the 50s as an anesthetic, but due to serious neurotoxic side effects, its development for human medical use was discontinued. In its purest form, it's a crystalline white powder. That's angel dust. Heavy stuff. You don't want to do it.

You don't want to do it. And you especially don't want to be surprised that you've done it. I think that's probably the worst, the worst way to experience angel dust. So August 8th, 1996, they're in Nova Scotia and Canada. They're having a pre-shoot rap party. They've wrapped up their Canadian shoot, which a lot of the stuff with Bill Paxton and the old lady and some of the stuff above water, I think, was being filmed in Canada. So they're getting ready to go down and start shooting in Mexico. Thankfully, Leo, Kate, and Gloria Stewart, is that her name?

Yeah. Okay. They are not there. However, Susie Amos, who plays Gloria's granddaughter in the movie and who will eventually become James Cameron's wife, but who is not his wife at the time of shooting, and Bill Paxton are there. Now, they're having a lunch break at midnight, sounds about right, And lobster chowder is being served. Now, Susie Amos doesn't eat the chowder. But about 60 casting crew members, including Bill Paxton and James Cameron, eat it. They are chowin down at the trough, loading up on that lobster. So pretty quickly, people start acting weird.

Bill Paxton and James Cameron both said that one minute they felt fine, the next minute they started feeling incredibly anxious and sort of beside themselves, almost like outside of themselves. Other people started bursting into tears, laughing hysterically, and then others were just vomiting, like, wildly. So the first thing they think is like, okay, the shellfish has gone bad. Yeah, food poisoning. Right. So they're like, whatever, this is food poisoning. They head to Dartmouth Hospital, where they're placed in these little individual hospital cubicles. And then this is where it starts to become clear. It's not just food poisoning because no one will stay put. They're like climbing out of their cubicles. They're jumping on each other.

They said that they were in wheelchairs flying down the hallways. It turns out they are all on PCP. James Cameron was stabbed in the face with a pen by a crew member, which sounds right for PCP. Like, what else are you going to do? Yeah, exactly. So you hear about somebody like running 30 miles an hour into a wall. Yes. Like taking PCP.

Yeah. But imagine your entire cast and crew on it. The case was never solved by the police, despite them looking into it for two and a half years. but Jane's Cameron does have a theory as to who spiked the chowder. He won't reveal a name, but he believes that a crew member had been fired the day before after causing some problems with the caterers. This is the claim. Cameron believes it was this person who poisoned the soup as a way of getting back at the poor

Canadian caterers, which I guess I don't know what the plan was there. And then the Canadians interviewed about it, said that they believed it was just the, quote, Hollywood people coming in trying to... Oh yeah, those Hollywood folks. Putting the PCP in the lobsters. Yeah, that's holiday party. But no, it sounds like it was a disgruntled crew member. Yeah, it sounds like, that sounds right.

Let's talk about the editing and release of the film very briefly now. So the film has blown past its initial release date of July 4th, 1997. So production is overrun by months, right? It's seven months, and it's seven months of night shoots. Oh, God. Yeah. Wild. Okay.

So they've blown most of their money. They've blown all this time. Oh, they've blown not most of their money. At this point, when filming has wrapped, they've blown all their money and then some. And they haven't done any CGI, anything like that. Got it. Both studios are trying to come to an agreement about when the film should release. Fox is like, it's going to release when it's ready to release.

Paramount is like, you release it on July 24th. We don't care what it looks like. We want it to come out this summer. So two executives actually came to blows at the Cannes Film Festival fighting over the release date. I really hope it was Bill McCann. I don't know. But it was eventually agreed that there was no way this thing was going to be ready. So they settle on a December 19th release.

He's also editing this movie himself. Interesting. He takes one day off to marry Linda Hamilton and then he goes back to work. So at this point, this is when articles start to float around saying it's, It's mathematically impossible for Titanic to make a profit. It's going to be the biggest box office bomb of all time. And Kim Masters, who is a famous entertainment reporter and actually she's awesome, she wrote a headline for Time Magazine that read Glob, Glob, Glob, Glob, Glob, Can James Cameron's

extravagant Titanic avoid disaster? So that is what Titanic was viewed as prior to its release. Because this was basically going to be like the first like $200 million movie ever, right? Yes. By the time it was done, the budget they claim, was $200 million. And this isn't like today where there are $250 million blockbusters made every year. No, this is one of the most expensive movies ever made at the time. I know you wanted to briefly touch on the score, which I do think is interesting because

there is an alternate history in which this movie would not have had, my heart will go on. Well, yeah, so here's what I know about the score. I know that James Cameron wanted Enya to do it first. And Enya said no. I don't know if it's because of scheduling or what. And then he heard James Horner score on Braveheart and was so impressed that he went to James Horner now. James Horner scored aliens for Jim Cameron.

And the experience was so miserable for James Horner that he said, I will never work with this person again because they brought him in so late that he only had two weeks to score the film before they had to start getting into recording. And then James Horner, though, saw a cut of the movie Titanic, and he said, you know, fuck it, let's bury the past and let's work on this together. And I heard that independent of James Cameron, James Horner decided he liked the vocalizations of an Enya style. So it almost still sounds like an Enya score, even though it's James Horner. And then it was James Horner who said, let's do a song for the end of the movie. Yeah, because James Cameron actually didn't want any kind of,

song with words. Yeah, he hated like original songs for movies. And then James Horner was like, listen, we can get Celine Dion. And I heard that James Cameron didn't know who Celine Dion was. No. But anyway, but I did think it was interesting that there's a history of people saying, I'll never work with you again. And then 10 years later, 15 years later, they come back. Because even though his methods do seem barbaric at times, they work. They work. And he's really good at what he does. It does release December 19, 19, 1997. to everyone's surprise and delight, it comes out and it makes $28.4 million its opening weekend. That's not, that's actually not great.

No, for how much money it made, that's so low. Yeah, Titanic is not a story of immediate box office success. It's a story of a movie that stayed in the theaters for an incredibly long period of time. That's crazy. So 20th Century Fox estimates that 7% of U.S. teenage girls had seen the movie twice by its fifth week of release. I was nine years old. old when this movie came out. No, I was, wait a minute.

I was eight years old. I can't believe I saw this in theaters. I know. It had human breasts in it. I wasn't allowed to go. I know about that. I went to go see it with my dad and he threw my little, I had like a little pink cardigan with these shitty little like bedazzled jewels on it.

And I remember him picking up my cardigan and throwing it at my face to cover my face during the sex scene. And I remember the like scratchy jewels hitting my eyeballs. But yeah, this was a cultural. phenomenon, the likes of which we kind of have not seen since. It launches Leomania. I remember lining up at Borders Books and Music to go buy the little shitty plastic heart of the ocean necklace so I could have my own little replica. Wow. I didn't even know that was a thing. It was a thing. I just remember it was the first two-part VHS. Yes. That I had seen. So speaking of the VHS,

when it was released on VHS on September 1st, 1998, it was still playing in theaters. So just to wrap this up. It was nominated for 14 Oscars, tying all about Eve for the most nominations ever at the time, and it won 11, tying Ben Hur for most Oscars for a single film. He won Best Director. It won Best Picture, and the only other film since to win 11 Oscars has been Lord of the Rings, Return of the King. And it was also the first movie to win Best Picture that was also the highest grossing film of that year. Wow. So it was the first movie that was number one of the box office the year that at one best picture. It just shows how it was both such a critical darling and so popular.

And Bill Mechanic hopefully got his, produced his Oscar for the best picture. Man, I hope he did. I hope he made a lot of money on this. And I think he did. Yeah. In some ways, everything went wrong. It was over budget.

It went way over schedule. It missed its release date. You had crew that was so disgruntled that they drugged the fellow crew members. You had actors joking about suicide on set, an actor who didn't even want to do the role. You had a studio threatening to shut down the production at a certain point. I did hear at one point that in the editing room, James Cameron had a razor, and he would say, this is what we use if the movie doesn't work. He had a razor taped to his computer, and next to it was a post-it note that said,

only use if movie sucks. But as long as the movie works, it doesn't matter. the movie worked. It worked in a way that no movie had really worked up until that point. So I think we usually wrap these up by saying a little something about what went right. And obviously, you know what went right with Titanic. It was an enormous box office success. But I do also want to highlight that I think one of the things that went very right in this movie is something that James Cameron has done over and over again, which is Kate Winslet's character, is Rose. He has a way of writing interesting female leads that tend to be the leads carrying action

movies, which it was and to a certain extent still is unusual. My last what went right thing I would say is he did a great job casting a movie with no major at the time stars. No, the biggest star is Kathy Bates. But one of the things that makes the movie work so well is the fact that there aren't distracting like, oh, I know this actor as themselves, types of performers. It was a ship of real people and he's filled it with people that feel like real people when you're watching it.

Yeah. So, you know, nice job. Jim. Good job, Jim. Thank you guys so much for listening to this week's episode of What Went Wrong. Hit us up. We have contact info in the show notes. And of course, if there are any movies that you would like us to talk about,

please reach out and give us suggestions. Remember, it doesn't have to be a movie that failed. It can be a movie that succeeded. We are just looking for films that have behind the scenes drama so we can continue to explore how crazy hard it is to make a successful movie in any way. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonio.