Titanic (Part 3): Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows and more. We are your icebergs of intel, here to sink your ship of apathy into a sea of sensationalized details. My name is Jordan run Tog and I'm Alex Hegel. I can't believe you just came up with that in thirty seconds. I mean, we're working on this episode for six weeks now, so you know, merrinating. It's been merriating. Yeah, well, folks, today we are bringing you the third and final installment and our epic trilogy exploring the making of James Cameron's Titanic, which turned twenty five years old a few weeks back. The last episode explored what was basically the first VHS of the original two tape release. In other words, all the happy, romantic stuff. The King of the World old scene will draw me like one of your French Girls scene, the scene where Jack wins over the snobs at the first class dinner party, the raucous Irish dance party in third class, and of course car Sex, all in all a good time. This episode is a bad time. We'll explore all the stuff that went down in the second VHS. That's when all hell breaks loose, the ship starts to sink, and the movie goes from being a period romance to being basically a high octane action movie. I have to admit, as a little boy, I sometimes went straight to tape two. Did you do that too? It was basically one of the most hetero normative things I ever did. Yeah, I mean, it's the best part. It's just my enduring. My indelible image of this movie is not the car sex, but the god's eye shot with the guy on the propeller says a lot about us. Every woman in my life says, yeah, you know what. First tape was the one that I always watched first and preferred every guy in my life. You know what, I hate it. I hate that I sound like the lame night class being like Big Ship sinc. I know, I feel, you know, I mean my I always feel like I say this about many things in my life. I feel in many ways like Bill Paxton or Bill Paxson's character in this movie, where at the beginning, you know he's just all about kind of like the treasure and the sensationalism of it, and then by the end of the movie he learns the heart of the story. And that's kind of was my relationship with Titanic because a little kid, I was interested in the archaeology of it, and in a way I don't know, in the same way the kids are into like dinosaurs and trucks. It was a big thing, you know what. I was like five six years old when I got into the Titanic, long before the movie came out, and it was just hit some kind of like primal child thing in me. And then I used to watch all these documentaries and this movie all the time, and then I started revisiting them in the last couple of years, like as someone in their early mid thirties, and now it's like, WHOA. I will choke up at certain points during this episode when we talk about, you know, the old man not being allowed a spot on the lifeboat and his wife stays behind to be with him. Things like that just hit totally differently when you have some some life under your belt. Good Lord, So this is our first and probably only, let's face it, three parts or that we're ever going to tackle on here. I'm very much aware that Titanic is very much my thing as opposed to yours. Now you're holding up, has this changed your view of Titanic, the film or the historical event in any way? You know? Really what it's done for me is I I have to hand it to James Cameron. Man, I'm still not gonna watch Avatar, but it is really mind boggling. And I knew some of it, but it really just the mind fairly reels. You know, I'm not sure aside from Avatar, like what else would really compare in terms of doing this kind of work for a movie. I mean like at a certain point it really becomes like, yeah, you know, this is just a movie, right, But and it was not. It was not for James Cameron. It wasn't. No. I mean we'll get into a lot more of those kind of stories in this episode, but it was like apocalypse now, like not like making the movie, but the actual experience of being in the jungle for James Cameron. I think, you know, we talked about this little in part one about how like Cameron doesn't really have like the fervent stand base that like you know, your p T A. S or your your Wes Anderson's do. But I think he's shaped modern filmmaking more than maybe more than anyone except for like Spielberg, in terms of just like not shaping like again, you know, camera techniques or whatever, but just really redefining the scope of what these big pop culture tent pieces can do. You know, Because he's not making like, you know, ambitious, single take avant garde filmmaking. No one's saying he's like Gadar or Cruissawa people have claimed to have watched but never actually have. He is literally affecting the landscape of twenty one century filmmaking. So well, before we go any further, I would like to shout out some younger history buffs that I think are carrying on in the spirit of James Cameron's uh insane complete a streak and obsessive attention to detail. Um Historians are usually seen as these older, slightly tweety people, but this team is in their twenties and they're attempting to digitally recreate the Titanic in its entirety through painstaking research. This project is called Honor and Glory, so named for the figures that a door on the clock in the Grand staircase, and the idea is that you can travel through the entire ship. It's completely interactive. Every door, every drawer, every item you see you can interact with. And these people were the real deal. They've been working with the greatest Titanic historians who have been on the case for like fifty plus years, trying to get the correct coat hangers or the correct color of a material in a room where all we have are black and white photos, or the correct design for a room where there are no photos. It's really nuts. And have been working on this project since twelve and they're still not done yet. So they've beaten James Cameron for the, you know, the endurance test version of this, but the demo versions that are available for free on their website and the walkthroughs on their YouTube channel are just phenomenal. I think they also have vr oculus capability to It's just it's so wild, and obviously I'm a giant nerd, so of course I think what they're doing is extremely cool. But it gets me excited in general about a younger generation of historians who can basically harness the power of the Internet and use it as the incredible database that it is. I mean in the same way that you've got kids that are half my age who have been exposed to ten times more music than I ever have because of growing up with Spotify. I think it's the same deal with young historians and research. They can do more research in a decade than some people do in their whole lives, and then they can build on it from there and take what we know about moments in history even further. So if you're coming back to listen to us for even more Titanic my new shaw, I think you might enjoy these folks to their websites Honor and Glory, and they're on YouTube as well, and they have another YouTube channel called Titanic University where they have a wealth of cool, granular videos that I love. Like it's like a fifteen minute long one about how they heated the Titanic. That's definitely better SEO. Honor and Glory feels like it's going to take me to like a White Pride site. Oh yeah, yeah. See for me as a Titanic book, I knew exactly what that meant, but I'm sure at a context, you're right that seems like a DW. Griffin film. Yeah, it should be the next thing James Cameron remixed Avatar Birth of a Nation. Uh, they're on Patreon as well. I should say, if you want to kick him a couple of bucks. Anyhow, without further ado, let's get into it. We'll get into the truly insane stories behind James cameron sinking of the Titanic, or should I say repeated sinkings and experience that very nearly killed Kate Winslett many times over and cost the sanity of the crew. We'll also get into the true life stories of heroism on the real tie Tannic, bust submiths about the lifeboats, and tackle the most enduring controversy associated with the Titanic production. Could Jack have fit on that floating piece of wood paneling alongside Rose. It's not a door. It's not a door, quinsay, it's a door door paneling. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the third and final part of our trilogy, sharing everything you didn't know about James Cameron's Titanic. I'd like to begin this episode by telling you a fictional story about another ship that sank in the North Atlantic. This British ship struck an iceberg on her starboard or right side during the month of April and sank roughly four into miles off the coast of Newfoundland, all of which was the case for a Titanic. There was a tremendous death toll due the fact that there were enough lifeboats aboard for all passengers. This ship was roughly the same gargantean size as the Titanic and travel at a similar speed, and even boasted similar safety features that were supposed to have rendered her indestructible and dare I say even unsinkable. The ship's name was the titan Now you're probably thinking of this fictional story is the work of a lazy author who just cribbed the Titanic story for their own work. But this is where it gets really weird. This story was published in eighteen, fourteen years before the sinking of the Titanic. It's taken from a novella called Futility the Wreck of the titan by Morgan Robertson, and after the Titanic disaster, many accused Robertson of having clairvoyant black magic powers. Uh He denied this, saying instead that he was simply very knowledgeable about ship building trends. Thanks to family members who worked on luxury liners. But still there are forty one point one million square miles of Atlantic Ocean, and he chose roughly the same spot where the Titanic went down. And you know, there are many reasons why a ship could sink besides an iceberg, but the ship struck in Iceberg. And then there's the name titan Titanic kind of makes you think fate priory. I don't know. Roberts said also claims to invented the periscope, which I just wanted to include because that sounds like something Dr Evil would say during that speech describing his father. My father would make outrageous claims like he invented the periscope. Anyway, Greek. What a great coda to that. Well, now let us move from the spooky to the terrifying. The sinking scenes in Titanic were the most challenging scenes to capture. It was not only technically complex, but also the most hazardous for the crew. During these moments, James Cameron transformed into the worst version of himself. And this is a man who almost killed someone already in the water on the set of the Abyss For legal reasons. For legal reasons. We have to say James James Cameron almost killed many people. Yea, this is so bizarre to me. They had a nickname for him when he turned into the bad Jim, Um Midge or meet me. I don't know what Jim spelled backwards, like evil spock, like with the goatee. Ridiculous um profile in the New York Times offered this memorable description of Midge. Cameron became known as an uncompromising, hard charging perfectionist and three hundred decibel screamer, a modern day Captain Bligh with a megaphone and walkie talkie swooping down into people's faces on a one hundred and sixty two foot crane. That's a creative it. I love that realistically, Jim Jim, he probably brought up his blood pressure. James Cameron was probably uh in an apoplectic rage for like of the shoot. Uh you know, not only did he yell at people all the time, he maybe got a little physical with a couple of crew members. There was eighty hour six day work weeks. One crew member described the environment as the closest thing to slavery I've ever laid my eyes on. Uh, it's just the second dubious reference to slavery in this trilogy. Some of the crew claimed that they worked upwards of ten consecutive hours without a break. Some actors got kidney infections after being submerged in the pool for so long. UM. Members of the crew have also talked about working thirteen days straight before Christmas, to the point where these stunt workers were actually falling asleep. They were falling asleep during their safety briefings to go over the scene where the Grand staircase is flooded. Um, you don't want to be falling sleep during that particular safety briefing. Cameron's a longtime editor, Mark Goldblatt said of him, you don't just join one of his films, you sign on for a tour of duty. Cameron echoed the sentiment, saying filmmaking is a war, a great battle between business and aesthetics. Cameron took to wearing a T shirt with the slogan that seemed to justify this punishing schedule. Time means nothing in the face of creativity. Sounds like a line of some of his dialogue. The crew countered by having T shirts made, We've had some of their favorite on set quotes from Jim or his associates. Jim is a hands on director, and I have the bruises to prove it. No animals were hurt during the making of this film, but the actors were tossed around like styrophone cups. Don't get creative. I hate that waiting on lipstick. I say, we just tattooed their lips. It's a timing thing. I don't care if it has any organic emotional reality or not. That was a favorite. That's a good one. You either shoot it my way or you do another movie. Bill Paxton, who it should be noted, was a dear friend of James Cameron's, admitted there were a lot of disgruntled people on the set. Jim is not one of those guys who has the time to win hearts and minds, which is probably why someone spiked his chowder with PCP. James Cameron yelled so much that script supervisor Shelley Crawford was quoted as telling Premier magazine, I can't even tell the difference between yelling and not yelling anymore. It's just what does he want and what do we have to do to get it done. The reporter for Premier, John H. Richardson, who called his piece Inside the Punishing Dictatorship that was James Cameron's Titanic set, observed an incident where a cable stopped working. He said, Cameron yelps, all right, this is major. He turns to an actor, Can I have your gun please? The actor hands over a stunt gun. Jim points it at the cable tech which kneecap. Do you wanted in? He asked. Granted, James Cameron was joking, but this was in front of a reporter, which just gives you some idea of what it was like when press weren't around. His behavior admittedly improved when reporters were present, which led the crew to joke or you know, joke in quotes about hiring an extra and having them around at all times and just telling James Cameron that it was a reporter. My personal favorite Midge moment occurred when Cameron invited one of the pre eminent Titanic historians, a guy by the name of Don Lynch, to serve as a historical consultant on the set and during the chaotic sinking scenes where one of the lifeboats is nearly lowered into another boat that's already in the water. It's like, you know, really scary. It's threatening to crush the people that are inside in the lower one. That really happens. But the historian gets on his walkie talkie very politely tells James Cameron, you know, hey, that wasn't how what happened. The lifeboat wasn't that close to crushing people in the water. The people in the lower boat, they could stand up and touch the hull of the boat, but not much lower than that. Cameron just dismissively snaps, thanks for your opinion. Now I'm gonna make it exciting. This is the one of the world's leading Titanic historians, and James Cameron's like nerd nerdle er. And yet in spite of themselves, and yet, and yet I've grown accustomed to the sound of his shrieking in my ear. Uh. People found themselves, Uh, you know, fond of him, not just limited to Bill Paxton, who was probably spent more time in close, didn't He said he was on the sub with him, right, He was on the sub not while filming Titanic, but when James Caeron was making Goes to the Abyss a documentary, and in like two thousand one two two. Actually, I think here's a weird one act play. I believe James Cameron and Bill Paxson. We're diving on Titanic on September eleven. Okay, I may be embellishing that. I hope you're not, I know. To his credit, Cameron did apologize for his outbursts on occasion. One of his assistant directors told The l A Times about a time when one of the extras complained about being fed raw chicken by the film's caterers, possibly dusted with PCP, and Cameron promised them he'd personally look into it, and he looked into it. The first ad said, well, he personally screamed it seven of us and we had to look into it. The script supervisor, who shared several of the horror stories we recounted earlier, told Premier the other day when they were doing the funnel drop scene, just the scene in one of the smoke stacks collapses, Jim says, what do we have to do to get this right? Sacrifice another chicken. The guy goes, how do you not like that? I mean? Yeah. A favorite phrase of Karen's is any idiot could figure this out? Uh? Justifying his problem solving. Um, you know the Stephen Lange quote that the only things he can't do on set our act and cater he wanted to do everything else. He would just just make up. He would tweak blood spatters. Uh. Script supervisor Shelly Crawford wonder why does he do it? Why does everything have to be perfect? Why does the wave have to be four ft and not two ft? Why does the amplitude have to be exact? How does he decide? How does he questions for our time? The shoot dragged on longer than expected, perhaps obviously in hindsight. The filming schedule was supposed to be a hundred thirty five days grew to a hundred and sixty. James Cameron didn't drink caffeine because it's supposedly made him meaner, which can you imagine? Uh? So he coped with his workload by taking Vitamin beat twelve supplements and drinking wheat grass. But other members of the cast and crew didn't cope quite so easily. Kate Winslet wrote in her production diary, which was later published in Vogue, when I left the shoot, they were supposed to wrap on February, but now it's March fourteen, and they're still shooting. They've been shooting nights for three months, rapping long after dawn most mornings, seven days a week for weeks, with two hundred or three hundred extras and dozens of stunt people and water and the cold air blowing off the ocean. People are tense. They want to go home. Hernando the driver says, two security guards got into a fight. It's just like it, just if you overlay the ken Burns Civil War, like sad little music. It's like a lovely It's like ill faded expedition to the North Pole, or some diaries in the trenches or something. We're out of food. Hernando the driver says, two security guards got into a fight. Throughout the production, there were rumors of on set injuries and accidents that harkened back to the lawless days of Hollywood, when human life was just part of the cost of that tinseltown glamour. A Fox spokesman acknowledged eight or nine accidents. Those were just the ones that were acknowledged. Some reports cited more. One paramedic on the set um, presumably of a fleet of them called Premiere that, in addition to run of the mayoral respiratory infections, flus, fevers, stomach problems, diarrhea. He treated one broken ankle, some fractured ribs. What is Dutch elbow? Is that like tennis elbow? I don't know. It might be just like ramming it into something. I don't know. Head injuries and a lot of bouts of hypothermia. There were also cases of extreme fatigue, with reports of crew members sleeping on their feet like horses and leaning against walls. Put An investigation by the Screen Actors Guild did not find any violations. Come on, SAG, get your together. A further investigation by Time magazine revealed something even more disturbing. Though the American members were chauffeured to and from their hotels, local workers on the Mexican set were not. There was a case where local woman was injured in a car crash after working until three am as a script supervisor. These local workers were reportedly required to put in twelve hour days. You will remember they chose to build the Titanic set in Mexico because there were no labor unions there. Honestly, Man, this makes his insistence on doing the VFX and Avatar so much clearer because one of the big issues with like Marvel and VFX heavy stuff is that VFX gigs are not union wardrobe, makeup set. All of those are union jobs. All of those like fex heavy Marvel movies, where like these anonymous people are writing into Empire and Variety saying like we've been in a bunker for seven days, like retouching. You know, Uh, Captain America's asked like, those are not union gigs. So suddenly it makes sense to me that James Cameron spent two decades developing VFX technology that would enable him to skirt the entire human element of filmmaking. Anyway, there is a memo from a construction coordinator complaining that workers were fed only bread and milk in the morning as their meal for the day, and that was rolled back at one point. This memo, obtained by Time magazine, right in part, it is deplorable that we have witnessed our workers digging through the trash to retrieve fruit and other foods to try and get something to eat. It's hard to believe that this company has stooped so low to reduce costs. One of the Cameron's production partners, John Landau, not that one, not Bruce Springsteen's manager. No, for legal reasons. Would that be amazing though it was? I checked, believe me. Uh. He responded to this allegation by saying that the Mexican workers on the film were treated far better than the norm in their country for these shoots. So cool man, I guess. Oh. And final one person died off the set in a drunk driving accident, so I know you can't really lay that at the feet of of of Jim. So this is all bad. Generally, the crew got the full brounth of James Cameron's Midge character, but Kate Winslet also got it more than her fair share, apparently. I've seen reports that James Cameron occasionally referred to her as Kate weighs a lot instead of Kate Winslet Wolf. Yeah. I think that was in the Rolling Stone profile of her. In um of all the starring cast, it's safe to say that Kate had the worst time overall, and she admitted that there were times when she was quote genuinely frightened of Cameron just a quick misery list rundown, She caught pneumonia, almost drowned several times, chipped a bone in her elbow and got so banked up that the makeup artist used her actual bruises as a photo reference to maintain continuity in the film. She told The l a. T Times that quote, she looked like a battered wife, end quote. She said in retrospect that she found it weird that no one thought to ask her whether she could swim during the audition. Processed Cameron's response to this, I have to let actors who are adults take a certain responsibility for their own preparation, which kind of fair, I guess, but still obviously Kate was subjected to the same grueling days we spoke about with the crew. She told The l. A. Times that her first day on the set started at five am and went until one am the following day. Nothing could have prepared me for it, she said. There are quite a few twenty hour days, and two thirds of it was night shooting because the Titanic sank at night. It was every man for himself on the set. You had to ensure that you snatch some sleep during the day with a black eyemask on. Sometimes you'd find yourself having lunch at two am or breakfast at four pm. It was very disorienting. Exertrom reproduction diary, which we talked about earlier, were published in Vogue magazine, are positively tragic. She speaks of having to spend an hour and a half before Betty each night getting her hair put into pin curl with the help of a hair stylist. She writes, good thing we were both too tired to chat, because half the time I'm asleep in the chair. On screen, I have luscious red curls. Off screen, I look like a bad lady with a head scarf tied in a bow at the front, so attractive. I think I've put on weight. I feel heavy, tired, physically swollen, and so lonely without my family. On February six, she writes, my feet are pulsating because they were so trampled on by all the steerage extras, third class extras, like a herd of elephants that reduced all my toes on my left foot to a pulpy mess in one take. And on February six, she says I was wrapped early because I'd hurt my arm I fell during a take, and since it was already sprained from something else this week, it just made it worse. I'm exhausted and ache like hell, I'm bruised and battered from head to foot. Just realized that this is the first time in ages that I'm going to sleep in the dark. It's night exclamation mark. And to cap it off, she told South Coast Today, for the first time in my life on a film set, I was thinking I wish I wasn't here. Some days I'd wake up and think, please God, let me die. I can only imagine that was delivered with a laugh. Laughter mind James Cameron something pokes his head in No. However, like many other members of the crew, Kate Winslet praise James Camera's work, ethic, and commitment, admitting that as hard as Cameron pushed her, he pushed himself even harder. As she told the only times by the end that was existing on about four hours of sleep a day, but Jim was existing on three. In addition to the punishing hours, there was also the minor matter of hypothermia. For all the scenes shot inside the sinking ship, the crew and most of the cast were able to wear wet suits, but this was impossible for Kate because of her costume, which was just a thin chiffon dress. Costume designer Deborah Lynne Scott had twenty four of these dresses made due to the beating that they took after hours of being submerged in seawater, and this water was cold, pumped in straight from the ocean. Kate's gasp as she steps into the water for the first time after rescuing Leo from being handcuffed and the Master at Arms office that's not acting. The cup that she wore did not offer much warmth either, hence hypothermia. Interestingly, the coat was a size eight, while the rest of her gowns were size four. They wanted it to be bigger on her an attempt to make her look smaller and more vulnerable during the sinking scenes. They did a similar trick in the engine room by hiring shorter stuntmen. I think five feet was the cut off, and that was just all done in an effort to make the engine room look bigger, which I appreciate. It's funny that the random ways that they would try to cut costs for all the you know, the dining room scenes. They got pounds of bluga caviare we engraved with the white star Line logo on individual forts uh, yeah, and yeah. Kate Winslet hated this costume not only because it offered her zero warmth, but also because the long flowing train kept getting caught on stuff, which is not good when your whole role is running through a rapidly flooding corridor. She wrote her production diary, my dress is driving me bloody bonkers. I'm in the same dress till the end of the film. It's layers and layers of chiffon, and layers and layers of pain in the arts. It's supposed to trail behind me in the water like a long snail, but instead of keeps wrapping itself around my legs and tripping me up in the middle of shots, which is driving me mad. And because of this pain in the arts costume, Kate very nearly drowned while filming the sinking scenes inside the ship. It occurred while shooting the scene where Kate and Leo are trying to escape in the white hallway that rapidly fills up with water, only to find their path blocked by a locked gate. In the film, they open it just in time, but Kate's coat got caught on the gate during one of the takes pinning her underwater. She explained, I had a sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free. I had no breath left. I thought i'd burst, and Jim just said, okay, let's go end. That was his attitude. I didn't want to be a whim, so I didn't complain. Cameron later defended himself by saying, I knew Kate was pretty stoic. She never expressed to me that she didn't want to continue. It didn't come to me until about ten minutes later that she was actually really shaken. It would not be unusual for Kate after a really big emotional scene to go and cry for an hour, just as part of the process. Is that part of the process. In this scene, she was never in physical danger, he continued, but she perceived that she was. If you have a spill on a horse, you just get right back on the horse. This was a close up shot and not a situation where she could be doubled. If I had to do this all over again, I would probably do the same thing, he said. I learned nothing. You'd be forgiven for wondering if Kate Winslet hates, or at least hated James Cameron for all this, and as we mentioned, she was pretty vocal about what a miserable experience the movie was. When speaking to the press, she even slammed him in the La Times about the tremendous cost of the movie, saying, I know we don't even think about things like budgets, but everyone on set was talking about it. I believe in the end it was an excess of a hundred and sixty million, actually two hundred million. It makes you think, doesn't it. How many houses could you build for that money? How many people could you feed? Who? And then she came for Jim personally. Soon after the release of Titanic. She told The Guardian, Jim's a nice guy, but the problem was that his vision for the film was as clear as it was. He has a temper like you wouldn't believe. As it was, the actors got off lightly. I think Jim knew he couldn't shout at us the way he did to his crew because the performances would be no good. You'd have to pay me a lot of money to work with Jim again. James Cameron, who presumably was sleeping on a bed of money following the worldwide successive Titanic didn't let the snarky comments in the press from his leading lady bother him. He said that Kate was quote just letting off steam after the pressure of shouldering a two hundred million dollar production. He added, Kate would look out and see the small city with these thousands of people and all this stuff happening, and she'd know that what it all boiled down to was what was going on in her eyes, which is sort of an uncharacteristically generous read on the situation from Jim Cameron. Uh and surprise, surprise, Kate Winslett did indeed get paid a lot of money to appear in James Cameron's Avatar to the Way of Water. Considering it's obviously a water based production, her salary must have been substantial. Kate Winslet and fellow actors took free diving lessons as part of their preparation for the production, and Kate trained to the point where she could hold her breath for an astonishing seven minutes and fifteen seconds. I don't understand how that's possible. She's destroyed Tom Cruise's previous record for on screen breath holding, which was at six minutes from mission impossible rogue nation. I I can't even begin to consider how that's done. Wow. Kate also has nice things to say about Jim Cameron these days. She told the Hollywood Reporter, it was so wonderful to work with Jim again. Time has changed him. Jim has become a father a few times over. It's a calmer person, chilled. You can just feel him enjoying it more this time. So that's that's all nice. But back to Titanic. Leo meanwhile remain kind of a oh he's a little that's not mince words, a little a little stinker. He was, uh we talked about this in the first episode, but um yeah. Despite being an accomplished scuba diver, Leo really hated being in cold water. I know, I know, well, this line really kills me. He admitted. The water stuff was really hard because I'm very temperature sensitive. Can you imagine how secure you must be to describe yourself as temperature sensitive and not expect to be torn apart? James Cameron jokingly called him a Persian cat, which is a tremendous diss. Kate helped him get used to the temperature for a few minutes prior to each scene. Uh, and he later said the Titanic made a man out of me. Uh. They would apparently warm up after they would do these scenes by having the crew pour buckets of warm water over them. But before we move on, let's get to some lightning round bullet point details from the sinking scenes. In the shot where Kate Winslet breaks Jack's handcuffs with an axe, if you pause it just the right moment, you'll see that she actually hits his hand directly. Thankfully, the axes made of rubber and EA glided viewers can actually see it. Bend, I have an asset in factual error. Can I that the mastered arms office where Jack is handcuffed was actually an inside cabin and had no porthole? Thank you? I am just impressed Cameron missed that. Yeah, but but they do have that great shot of of the porthole, like starting to be submerged under water out of it. Oh yeah, I'm surprised he wasn't. Like Kate. This is the real fire acts will be using in this scene. Don't miss make it. Let's go again. Leonardo's holding a bleeding stump. It sounds like one more time. Um, you remember the scene where Jack and Rose are running in slow motion down the White Hallway which was known as Scotland Road, being chased by the water. Those are stunt doubles doing the running, to which Kate and Leo's faces were digitally composited. Uh. Even especially in four K Baby, you'll notice that the water that floods the ship is fairly clear, which is incorrect according to NASA. Of all people, ocean water can appear murky and dark due to the marine life that it contains, so in real life, the rush of sea water would have been a terrifying brown wave like Pooh Water. Friend of the Pod. It never gets old. Uh. And finally, the scene where Jack and his Irish friend Tommy Ryan pick up a bench in third class and smash open a gate resulted in more injuries. What is do we have a running tally of how many injury web worry into like two dozen at this point? Right? Well, Leo threw out his precious little shoulder, uh, and Barry caught himself in the chin with the bench again, Jim, They shot the watch shot for that scene and Cameron goes cut, all right, let's go again. But wait, this is cute. I like this story though, well, a child playing one of the extras got really upset because he thought he'd screwed up and that was why they had to do it again. And everyone started to laugh, and James Cameron goes over and starts to talk to this little kid and he takes him aside, and he's like, all right, we're gonna do this and then we're gonna do this again. Do you think you can do it like three times? Because he didn't know that they had to do like wide shots and then close ups and everything, and he just thought like he had screwed up. And I just thought that it was really nice take the time. I mean that little like taking the kids aside probably costs like two point three million, but uh, but still that child would later grow up to be Sam Worthington. I'd like to take a moment to discuss kind of a bummer point of fact. In nearly all dramatizations of the Titanic story, there's inevitably a scene that shows the third class passengers locked behind gates, trapped down below, and the bowels of the ship as it sinks, kept from the lifeboats in favor of the first and second class passengers. It's certainly a powerful visual that illustrates the stark disparity between the socioeconomic classes on the Titanic, but it's not how it went down in real life. Numerous historians have commented on this. Well, there were gates. They existed not to keep the poorer passengers down below in the event of an emergency, but it was as part of a U s immigration law and to prevent the spread of disease. In other words, the immigrants had to be separated until they could be brought to Ellis Island for of checks and processing. Uh. This whole thing actually throws a real ranch into the plot of the movie about a first class passenger having a relationship with third class passenger. Uh. In the book Real Versus Real, How Hollywood Turns Fact into Fiction, author Frank Sinello quotes an anonymous story and who explains that on the actual Titanic quote the classes were strictly segregated. Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near Kate Winslett. So all this to say, the gates were there, and some of them may have been closed or even locked in the initial confusion after the ship struck the Iceberg, but they were open very quickly. Historian and author Tim Malton told the BBC Radio Times that the idea that the third class passengers were locked below deck is quote total rubbish. As soon as the order was given to lower the lifeboats, the order was given to open all the gates, and there was no discrimination on the boat deck between first class or third even back in twelve maritime law front of the pod maritime law dictated that all passengers have access to the upper decks at all times. The third class general room had a door that opened directly out into what was known as the well deck, so in truth there were no physical barriers for third class passengers to get to the boat deck and ultimately to the lifeboats. A man named Daniel Buckley was one of a handful of third class passengers who made it to a boat, and according to testimony, he gave it one of the official inquiries the gate leading up from the steerage or third class area was not locked, and those who've been sleeping below had, according to him, as much a chance as anyone else to make it to the lifeboats. So this leads to the devastating question why did only of third class passengers, or a hundred seventy eight out of seven hundred and six survived the sinking, while of first class survived and of second class survived. I wasn't due to any malicious intent by the crew members on board, but a number of other factors, and we'll go over some of them now. Though they had access to the upper boat deck, third class passengers and not have direct access to lifeboats, which were kept in the first and second class are ways of the ship. To get there, they would need to know their way around parts of the ship where they'd never been. There was a maze of passageways and corridors. Even on the set for the third class area on the Titanic production, cast and crew regularly got lost. It would sometimes take them upwards of two hours to come back from a lunch break because no one could find their way. So now imagine navigating that in the middle of us sinking in the middle of the night with limited lighting. Many third class passengers just had no idea how to reach the boats, and by the time they did, they were gone because the first and second class passengers had much easier and quicker access to them. Adding to the confusion, many of the third class passengers didn't speak English and couldn't interpret what was going on or what they needed to do or where they needed to go. And also, many passengers and third class initially didn't want to abandon the ship at first, purely because they didn't realize that the Titanic was in any sort of mortal danger, at least until it was far too late. We'll touch on this more later, but this was a phenomenon that spread across all classes. People felt that staying on the big, warm, well lit, seemingly strong Titanic was much safer than taking their chances and what was essentially a rowboat at midnight in the middle of the freezing North Atlantic. Adding to the reluctance to leave the ship was the fact that many of these people were traveling with all the worldly possessions because they were going to go start a new life in America. As such, they were wary of leaving their luggage because it was all they had. And you also need to take into account the family size and first and second class. Most of the folks traveling were wealthy individuals or couples, but third class were full families because again, many of them were repatriating Uh. Generally lower class families had more children because many factories meant more labor. Uh. It must be said Irish Catholics. A lot of the third class passengers were Irish immigrants. Irish Catholics had big families. Uh. Took with your priest. I've heard boys of thirteen or fourteen were considered men in the eyes of sailors loading the lifeboats and not let aboard. And as a result, many mothers didn't want to leave their sons behind and split up the family, so they opted to stay behind grim and finally, perhaps the most insidious reason, I call it the Aikman excuse. Most third class passengers were used to following orders from their superiors. Remember the scene in Titanic when the mother tells her children that they were waiting their turn while the first and second class passengers were getting loaded up. That was much closer to reality than any of the alleged locked gates. It was different arrow as a time when the crew members would say women and children first into the lifeboats, and hundreds of men would step back voluntarily and face almost certain death. There was a higher premium put on obedience at the time, so the third class passengers gathered in public rooms waiting for proper instructions from the crew, which for the most part, really never came. The crew were so preoccupied with the chaos that the third class passengers were essentially forgotten. Historian Don Lynch said that the third class were essentially neglected to death was his phrase, and it's true. Survivors reported seeing passengers in the third class general room awaiting the end, including a Swedish man who apparently refused a life belt as he claimed to be quote too old to fight the Atlantic's waves. And there was also the site of an English lady sitting and playing the piano with her child on her knee, with no visible intention of trying to save herself and a child. This is so grim. Let's talk about the lifeboats themselves for a moment um. There's a scene in the movie where Rose and her entourage are getting a tour of the upper decks the Titanic by the ship's builder, Thomas Andrews, played by Victor Garber. He implies that he pushed for more lifeboats to be added, but was overruled. It's a huge part of the Titanic legend that Titanic was sailing without enough lifeboats because they wanted unspoiled boat deck views for their rich passengers, and the ship was unsinkable, supposedly so that they would not need them anyway. These days, it seems criminal that ship would set, say, without lifeboat space for all the passengers and crew, and so clearly the owners of the Titanic had committed some kind of act of gross negligence right, well, not strictly. In fact, the Titanic was sailing with more than the legal requirement of lifeboats at the time, and this is weird because the ship had twenty lifeboats in total that could accommodate eleven d seventy eight people, or a little over half of the twenty three on board the night it sank, or about a third of its maximum capacity of passengers and crew. But you have to understand that at the time the Titanic was built, the safety laws had been put in place at the end of the nineteenth century. British Board of Trade regulations for lifeboats were based on the ship's gross tonnage or weight, not the number of passengers that it was carrying. So when the law was written, they essentially said all ships over ten thousand gross tons should have sixteen lifeboats because that was the size of the biggest ships at the time. This law did not involve to keep pace with the new superliners. So Titanic had a gross tonnage of forty six thousand tons, so by law she was only required to have sixteen lifeboats that could safely hold a thousand and sixty people, and she had actually four extra boats for uh So. In other words, I mean these laws were the biggest ships that the lawmakers could conceive of were ten thousand tons at the turns of the nineteenth century and Titanic was four and a half times that big. Yes, And the other thing too, is the builders hadn't really even conceived of a situation which the entire ship would be evacuated. At one time. Lifeboats were designed to shuttle passengers to rescue ships. Yeah, I mean, I'm no expert on arcane centuries old maritime safety laws, but I believe that ships built was certain kinds of safety features were rewarded by being required to carry a fewer boats, simply because the leaf was that they wouldn't be needed. These safety features that they added would prevent or at least slow any sinking, and the newly established shipping lanes in the North Atlantic meant that vessels would be a limited distance away, something like sixty miles. I mean, it's like your car breaking down on a very crowded highway. You know you're in trouble. There's gonna be someone coming along soon. So that was kind of the thinking. So in short, the White Star Line did nothing wrong technically. And now to an even more controversial point, it's been theorized that more lifeboats wouldn't have actually helped save more people. Sure, for the reasons we will now outlined, are we gonna get angrily tweeted with Titanic survivors because of this? Oh they're all dead? Um? As we touched on earlier, for the first hour after the ship struck the Iceberg, PM passengers were reluctant to get into the boats. In fact, the first few were launched with less than twenty people in them, when they were capable of holding sixty. People did not want to get into them, and the reasons why became apparent. During the himing The Titanic the movie, Cameron had commissioned the well In Company, the original company who built the lifeboat davits, which are the little cranes that you launched the boats to replicate what they've done on the ship, and in fact they re ya and in fact they reinforced them slightly more than the vintage versions. Um. But even so, these things bounce up and down in a truly terrifying way that gave the impression that they were going to snap. So picture it. Lifeboats were swung off the boat deck, suspended by these bouncing, seemingly rinky dink cranes over a ninett nine story drop into the freezing black sea below. Passengers were not interested. I mean, the Titanic at this point you couldn't even tell that it was sinking. It was bright, it was warm, it was huge. It's just it kind of makes sense get into the rattily bouncy death trap. No rich people. Famously, a lifeboat drill had been scheduled for the morning of April fourteenth, the day the Titanic struck the life lifeberg, but it was canceled because the ship's captain, Edward J. Smith allegedly wanted to deliver one last Sunday service before he went into full retirement. At the end of the voyage. He would die in the sinking so these boats were an unknown quantity to the pastors, and it's a little surprised that people preferred to stay on the safe ship. John jacob Astor, the richest man aboard, was heard to say to his wife, we are safer here than in that little boat. He also died with his dog. Right. Yeah. The crew, if they knew the seriousness of the situation the beginning, were put in the difficult position of trying to convey urgency without starting a panic. All right, this grimmer and grimmer, I mean a lot of them didn't even know. A lot of the like slower ranking crew members. So if they were aware at all that there was a problem, they were trying to strike a balance between you know, urgency without terrifying these people. You know, since as we estatis, there wasn't enough boat space for all on board. The first boats that were launched early in the sinking to a third of their capacity were ordered to return to the ship to receive more passengers, but they kept rowing away for fear of being swamped. Once that they saw the ship was in serious danger. Uh, someone aboard one of these uttered the famous line, it's our lives now. Uh, that is just a grim line people are the worst, so by the time passengers started willingly heading towards the boats, it has been theorized that there wouldn't have enough time to even launch all of them. As it stood, the last two lifeboats to leave the Titanic weren't even launched. They just floated off the ship as it sank. One of which, collapsible b that's my rap name was upside down and thirty men balanced on top of it all night as the air pocket underneath leaked and it slowly sank lower and lower into the water. Oh it's like working. In digital media documentary Titanic twenty years later with James Cameron, he tests the notion that more people would have been saved had there been more lifeboats. After calculating the time it would take too ready load and lower boat, he concluded that more lifeboats actually would have been a hindrance, saying, I think if you had more lifeboats on that ship, they would have just gotten in the way and would have cost hundreds of lives. As an interesting aside for pedantic memorabili aboves like yourself, you rang the wearaboats of the Titanic lifeboats are unknown thirteen of the twenty were deposited on the White Star Lines New York doc by the rescue ship Carpathia, with the rest set adrift on the ocean. One collapsible, a that's your rap name was recovered in the open ocean weeks later and brought to New York with the others, bringing the total recovered ships too. I think there was some bodies in it too. H souvenir hunters pillaged many of the name plates and other items from inside, including an emergency hardtack pilot biscuit, which still exists and was sold for twenty three thousand dollars worth every penny it was you. That's that's my Christmas gift to myself. But the lifeboats is priceless and depressing. Artifacts from this historic night have vanished. It's believed that they were either scrapped, left rot New York or quietly redistributed to other vessels sometime after the sinking. Can you imagine finding out one of your lifeboats on your ship was repurposed from the Titanic. I mean that, yeah, hence less why I said quietly, I have a story that I don't have any room for it. But this is maybe a good time to mention it. So, the Titanic had an identical sister ship. They're almost identical sister ship, the Olympic, and she was relatively near the crash site or the sinking site, and she radioed the rescue ship. Because the ship that rescued the survivors, the Carpathi, was a small ship, she offered to come by and pick up the Titanic survivors. And everyone was like, no, all of these people just saw people die when the ship went down, And now an identical sister ship will come out of the ocean like a terrifying ghost ship, and they're gonna go have to board the ship that looks identical to the one where they just watched their family die on. No, they're not gonna want to board that ship. No, stay away. Uh. Considering there was a shortage of lifeboats after the change in regulations following the Titanic disaster, and these Titanic boats were basically new since the ship was on her maiden voyage, the fact that they would have gotten reused does make sense. Uh. There are some people who claim to have an original Titanic lifeboat, but none have been authenticated. It has been claimed that one of the prop boats filmed in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Lifeboat was a Titanic survivor, but it is believed that this was just some pr sleight of hands smoking mirrors in The lifeboat was found abandoned in the hedge in England and purchased off eBay. It was originally about Liverpool, where items from White star Line ships were deposited after the ships were decommissioned. It is the same size, shape, type of wood and build quality of White star Line lifeboats of the period, but it has not been authenticated. The only White star Line lifeboat of the Titanic era in existence today is from a passenger tender, the SS Nomadic, which is docked in Belfast, Ireland, but the remains possibility that some of the original Titanic lifeboats are out there unknown to the owners. If you were a friend, that's very fascinating to me. I'm very interested. I'm just mortified by the idea that someone's lifeboat was maybe a Titanic lifeboat. That's bad juju. Yeah, no, I agree. Now we're gonna tell some heroic stories from the real life sinking of the Titanic, many of which were dramatized in James Cameron's movie The Titanic. Film re enacts the last moments of numerous real life figures on board, and it's a devastating but also fascinating study of human behavior. There's the scene where the American millionaire Benjamin Goggenheim as Valet changing the tuxedo dinner jackets complete with roses in the buttonholes, and Googgenheim supposedly said, we're dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen. And they were last seen in the grand staircase smoking cigars and drinking brandy. Hence the line that James Cameron added, spoken by Guggenheim, we're dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen, but we would like a brandy. Uh. They both went down with the ship and their bodies were ever recovered. One millionaire's body that was recovered was that I really shouldn't have phrased that in such a cheery way. Was that of John Jacob Astor, the richest man on the ship, and he was believed to be among the wealthiest men on the planet, with a personal fortune estimated at eighty seven million or two point four or four billion in today's dollars. Well, this is all pre income tax. I'm surprised that the fortunes back then weren't like truly insane, but probably enough. John Jacob Astor's body was recovered with a gold watch, golden diamond, cuff links, diamond ring, two thousand, four hundred and forty in American bills and hundreds more and other assorted currencies on his person. On his person, yes, like strapped to his body in a wallet. I guess our bill fold or whatever. They call him back them, how do you have two hundred dollars? You know whatever? Good good Master's sorry, Think of where he is, Think of where you are. There is a persistent myth that his body was covered in ash when it was picked up by a recovery ship a week after the sinking. This led to the theory that his body was crushed by a falling smoke stack, possibly the one that killed for Britzio in the Titanic movie. There are conflicting reports about whether or not his body was actually covered in ash, but this is the version that James Cameron went with to film Master's death. They needed to use a hundred and twenty tons of water, and as a result, there was no way for the actor playing Astor Eric Braden to actually rehearse it before filming, and he later explained the preparing for that scene mentally was terrifying, probably for several reasons. Turns out that Eric Braden is a survivor of the single most deadly sinking in history. The Wilhelm Gustlav was a cruise ship built by Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties and in the ship was being used to evacuate eight civilians from the Baltic ahead of the advancing Russian army, and on January the ship is being used to evacuate civilians from the Baltic ahead of the advancing Russian army, and she was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, resulting in the death of nine thousand, four hundred people, nearly six times as many who died aboard the Titanic. Eric Braden, the guy who played John Jacob Astar and I think he's a soap star too, was one of the one thousand, two hundred and fifty two people who survived this disaster. So all at all, I'm kind of shocked he agreed to sign on for Titanic. Can imagine he wanted to relive that James Cameron bullied him into it. Yeah, maybe we touched on this in the first half of the episode, but James Cameron went to insane lengths working with extras to ensure the film's authenticity. He gave hundreds of them elaborate backstories corresponding to real life figures on board, and essentially choreographed them on the deck as they were in real life. Billy Zane, who played Rose's fiance Cal, later told The Daily Beast one night towards the climax, it was about four thirty AM and the ship is dipping into the very chilly Pacific waters and two thousand people are scrambling towards the stir and her back of the ship. James Cameron Yell's cut. He climbs onto the deck from the crane basket swinging him around with the skycam, goes up to an extra who's this old lady and says, you're not just running. You need to go down to b deck because your daughter told you she forgot something very dear, her wedding ring, and she's going down there and you gave her five minutes and she's taken ten, and you regret making that choice. And Billy Zan continues, he's giving this backstory to a background artist, which elevated the moment for her and spread like wildfire to the other extras. And there's a scene in Titanic where a father places his daughter into a lifeboat and says, it's goodbye for a little while, only for a little while. And this was the testimony from a little girl. I think it was Ava Heart is a famous Titanic survivor who remembered those as the last words her father ever said to her. And here's a little detail. But I don't believe made it into James Camera's Titanic film him, but I think it was included in the almost as famous A Night to Remember film from the fifties, And it's always fascinated me. This is the story of Edith Rosenbomb and her pig. First class passenger Edith Rosenbomb had a plush toy pig with a wind up music box inside that she kept for good luck. It had been a gift from her mother after she her mother was injured in an early road traffic accident and when the Titanic began sinking, she left her nineteen trunks in her room, but took this pig up to the boat deck. This is when we need a rosenbomb. She's very fascinating. She once had this great quote, I've had every kind of disaster but the bubonic plague and a husband, so she's got personality. Initially, she, like so many didn't want to board a lifeboat, and she said in a TV interview in vent I never would have left the ship. But a sailor came along and he said, hey, you you don't want to be saved, well I'll save your baby. And he grabbed this pig from under my arm and tossed it into the lifeboat. And when they threw that pig, I knew it was my mother, called to me. Clearly the sailor thought that this toy pig was a baby and tossed it into the lifeboat. So she would follow it so to amuse the children on her boat boat eleven and generally helps keep spirits up because it was a crowded boat and some of the people have the stand for hours in the freezing cold on the ocean, which couldn't have been fun. Edith Throws, a mom would wind up her toy pig by the tail and play a little song that was later identified as Lascerella folk song. The pig survived and is currently at the Royal Maritime Museum, and amazingly, the music box still plays. A clip has been shared online. I think for years people weren't sure what the song actually was, so they recorded and put it online and hope that you know, kind of crowdsource trying to find the identity of a song. Um, I'd like to play it now. Imagine if you would, being in a tiny open lifeboat just before dawn and the freezing North Atlantic blackness all around you and hearing this echoing in the water. Why is everything so creepy? Back then? Yeah, the doll in the earlier episode in this um well to help a race, just a smidge of that haunting anecdote, I want to share that. Edith met up years later with a man named Frank X, who was one of the boys she had entertained in the boat as a ten month old, and she, I guess busted at her pig and played it for him again as a grown man. Presumably this was before PTSD was a thing. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. There's the famous scene in the Titanic film where an elderly man has refused entry into a lifeboat. We talked about this earlier. His wife refuses to leave him, saying, we've been together for many years and where you go, I go as we have lived, so we will die together. This is is a door and Ida Strauss, a well known German American couple. A friend wanted to ask an officer about letting his doorboard the boat, but he refused to go. There were still women and children on board. Does that kind of chivalry exist? Now? I know? Yeah, he would have shoved a kid out of the way and hit the dab. Yeah. Uh is it? Or? His famous both because he was a congressman and perhaps most likely because he was the co owner of Macy's department store in New York? And uh is it? Or? An Ida Strauss was a great great grandchild. This is singer King Princess, which is fascinating to me. Is it or an Ida did indeed die together? James Cameron shows them in bracing in bed as their room rapidly floods. This is a bit of dramatic license, as they were last seen sitting in deck chairs. Uh and Isadora's body was later recovered floating in the ocean days later, which wouldn't have been possible if they've been in their suite. He's buried at New York's wood Long Cemetery, along with an urn filled with water from the wreck site, in tribute to Ida, who was never found. The Strauss Mausoleum bears the following biblical verse from Song of Solomon eight seven. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. Okayo Gurgi Loin's people were nine and halfway through this bitch. The recovery vessels retrieved just over a fifth of those lost in the sinking, approximately three thirty five of the ninety people who died, roughly a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty five of these were buried at sea, either because of the poor state of the body or more often because they appeared to be of a lower class or crew. Roughly sixty year so we're taking back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and transported elsewhere for burial like rath Strauss, New York, but the vast majority remained in Halifax. Victims are buried at the Fairview Lawn Cemetery, nineteen at Mount Olive Catholic Cemetery, and ten at the Baron de Hirsch Jewish Cemetery. Uh not to be ghoulish, We're going somewhere with this, and the place that we are going is that there is a grave marker for a J. Dawson at the Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Naturally, following the release of the Titanic movie, fans freaked out, believing that they had found the final resting place of Leo's character Jack Dawson. In truth, the marker is for a twenty three year old irishman named Joseph Dawson, a member of the ship's crew who worked as a coal trimmer. Cameron claimed that he had no idea this guy existed when he named the character. Despite this, it has become one of the most widely visited graves at the cemetery. The Titanic production visited the cemetery at one point where they were filming in the area, and Bill Paxton later were called being extremely affected by the inscription on the gravestone for a young officer, which read each man stood at his post while all the weaker ones went by, and showed once more to all the world how Englishmen should die. Speaking of Titanic officers doing their duty, we should talk about the depiction of First Officer William Murdoch, played in the James Cameron movie by Ewan Stewart. James Cameron paints this guy is sort of a cowardly weasel. He's the one that cal tries to bribe for a place in the lifeboat with pedantic fact punch in bills that did not technically exist until two years after the ship sank. Yeah cinemason's voice. Ah. Then he shoots Jack's friend Tommy Ryan and another passenger during a mad rush for the boats, and finally he shoots himself in the head. In real life, things went down somewhat differently. In fact, First Officer Murdoch is seen as something of a hero in the real life sinking of the Titanic. He oversaw lifeboats on one entire side of the ship, having launched half before his counterpart on the other side had even launched one. He helped ten boats get away and then went around, throwing debt chairs, overboard serves, makeshift wraps before he ultimately died, likely not by his own hand. There were reports of people being shot that night. A letter written by a steerage passenger from Norway surface days after the movie was released that read some were shot when they wanted to crawl their way into the boats, but there's no evidence that Murdoch had anything to do with this, and his surviving family were extremely angry when they saw the film. Cameron later said that he regretted his decision to portray this man as a murderer. In the case of First Officer William McMaster, Murdoch, I took the liberty of showing him shoot somebody and then shoot himself. He's a named character. He wasn't a generic officer. We don't know that he did that, but you know the storyteller and me says, oh, I start connecting the dots. He was on duty, He's carrying all this burden with him, and it made him an interesting character. But I was being a screenwriter. I wasn't thinking about being a historian, and I think I wasn't as sensitive about the fact that his family might feel offended by that. And they were the vice president of twentieth Century Fox traveled to Murdoch's homeland of dal Batty, Scotland to apologize to Murdoch's then eighty year old nephew and present a five thousand dollar donation to dal Batty High School to boost the school's William Memorial Prize or in other words, point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent of what the movie grows. Sorry, we made your uncle into a bastard. For the ages in the highest grossing movie of all time, here is a pittance. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews played by Victor Garber, is also given shabby treatment in the Cameron movie. He's shown his compassionate and smart, but a bit of a whimp at the end, standing comatose in the first class smoking room, staring off into space, completely broken by the fact that a ship is going to founder and kill hundreds. Rose confronts him by saying, aren't you going to try for it? And he just smiles meekly and hands her life jacket. In reality, Andrews took a much more proactive role that night, working hard to save the passengers. According to the Smithsonian magazine. There are multiple reports of Andrews arguing with passengers who simply didn't believe that the ship would sing. He was seeing throwing chairs and other buoyant objects into the water for people to grab onto, and like he does in the movie, he gave away his life jacket resigned himself to his fate, either to give one more person a spot in a lifeboat or because he felt duty bound to go down with his ship. Oh this one, This is the one that still kills me. One group portrayed as heroes in Titanic or the ship's band. The eight players, led by Wallace Hartley, played cheery music on deck to help keep passengers calm and avoid a panic until the bitter end, leading to one of the most enduring legends of the ship's sinking, which happens to be completely true. Wallace heartless body was recovered after the sinking, with his Eileen in its case, still strapped to him. It was a gift from his fiance and bore the plaque for Wallace on the occasion of our engagement from Maria. It was sold in two thousand thirteen for one point seven million and is now on display at a museum in Tennessee, dedicated to victims of the sinking. Unfortunately, the moisture from the water cracked the instrument and it is no longer playable, so the last song played on it was in fact the last song played on the Titanic, but that specific song is still up for debate. In the movie, they play the hymnal Nearer My God to the but a few have claimed to have heard song the autumn, a then current pop hit. One man who heard this was wireless operator Harold Bride, who was one of the men who'd been raiding for help. He was on the deck until he was literally washed off, so he is a credible witness. Band leader Wallace Hartley himself was interviewed prior to the sinking and was eerily asked what song he would play in the event of an emergency. According to snopes dot Com, Heartily responded with two songs, one of which was Nearer My God to Thee. It was reportedly Hartley's favorite hymn, and it was regularly played at the funerals of members of the Musicians Union. The problem with me or My God to Thee is that it's not a song, but more of a set of lyrics, there are two melodies that traditionally accompany it. In England is traditionally accompanied by a tune called Horberry, and in America the melody is called Bethany. Most versions of the Titanic story, including James Cameron, use the American version Bethany, which you will punch in here. But the band was British, so it does stand to reason that they played the British version, which you will punch in here. There's a good chance that this was the last song played on the Titanic. Grim really grim stuff. Did he actually say, uh, gentlemen, has been an honor playing with you this evening? That I don't know. I think that might have been uh James Cameron embellishment. Anyway, It's hard to think of Nearer My God to the without thinking of the image of the captain standing on the bridge in the wheelhouse as all the windows shot her, one of the scariest scenes in the movie, and almost certainly James Cameron's creation. Most witnesses saw the captain dive off the bridge just as he began to submerge, and presumably he then froze to death in the water. But there have been other myths that have him heroically rescuing a baby and delivering it to a lifeboat before swimming off. Another version has him cheering on a bunch of men balancing on top of the overturned collapsible boat. Um all sounds like stuff, his relatives yelled in a crowded room. Hey, we actually saw him put a baby on a life boat. Some hearst paper stuff. No, he was actually I think I saw him cheering on a bunch of guys who survived. Who said that? Uh. The scene where the captain played by Bernard Hill, Bernard Hill, is engulfed by the flooding the wheelhouse, was apparently the very last scene to be filmed for the movie prior to reshoots. It was part of an all night shoot that was mandated to make up for lost time him and although the stuntman was equipped with a breathing regulator, James Cameron was in the cabin himself wearing a diving suit during the sun in case he had to supply emergency oxygen to the stuntman. All went well, and afterwards Cameron had a brief rat party with the remaining crew members where he drank half a bottle of tequila, and when he was finally taken home, he had already fallen asleep in the van before it left the studio, dreaming of abusing other crew members, abused crew members dancing, visions of abused crew members dancing like sugarplumps in his head. Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves. But James Cameron had every right to be exhausted, because destroying the Titanic was, as we previously established, very hard work. The flooding of the dining room scenes was exhausting because they'd flooded over and over and over again, and after each take they have to meticulously set it all back up again and reset each multi course place setting. But this is arguably preferable to how things were done to show the flooding of the Grand Staircase, which was a one shot deal. The Grand Staircase is arguably the most iconic room on the Titanic, and in the film is practically its own character. That's where Jack enters the world of first class before the dinner party scene, and if you look closely in four k uh you can see a steadicam operator's reflection in the glass when the steward opens the vestibule door for him, which is funny. I wonder if James Cameron is like haunted by cinema sins like this, if he like stays up late at night googling errors and Titanic and just like grinding his teeth. Well, we will talk a little later about some of the things that he fixed for the three D re release. The Grand Staircase is also the room where Rose meets Jack immediately after the dinner party scene where he invites her to go to a real party, and of course it's shown in the final scene of the movie when Rose reunites with Jack in the fantasy sequence, the meaning of which is perhaps the second most debated topic in this film, and we'll get into that more later. James Cameron rebuilt four stories of the six story staircase on a sound stage, and this wasn't a set. It was a full scale structure made of solid oak. And interestingly, they actually made the staircase eighteen inches wider on either side because, to quote James Cameron, people now are just bigger. What a body shaming he is, Kate weighs a lot. I have to make the staircase wider because people are fatter. He's coming after he's coming after the NOVVI next. I mean, you're going to like colonial houses and you walk up the stairs and your feet can't even fit off. People were smaller background. They even built a massive glass dome above the stairs. There's just twenty four ft in diameter. But sadly it was all destroyed when they shot the sinking scene and dumped water into it. Obviously, since this was a one shot deal, they planned it out like a lunar landing and you know, made sure that nobody had the lens cap on or anything like that. It proved to be extremely dangerous. The water flooded the structure from multiple sides with such force that it caused the staircase itself to rip free from its foundation and float up. As Cameron explained, the staircase has got a steel footing. Then when we sank the ship, it lifted wood is buoyant. It ripped off that footing and it all floated up and it actually pinned two stunt players to the ceiling. Fortunately they weren't hurt, but it was a pretty scary moment. And this is interesting because it may go a long way and solving a long growing mystery about the wreck of the Titanic. When Dr. Robert Ballard, the guy who discovered the Titanic, first dove on the wreck, in the grand staircase was one of the first places he visited, and he was disappointed to find that it was basically just a big, gaping hole. There was some pillars and chandeliers, but the staircase itself and the famous clock and all the ornate would work was nowhere to be found, and it was assumed the wood boring organisms had eaten over the previous seven decades. But later missions went further inside the ship and they found lots of other wooden elements elsewhere, and also the staircase contained a tremendous amount of wrought iron decorations, which theoretically would have fallen to the bottom of the staircase hole if the wood had gotten eaten away. Instead, there was nothing there at all, as if the staircase itself had just vanished. Cameron's production may have inadvertently proven a theory that the buoyant staircase had broken free from its foundation during the sinking and shot up out of the hole where the glass dome had been until moments before, and some eye witnesses had recalled seeing what they believed to be the ship rapidly rising out of the water and the chaos of the last minutes. This could have very well been the staircase just exiting the ship and shooting straight up. And there's also a story that I have been unable to verify or even track down. It exists purely in my memory because I find it so haunting. I think it's from a book by the historian Arles Pellegrino, who's semi disgraced for telling tall tales, but I just would like to share it. There were claims that passengers on a ship passing through the wreck site the day after the sinking uh saw what appeared to be a multi story structure off in the distance with figures waving on it. Then it became blocked by sheets of pack ice, and officers on board the ship convinced the witnesses that they had seen just a bunch of seals on an iceberg. Ultimately, they steamed off without investigating. But there's a possibility, albeit remote, that the Grand Staircase formed a massive piece of debris that dozens clung to until they either starved, froze, or the structure became water logged and sank, and they all drowned anyway, the fact that's only slightly less upsetting. The ruins remains of the Grand staircase from the Titanic movie production was destroyed and sold a scrap metal, rather than being repaired and turned into some sort of a museum. The most harrowing action scenes were filmed as the Titanic sank lower into the water, snapping into before its back end, or Stern rose into the air, sticking out of the water at a ninety degree angle like a skyscraper in the middle of the North Atlantic, with Jack and Rose holding onto the top for dear life. Camera later said that he felt like all the previous Titanic movies depicted the final plunge as this graceful affair with the ship just drifting beneath the waves, and he wanted to go a very different route and depict the moment quote as the terrifyingly chaotic event that it really was. And this sequence required a full size set built on hydraulic lifts so they could tilt with a hundred and fifty extras and one hundred stunt performers sliding down hundreds of feet like a giant slide, bouncing off railings and propellers on the way, and some of the stunt performers had rollers and ball bearings fitted into the back of their life belts and costumes so that that wouldn't have to be tilted quite so much. They get a push off camera where they were pulled also off camera with a zip corps. Then I would just go flying, and even though the deck was only angled about six degrees, if they could tilt the camera so it looked like they were, you know, just whtting gravity do the work. But there were some scenes where the set really was straight up and down vertically, and they rehearsed the scene for weeks with necessary safety measures put in place. The stunt performers were suspended by harnesses and wires, and also much of the set was either coated in foam or made of rubber. If you look closely at some of the people sliding down the back of the ship and hitting equipment like winches or ballards sticking out of the deck, you can see that the supposedly metal stuff actually bends because it's made of rubbers. You know, they didn't want these people get hurt when they rammed into it. Despite these precautions, this was still no joke. Even with harnesses, the stern would point one dred ft or ten stories straight up. One stunt man broke his leg and a stunt roman fractured for rib, leading Cameron to halt some of the more dangerous stunts and instead he uses a mix of stunt people and c g I, with people sometimes transforming into c g I, sometimes in the same shot, which is very impressive considering the technology for this was still in its infancy. They'd use motion capture footage of people who needed to fall many many feet and hit things like the you know, the propeller. Most famously, the split of the ship was done with the aid of a one thirty five size model packed with explosives to break apart as needed. Obviously, the moment when the Titanic rips into is extremely dramatic. It breaks above the waterline, the back end falls back into the water, resulting in a massive tidal wave. In other words, it's pretty hard to miss. And this is interesting because about half of the survivors of the Titanic sinking believe that the ship sank in one piece. Granted it was a lot darker in real life than Cameron's film When Have You Believe? Considering it was a movingless nipe. Once the ship's lights failed, the Titanic was mostly visible to people in lifeboats purely as a silhouette that blotted out the stars, so that may have been a factor as to why so many people didn't see it break apart. Another theory is that it actually broke it a somewhat less dramatic fashion below the waterline as part of the aforementioned Titanic twenty years later with James Cameron documentary, Cameron tested this out with a large model and determined that he got it wrong in his film, but he wasn't sure how. As he said in the documentary, we found out that you could have the stern sink vertically, or you could have the stern fall back with a big splash, but you can't have both. So the film got it wrong on one point or the other. I tend to think it's wrong on the fall back of the Stern because of what we see on the wreck. Despite this flub, Cameron was justifiably proud of his work, depicting the Titanic's final moments on the surface and footage from Those scenes were featured prominently in the trailer, and Cameron later commented that shot alone of the ship breaking in two got our opening weekend audience. Before we move on, we need to talk briefly about a man named Charles Jocklin. I think it's how you say his name. He's the man in white next to Jack and Rose as they hang onto the railing on the stern as the ship goes down. He was the chief baker on the Titanic and is widely believed to be the last man off Titanic. He held onto the stern and wrote it down to the water like an elevator, as he later described, without getting his head wet. His survival story is insane and sometimes goes beyond the realms of believability, but it's generally taken as factual. He's something of a folk hero, and I think he's our actual friend of the pod, Dora's favorite Titanic survivor, so the stories for Dora h In his role as the chief baker, he sent his men up to the lifeboats to load them up with loaves of bread and provisions. Uh. Then he went to the boat deck himself to help load the boats and When people refused, insisting that they wanted to stay on board the ship, he would physically grab them and throw them into the boat, which not great bedside manner, but appreciated. He was supposedly offered a job of captaining one of the lifeboats, but he saw there were several other sailors inside the boat, so he refused, opting to stay aboard the ship. And by this point all the boats were gone, so he busied himself throwing upwards of fifty deck chairs overboard to act as ad hoc rafts in the water. And when there was nothing else left to do, he went and poured himself a stiff drink. Or several accounts very when the Titanic began to break into he ran to the stern, held onto the guardrail on the outside of the ship, and rowed it down into the water. And here's where it gets crazy, or even here where it gets crazy. Yeah, the water was twenty eight degrees or four degrees below freezing. Human beings can only survive in water that cold for about twenty minutes, if you're being generous, more like fifteen. He somehow was able to tread water for several hours while clutching debris, and at daybreak he finally saw the overturned collapsible b lifeboat and swam over to it, but there was no room for him on it, so we clung on half in, half out, with his legs dangling in the water until a second lifeboat came by. He swam to that boat and was pulled in, and miraculously he was fine. The only damage he suffered was some swollen feet. He attributed his good fortune to the alcohol in his system, which he believed kept him warm and insulated. Doctors will insist that that's not how it works physiologically. Amazingly, this was the second time he had survived the shipwreck. He was also aboard the S s Oregon in eighteen eighty six, which also had enough lifeboats for only half the people on board. He died in nineteen fifty six at the age of seventy eight in Patterson, New Jersey, his mind boggling. I do, I do wonder how much of this he made up, but it's taken as fact. God love him. Well, where are we in depressing count again? Okay okay, okay, okay, cool cool cool cool cool? Uh. Well, although it might have been slightly easier to shoot than the sinking scenes. All the footage of passengers thrashing around in the water brought hazards of its own, especially for Ate Winslet, who, as we mentioned before, had the most miserable time on the set. The final scene that she shot was the one after the Titanic slipped beneath the waves and she and Leo are pulled underwater, spinning around chaotically. Is the stern of the ship disappears behind them, beginning it's two and a half mild descent to the ocean floor. For these close ups, Kate and Leo needed to be weighed down to the bottom of a tank that she described as twelve ft deep. She later said, looking back, I can't believe I allowed that to be done to me that In the Leo fart jackets uh. Leo, who was scuba certified, stayed by her side and would stroke her legs in time with the breathing so that she wouldn't get flustered. Unfortunately, she had a problem using an air regulator to inhale air and swallowed mouthfuls of water while unable to kick her way to the surface. After three takes, she said, I simply said I couldn't do anymore. I just want to sell everyone that. Jordan titled this next section drowning in free using piss. Sometimes just the views just flows through you. Um. This brings us to some of the most disturbing scenes in the movie, he said, gleefully like a true crime podcast host, describing as someone was raped and murdered, dismembered, uh, depicting people freezing to death in the North Atlantic. In reality, as we said earlier, the water was twenty eight degrees or four degrees below freezing. According to the Red Cross, hypothermia would have killed many people in as little as fifteen minutes because you lose heat faster in water. Earlier in the movie, when Jack is persuading Rose not to jump off the back of the ship, he tells the story of falling through some thin ice as a boy and the water feeling like being stabbed with a thousand knives all over your body. That is a direct quote taken from Titanic survivor Charles Lightowler, who served as the second officer on the ship. The water in the massive tank on the set of Titanic wasn't that cold, but it was still very cold. Cameron was faced with the problem of keeping it cold enough that it didn't steam like a jacuzzi, but also warm enough that people didn't die, which suredly he didn't like the director's quandary. Yeah, he told People Magazine in the water in the tank was about eighty degrees, so it was really like a pool. All of the cold, frigid breath was added later. It was real breath, filmed and composited in which seems like a ridiculous thing to do. Hashtag James Cameron baby. It was about three ft deep, although there were deeper areas that people would dive into off the boat set because you're not supposed to dive in less than three ft of water. And while the water may have started at eighty degrees, it did not stay that warm, simply because there was so much of it. By most accounts and recluting Kate Winslet's the temperature for that tank was more like sixty degrees, which doesn't sound that bad, but imagine being submerged in that for hours. Uh. They had mid level production supervisors acting as guinea pigs to see how long they could safely say submerged in the unheeded outdoor tank, and they determined several hours would be just fine. Can you imagine learning where you fall in the production hierarchy of just not not hot enough to get points off the back end, not low enough to be shot at by James Cameron, but Ryan in the lower middle, where they make you stand in sixty degree water before your legs go sit, say oh you sit? You just bob around? Good lord, Getting the getting the pool. Kate Winslet told the l a times the water was filthy, dirt blue into it, and actors splashing around, and it got kidney infections. I only got to wear a wet suit for a wide shot in the big tank where the water was about sixty degrees, and that felt absolutely freezing. Thankfully they had rules for how long extras and performers would have to sit motionless in the water. The extras have been covered in wax on their clothes and hair to create a frozen effect. Their faces were doused with a powder that crystallized in water to look like frost, and they were given contact lenses that made them look like dead fish. Every few hours, these frozen blue corpses would suddenly become re animated, stand up and march off to take a break. There were warm water hoses and hot tubs nearby for actors to warm up, and uh Billy Zane told a great story to The New York Post paints a beautiful picture. The cast would sit in these hot tubs, fully dressed in their nine costumes, chowing down on craft services, saying, you're gnashing on a hot dog in a tux in a hot tub, just deadpan, without any reaction, like this is completely normal. One of the onset paramedics that that he was tasked with keeping an eye out for quote, violent shivering, in which case he was instructed to take those people out of the water right away, presumably to the chagrine of James Cameron. But other than emergencies and the pre established breaks, people were not really allowed to leave the frozen waste land of the pool, including for bathroom breaks. There's a persistent legend surrounding James Cameron, dating to his time filming The Abyss in the late eighties that he forbade those on the set from going to the bathroom, and it would appear that this tradition continued on the set of Titanic, supposedly due to the strict schedule he was forced to keep or and forced others to keep um. In some version, he threatened to fire people on the spot if they dared to take a pea break. Cameron has denied this, presumably for legal reasons, but Kate Winslet has spoken several times over the is about her and Leo being forced to pee in the massive water tank. She said during an appearance on the Rosy O'donald show, you know when you gotta go, you gotta go. It was so awful, because Leo sometimes would say to me, Sweetie, I gotta pa. It was terrible. It was awful, and you always felt awful doing it. It took too long getting out with the wet clothes. I confess it happened. The two of them would apparently pe and shifts, taking turns, swimming over to another part of the tank. I've learned so much about Leonardo Dicapra's bodily functions. Yeah, yeah, that's true, part jacket designated peace spots and James Cameron's human soup boy and from pissing in a pool, we naturally go to Cathy Bates. She played the beloved heroine of the Titanic story the so called unsinkable Molly Brown. Those we mentioned in the prior episode. No one called her Molly at the time. She went by Margaret. She and the other women in lifeboat number six took a very proactive role that night. The boat was overseen by one of the Titanic's crew, Quartermaster Robert Hitchens, who was the one who had his hand on the ship's wheel during the collision. Though it would be wrong to say that the collision was his fault, it's perhaps not a coincidence that he was in a bit of a pissy mood. Another man on the boat was Lookout Frederick Fleet, the man who first spotted the iceberg from the crow's nest. So weird mood in that boat, I could imagine Molly Brown has depicted in the Titanic movie. Wanted to go back to the wreck site and try to rescue people screaming in the water. Hitchens, the commander of the boat, refused, fearful that the boat would get swamped, and he delivered the immortal line, there's no use going back. There's only a lot of stiffs out there. It's our lives now, not there's In the movie, Molly Brown backs down. In real life, Molly Brown overruled him. She went for the oars and he tried to physically stop her. Molly then three to throw him overboard, and other women in the boat backed her up, and Hitchens, sensing a mutiny, back down. He spent the rest of the night cussing her out to such a degree that one of the engine stokers who had been rescued finally asked him, don't you know you're talking to a lady. This poor guy, he really has a bad rap. He supposedly complained that the lifeboat was going to drift for days before any rescue came, which was not true, and at least two passengers in the boat publicly accused Hitchens of being drunk. But anyway, Molly Brown took command of the boat, passing out oars to other women and organizing the rowing, and after being rescued, she helped organize a committee with other wealthy passengers to provide basic services to second and third class survivors and even basic counseling, which I feel like it's very advanced. So all in all, a pretty cool lady. Uh, Molly Brown's boat failed to recover any survivors. In fact, only two boats actually went back specifically to look for survivors, Boat four and Boat fourteen. In the movie, Rose is rescued by fifth Officer Harold Lowe, who transferred survivors from his lifeboat into others in order to row backs specifically to rescue people from the water, and he purposely waited a short time until the cries died down slightly so that his boat wouldn't get swamped, which is agonizing, but one of those choices one had to make that night. I suppose that was a very real concern, But as his character says in the movie, he waited too long. In real life, he rescued just four men taken from the water, and one of whom died later that night. I think the total of people plucked from the water who survived were thirteen. Um in the film office were low wheels of flashlight during his search for bodies, which is understandable because it's a movie you need to be able to see what's happening. But in reality this all unfolded and complete darkness. As The New York Times notes, much of the ending should have been a pitch black sequence, and though the first battery powered flashlights were invented in these early versions were weak and unreliable, and as far as I'm aware, the only flashlight adjacent tool that the survivors had in their lifeboats that night was a passengers cane that had a tiny battery powered light that was waved around to attract the attention of other lifeboats so they could stick together. And speaking of extremely granular points about illumination, this brings us to the stars. Years after the release of Titanic, James Cameron got what he described as quote quite a snarky email from astrophysicist Neil de grass Tyson beforeing him that the star field that Rose sees as she gazes up from her improvised life raft was not the one she would have seen at that location in nineteen twelve. So Cameron, who, let's remember, basically rebuilt and sunk the Titanic and visited the real one twelve times, took this oversight hard. He said, with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that, and I should have put the right star field in. So I said, all right, send me the right stars for that exact time, and I'll put it in the movie. And that's what he did. He reshot the scene for the three D edition of the movie that was released. Well, now we have arrived at what is, without a doubt, the most controversial section of this episode, and things are gonna get heated. It's time to talk about so called door controversy. Hashtag door controversy, hashtag all doors matter. After the Titanic disappeared, beneath them, Jack and Rose swim to a piece of wreckage commonly referred to in the discourse as a door. In fact, it is actually a piece of ornately carved wood paneling above the forward door in the first class lounge you insects. It is actually a real piece of wreckage that was recovered after the sinking by one of the ships tasked with picking up bodies, and it is currently on display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where you can see an original Titanic deck chair that was pulled from the ocean, as well as many other artifacts. Have you been there, I've never been there. No, we should go, and we should? Is that on the east or west side of Canada? East? Yeah? Uh? If you go to pay this piece of rose wreck would a visit be prepared like the Mona Lisa. It's actually a lot smaller in real life than James Cameron's version, you say, about half a size. Cameron made it bigger because the original would never have been able to support the weight of a human being. But the real question that's on everybody's lips could have held Jack. Over the last twenty five years, many Titanic fans have argued that there was room for both Rose and Jack on that piece of not a door. Instead, Jack did the gentlemanly thing and treaded water alongside the wreckage until dying, frozenly Wetlee until Wetley dying. The debate continues to ray Age. Leo has asked his thoughts about it by MTV News in twenty nineteen during a junket for Once upon a Time in Hollywood, to which she wisely replied no comment. Kate Winslet's opinion has flip flopped over the years. Years back, during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmels, she said, I think he actually could have fit on that bit of door, But more recently she changed her tune. Telling Josh Horwitz during an episode of The Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, she didn't think it would work with two people. She likened it to two adults on a stand up paddle board. Oh, these coastal elites, and they're out of touch, similes, saying it becomes immediately extremely unstable. I actually don't believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door. I think he could have fit, but it would have tipped, and it would not have been a sustainable idea. And that gets closer to the truth. It is less question of size and more of a question of buoyancy. Though there may have been room, it's doubtful that it would have stayed afloat. And this was the premise of a special two thousand twelve episode of MythBusters featuring James Cameron, who joked that it was a necessary plot point for Jack to die because if he lives, the movie makes a tenth as much. The script says Jack died, he has to die. So maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a little tiny bit smaller. But the dudes going down the MythBusters test concluded the only way they could have stayed afloat was if they tied Roses life jacket underneath the board to help with its buoyancy. Otherwise, the weight of both their bodies would have sunk the board low enough in the freezing water that they both would have died. Another wild card here is the fact that Jack and Rose were trudging through the freezing water inside the ship for over an hour, so they probably would have lasted even less time in the ocean because their body temperature had already been lowered. In fact, some experts have said that they both would have died of hypothermia long before the ship even actually sank. James Cameron, as usual as answers prepared for all of this, he told the Toronto Son during press for the New Avatar movie that he had commissioned a scientific study, quote to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all. He continued. We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the wrath from the movie, and we're going to do a little special on it that comes out in February. We took two stunted people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo, and we put sensors all over and inside them. Question Mark and we said, and we put them in ice water, and we tested to see whether they could have survived the a variety of methods, and the answer was there was no way both of them could have survived. Only one could survive. This man needs to be stopped. This is what happens when you have too much money and power and self confidence. Did he aintally penetrate these people? I don't know how he's got sensors inside. I think I'm more interested in, like, hey, hey, Kate, he leo, what was your BM? I back? Okay, Yeah, remember all that body shaming I did. If you go back to that headspace, send me your set diary where I told you to weigh in every day. So uh, stay tuned to National Geographic premiering in February onto Alex's fan theory corner. Yes, uh, there are fans who agree with James Cameron's quote. If the script says Jack dies, he has to die. Also, famously, Dolph Loundrons quote about Carl Weathers and Rocky too, if he dies, he dies. Uh. There's an internet theory positing that the film Titanic, not the boat Titanic, is said in the same universe as the Terminator movies, and Jack Dawson was a time traveler from the same future where Skynet has taken over the Earth and humanity is enslaved by robots or that's the matrix. They're still fighting, they still have a fighting chance in Terminator. Uh. Similar to the Titanic plot line in which Kyle Reese went back in time to protect Sarah Connor for me, t e model, Terminator set up the birth of resistance leader John Connor, which is he's his own granddad theory. Isn't that what they call that? I think so it's like the Futurama plot where Fries is, I don't know, there's a whole time travel man, I don't I love my favorite bit of time travel explaining ways in Looper where uh, what's his name? Not French Stewart the other one Joseph Gordon Levitt playing young Bruce Willis, and he's trying to prod Bruce Willis into explaining how the time travel works, and Bruce was says something like, uh, you think about it too much, it all gets fuzzy. The best hand wave away. UM. Titanic Terminator theory states that Jack sacrificed himself to save Rose because that was his mission. He went back in time to protect Rose. Do it, Bukada? Why is her name so close to Bukaki, who was another ancestor of John Conner to prevent her suicide and ensure that she survived the sinking of the Titanic. Evidence cited by believers of this theory point to a number of anachronisms concerning Jack and his life story. For instance, when talking about his childhood, Jack claims to have grown up by Lake Wasta near Chippawa Falls, Wisconsin. Lake Wassoda is a man made lake that wasn't made until nineteen seventeen, five years after the Titanic sank Checkmate James Cameron. Also, in the scene where he and Rose are discussing what they want to do when they get to America, Jack suggests going to the pier in Santa Monica, where they can ride on the roller coaster until we throw up. Santa Monica's peer didn't acquire a roller coaster until nineteen sixteen, four years after the Titanic sank. Checkmate James Cameron. It has also been no, I will not rest until we have bankrupted this man by pointing out every single horrable anachronism in this film and forcing him to go back and do reshoots a d R vision VFX punches until he has no money left, and delaying the release of Avatar six Southie until it has also been noted by various vintage clothing experts that Jack's ruck sack was of a style that wouldn't be manufactured until nineteen thirty nine, Cross examining him. But ruck sack prosecutor, Mr Cameron, what do you have to say about that? This is probably We're probably James Cameron's gonna, like, regrettably, like He's gonna like tearfully have to kill the costume designer in the dead of night costume designer like waits up in a cold sweat. James Cameron has like a silenced Walter p pk in a scheme asking was you know what this is about? Is? Don't you? She goes it's the rucksack, isn't it. He's like, yes, people on the internet, I'm sorry, makushla he shoot sir. That is the Gaelic phrase meaning my heart that Clint Eastwood calls Hillary Swank in a Million Dollar Baby when he spoiler alert kills her so if you're still traumatized by Jack's death, know that it was scientifically unavoidable, which will be proven in the months to come on National Geographic hashtag sponsored contact hashtag nat GEO, hashtag I don't know do we get money for this? Hashtag? I heart media ad sales and two possibly preordained as part of a larger plan to save humanity against evil robots. The defense rests. I think it's also worth noting that Jack and Rose have only known each other for just over forty eight hours at this point. Jack stopped Rose committing suicide on Friday, April twelve, and the Titanic sank in the early hours of Monday, April, So to say, maybe Rose got over it. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, there were a couple of interesting aspects about the end of this movie. As originally scripted, Cow was supposed to actually find Rows aboard the rescue ship the Carpathia the morning after the sinking. Rose tells him to let her mother know that she died on the Titanic and demands the Cow leave her alone the rest of her life. There was another scene with Cal that was cut, where Fabrizio, Jack's Italian friend is seen struggling in the water trying to climb aboard Cal's lifeboat, crying that it is his destiny to go to America. Cal then knocks him unconscious with a lifeboat or and says, America's that way. You said that like a waspy man talking about his son's gay for at a party. This is Fabrizio, my son's Italian friend. Didn't know what I'm Italian. I can say that, um Predictively, James Cameron found this scene too dark and cut it. And there's still another scene that was storyboarded but never shot, in which Rose walks off the Carpathia, the rescue ship in New York, and disappears into the crowd, but any rare concession to Budgets The scene was cut because it would have required almost a thousand extras brought to New York to film a thirty second sequence, and they just didn't go along with it. Interestingly, Rose's scene arriving in New York on the Carpathia as it cruises past the Statue of Liberty, where she gives her name as Rose Dawson. It's a poignant moment, but it contains a minor historical error. In the movie, the statue is green as it is now, but in reality, the statue retained his original brown color back in nineteen twelve. And you know, as you probably, James Cameron statue is made out of copper, and it took reportedly around thirty five years for the elements to change it from brown to the green that we know today. It was unveiled in eighteen eighty six, so it wasn't until the early twenties that it started to appear green. Here's a question. Why was it made out of a material that turned from a majestic copper to a sickly green hue? Was that some sort of prank by the French? Okay, good? Did you really answer for that? No? I mean sure, if you got one, like, why not something that doesn't turn green? I don't know. Oh wait, Actually, according to the New York Times in two thousand nine, the green patina began gradually covering the surface of Liberty after nineteen hundred, was noted in the press at least as early as nineteen o two, and it was entirely green by six. Huh have I been bested by j C. I I've seen both. I've seen I just wanted to just flagging. Okay, well, we'll reach out or reach out to the statues reps. After Jack dies, the movie more or less returns to the present. There are tears in the shipboard office, where Old Rose is telling her story to Bill Paxston's character, the treasure hunting undersea explorer brock Lovett and his crew. The rest of the movie more or less belongs to Rose. Uh spoilers, I guess uh he listened to the six hour podcast. I'm assuming that you've probably seen this movie. We see Rose sneak out to the boat deck in the middle of the night, clutching the Heart of the Ocean necklace. Remember that's the diamond that Bill Paxson has been looking for this whole time. It turns out she had it all along, having found it in her pocket when the Titanic survivors reached New York on the rescue ship Carpathia, and with a gleeful yelp Old Rose tosses the price araceless jewel overboard. And there was an e w piece by Mary Solosi published for the twentieth anniversary of Titanic in two thousand and seventeen called ten other Titanic baits we should be having besides the Door, And this piece explores the many reasons why Rose throws the priceless diamond overboard. She writes, was it symbolic of her letting go after having been explicitly told she never should? Or does the drop diamond represent herself Rose joining her beloved Jack in the spot where he died a slow, cold, watery death decades prior. But is that notion undermined by the diamond significance as a symbol of Cow's purchase of Rose? That you keep it all those years just to look at it and laugh thinking about how hard he must have searched for it, That you keep it all those years planning to one day sail back to the spot where she lost the love of her life and almost died herself, and just drop it. And honestly, was it really hers to throw away in the first place? It was a rather important historic artifact and just abandon it at the bottom of the North Atlantic is pretty irresponsible. And why didn't she sell it? That would have been sensible. Why didn't she donate it? That would have been selfless? Why did she drop it when that is neither sensible nor selfless? Wants to impact with this one. I don't have an answer to this, But there was actually supposed to be another ending in which old Rose throws the diamond necklace overboard, but not before letting Bill Paxon's character hold the treasure. The scene starts with Paxston and Old Rose's granddaughter played by Susie Amis, who, as we've said several times, went on to marry James Cameron a few years later. They're basically flirting on the side of the ship when they see Old Rose standing on the rung of the ship's railing. They run over in a panic, fearing that reliving the traumatic Titanic memories made her suicidal. And it's actually a sort of clever call back to the moment when Leo stops Rose from jumping off the back of the Titanic when they first met. Paxiston approaches her and sees that she's holding the diamond that he's spent years and frankly countless and millions of dollars searching for, and Rose dangles in his face and dispenses egg truisms about how he's been looking for treasure in the wrong place, and how only life is priceless, so we should make each day count and basically just spoon feeding the message of the movie of the audience. Bill Paxson's character makes a request to hold the diamond, which she allows before flinging it into the ocean. The assembled crew screams Jesus no as they run to the rail. Louis Abernathy, the goofy bearded guy, screams, that really sucks, lady, which is both a hilarious understatement and a hilarious thing to shout at an elderly woman. But Paxson's character Brock, has an epiphany and just lets out a crazed laugh as the treasure begin. It's two and a half mile plunge. All in all, this scene is bad. Bill Paxson was asked about the ending just a few weeks before his death in two thousand seventeen, and he was pretty adamant that he wasn't a fan of this ending, telling ya who I would have shot heroin to make the scene work better. Pretty unambigus, he continued, I always saw the wrap around story that I was involved with with Susie Amos and Gloria's Stewart, who played Old Rose like we were the gantree on the Saturn five rocket. He's recalling his role in Apollo thirteen. You know, the gantree that holds up the rocket ship that launches Apollo thirteen into space. We were there the whole the rocket up, but once the rocket takes off, the gantry has forgotten and falls away. Coming back to us was a way to wrap it up and kind of tie up Old Roses story and all that. But you didn't really need anything from us. Our job was done by then, So it became very evident in the cutting. If you're smart and you take the ego and narcissism out of it, you'll listen to the film. The film will tell you what it needs and what it does not, and the baby needs tough love. R I p Bill Paxton that ending would have been way too on the nose, which is why I appreciate the very end of the movie, which leaves room for ambiguity. Old Roses in her bunk on the ship, surrounded by photos from her fabulous life, including rides on the Santa Monica Peer, just like Leo promise you would one day do. Then there's the fantasy sequence when she descends the ocean depths and reunites with Jack at the Grand staircase amid an ovation from the rest of the lost souls who perished in the disaster, and he will notice that the clock behind Jack reads to twenty, which was the exact time that the ship foundered. For years, people have wondered whether Old Rose was just dreaming in her bunk or if she died Like Jack said in the water, You're gonna die an old lady, warm in your bed, and James Cameron has said that this ending was intentionally vague so that the audience could make up their own mind, and his screenplay is equally ambiguous. He writes, we pan off the last picture to Rose herself warm in her bunk, a profile shot. She's very still. She could be sleeping or maybe something else. I love. He's coy in his own script. As we said in the previous episode, not even actress Glorious Steward, who played Old Rose, knew for sure whether or not she was sleeping or dead when she filmed the scene. And she's only in the shop for a moment, so you can't tell if she's breathing or not. I checked. Uh. The filming schedule, as we mentioned earlier, was intended to last a hundred and thirty five days, but grew to a hundred and sixty. Shooting officially wrapped, I believe on March twenty, the day before my sister's third birthday. James Cameron spent the summer of in an at home editing room darkened by blackout curtains. By late July, he took a day off to Mary Terminator star Linda Hamilton's, his girlfriend of seven years, in the backyard ceremony, and then the next day he went back to his editing suite and back to Titanic. That's wild to me that his his work on Avatar, his lasted longer than several of his marriages. Yeah, but not the Susie Amos. They're still together, that one. That one lasted all right. God, I can't believe it took us this long to get to this. There is one crucial component of Titanic not in place until extreme really late in the game, and that is Selene Dion's ballad My Heart Will Go On. James Cameron originally wanted Enya to compose the score of the film, and even went so far as to assemble a rough cut using her music, but she ultimately declined. Dolores O Reordon of The Cranberries was apparently asked to both act in and compose music for the movie, but she also declined, reportedly due to the birth of her son. So Cameron hired his one time musical collaborator James Horner, who previously worked with him on Aliens. I believe James Horner did the avatars um that movie. Aliens was not a pleasant experience for Horner, as he experienced pique, James Cameron later saying Aliens was james first big film and he wanted every frame and note to be perfect. But I had just ten days to write the music and there was a lot of friction between us. I didn't think we'd ever worked together again. But Horner read the script and loved it. Cameron heard his Brave Heart soundtrack and loved it. So the seeds were re sewn. Um. James owner is, as we touched on in the Hocus Pocus episode, somewhat of a controversial Hollywood composer. Uh He has been accused of reusing a his own previously written works or uh, we're existing works by classical composers issue of Film Score Monthly. An editorial review of Titanic said Horner was quote skilled in the adaptation of existing music into films with just enough variation to avoid legal troubles. This is not strictly true. Horner got in trouble for his work on Honey I Shrunk the Kids, the main theme of which incorporates cues from the score to Federico Fellini's nineteen seventy three film and record by Nino Rota, and Raymond Scott's piece Powerhouse, regularly heard in Looney Tunes. If you're gonna steal from from another composer, maybe don't make it one of the most common Looney Tunes musical cues you puts. This led Raymond Scott the state to threaten the lawsuit against Disney, who paid an undisclosed settlement out of court. Oh, I shouldn't have called him a Putts. He died. However, history has taken a kinder view of him following the mega success of Titanic, not to mention his death in a single occupant plane crash in the Los Padres National Forest. I forgot that he died. Um back to Titanic, James Cameron invited James Horner over and screamed, screamed and screamed at him for hours, like he did to an ailing Stanley Kubrick at the iconic director's home that he invited himself over to. Cameron invited Horner over and screened thirty six hours of footage for him. Horner supposedly wrote the main themes for the movie in one night, heavily influenced by Irish folk music, paying tribute to the ship's Irish heritage. Titanic had been built in Belfast in Northern Ireland, stopped Queenstown on the southern coast of Ireland. It's its final port of call, and there were many Irish immigrants on board. It wasn't long before James Corner remembered that James Cameron was a nightmare to work with, though He told Entertainment Weekly, we'd lock the movie, then release dates would shift and Jim would fine tune it, so I'd fine tune. Then we'd lock it and the dates would shift again, and he'd fine tune, and I'd say, God, I'm gonna have to do this queue six hundred times. The other problem with the closing credits. Given all the people who worked on this three hour epic, the credits were long, something like eight minutes, and this was an issue for James Horner, who later said, my job is to keep the audience in their seats and not let them off the hook. It's my personal belief. I should never let anyone put their coats on. Okay, they have to be in it as long as they can be. As I started writing this eight minute sequence, I was saying, how am I going to do this just another orchestra reprise? It had to be very intimate, very emotional. His solution was to have a full fledged song, but Cameron was dead set in Horror's words, against a love song over the closing credits. He felt strongly that he only wanted instrumentals for the soundtrack, believing that a pop song would seem a bit tone deaf. He compared it to commissioning a pop single for the soundtrack to Schindler's List never won for a subtle similar Horner later told Empire magazine James did not want it to be a Hollywood movie that had violins soaring away around it and a song pasted in at the end, which as you put in narrator voice was what he got. So Horner furtively recruited lyricist Will Jennings to put words to Titanic's main instrumental theme, and then he called in a favor from his friend Selene Dion of the Canadian Dions. Oh. Will Jennings wrote the lyrics that tears in Heaven. Oh he was very what prolific gentleman? Oh he wrote lyrics to Higher Love by Steve Winwood. Higher enough bangs looks like we ate it by Barry Manilow Up where we belonged by officer and a gentleman? Who Will Jennings this way again? My Dion Warwick? Yeah? Did we almost have it all? Whinney Houston? Wow? God, being a lyricist must be just the God. What a what a job man? You come in, somebody's already done the hard work and you just spout a bunch of horse cliches over it and get half the money. Anyway, if anyone wants me to write lyrics to here James Cameron's score, um do. He called in a favor from his friends lying Dion to record a vocal demo in the spring of later telling Billboard she started singing the song and it was just electrifying. By the end of it, we were all emotionally shook up. She started crying while singing it two thirds of the way through the song, and then everybody in the room was crying. She was singing it like her life depended on it. At one point she had to stop singing and compose herself, but she reportedly nailed it in a single take that it was supposed to be a demo. The emotion in the tune was so perfect that it ended up being the master take heard on the soundtrack. But Horner waited for the right time to present the song to James Cameron. He wanted Cameron to be at a point where he was quote comfortable with the film, as Horner were called an Empire magazine. The day finally came when I played it for him. He played it for his family, who loved it, but he was still not convinced. James Cameron's like, son and children like dad, we really love the songs. He's like, what do you know, Well, we have to imagine that the song was produced by Walter Afanasy. If the code of all the one for Christmas, as you and targeted victim of Mariah Carey's concerned attempt to write him out of that song. Horner said it took him Cameron another month and a half to be convinced. We took it to New York and previewed the song, and the audience was in tears and tatters at the end. That's when he decided the song would be in the movie, and when he realized it was a cinematic tool and not a gimmick. He had to see it with an audience to believe that, Wait, you made I can I can hurt people with this emotionally, Oh great, okay, cut print James Cameron to a crying Celine Dion. Can we go again? There's also a good chance that Cameron wanted to appease anxious studio executives who would appreciated the added bonus of a hit song, and James had a lot of anxious executives on his ass. Yes, cost overruns and extended shooting schedules made a lot of people up Paramount and Fox extremely nervous. Early early, early projected costs for Titanic were seventy five million. Paramount and twentieth Century then joined forces to pony up a hundred and ten million and wanted it ready by July, but costs had balloon to two hundred million, or in other words, twenty two times the cost of the original ship, making it the most expensive film ever made, and making matters worse, it wasn't ready until December, five months later. Typical filming schedules can run anywhere from thirty to ninety days, depending on the scope or complexity of a film. The original schedule for Titanic I've seen it was either a hundred and thirty five or a hundred thirty eight days of principal photography. In the end, it took an extra twenty two days to finish up, or about fift longer than expected. And remember, this was a love story with a sad ending, not a superhero movie that was certain to score big at the box office. In other words, it was kind of a bummer. Plus it was long, three hours and fourteen minutes or sometimes fifteen in either case, much longer than your standard popcorn flick. When studioheads insisted on trimming it so the theaters could fit in more screenings per day and make more money, Cameron reportedly responded by telling the head of Fox Bill Mechanic, who visited him on the set at two in the morning, if you want to cut my film, you'll have to fire me. And to fire me, you'll have to kill me. Then Cameron stormed off the sand. Why did he make that threat so much? I don't know, you'll have to kill me because it's effective. Maybe he's a big cool hand, Luke fan, I don't know. You can have my large boat when you pride for my gold dead. But Cameron knew he had the studio over barrel because he knew that they knew who was the only person on the planet who could manage this production and put all the pieces together, so they kind of had them do what he said. Uh As you can probably guess, Cameron had very little patients for any studio brass he felt weren't supporting him. Bill Mechanic likened it to quote, being in the trenches and your infantry made is shooting at you, even if you're the only one there who can save his life. Even though he knew I was on his side, nobody's ever on his side. Just I want I want a listical. I want a BuzzFeed listical of James Cameron's drastically inappropriate simile is ranked Oh even tell this next one? Then? Well, yeah, while we're on that, Cameron told a producer to deliver the following message to a top executive at Fox. Tell your friend he's getting in the ass, and if he would stop squirming, it wouldn't hurt so much. God, oh what, but he gets results now. In shooting a typical action blockbuster like Batman Forever or the Bond movie, to Bar Never Dies costs an average of a hundred thousand, maybe a hundred fifty thousand dollars a day. Titanic average between two hundred and twenty five thousand and three hundred thousand dollars a day, and this was after construction ended on the brand new forty acre movie studio that Cameron had built to film it, which costs something like twenty three million. Speaking to The l A Times, Cameron's first assistant director had this to stay of the film's two hundred million dollar budget. It was just too big. I've been doing this for over twelve years and I still can't get over the size of this. There should be a law against making movies over a hundred and eighty million Jesus, you can make eighteen Woody Allen movies for that. How many sling blades could you make? About forty A hundred and eighty million is the budget for education in the state of who knows where I find that obscene, echoing Kate Winslet's sentiment. There, Ah, I love this story too. At one point, the studio sent the producer named Marty Cats to try to get the spending under control. Cats, aware that this was a very sensitive situation, asked Cameron to consider him a friend. Cameron responded, friends, friends, I don't need friends. You're not my friend, Cats countered, I'm the only friend this production has at the studio. We're in trouble. They don't know when the bleeding is gonna stop. And Cats picks up the story. He looks at me with a twinkle in his eye and says, a friend of the picture is good. But by the way, our little conversation here just cost a hundred fifty tops. And with that, Cameron turned around and went back to work. But I think my favorite story of Nervous Execs is when they made the first teaser trailer. The film was so behind schedule, but none of the special effects were ready, so the best they could do was have a short clip of Old Rose narrating about the necklace. This was so underwhelming that one Fox executive vomited over his own shoes after screening it. Now, at one point, James Cameron ran into Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch and told him, I guess I'm not your favorite person in the world, but the movie is going to be good, and Murdoch replied it better be a damn site better than just good yea. And there's another great Murdoch's story that we discussed during our Air Force One episode. A long time ago. Rupert Murdoch demanded to see an early cut of Titanic just to see where all his money was going, and apparently they delivered a faulty, defective print to Rupert Murdoch's private screening room. I'm theorizing that this might have been on purpose, because James Cameron either wasn't ready to show it or just didn't want any meddling from anyone, But in any case, Rupert Murdoch instead washed, of all things, an advanced cut of another twentieth century Fox movie, I think air Force One, and Murdoch loved it. In fact, he loved it so much that when he finally saw a completed kind of titan An, the first thing he said was, it's good, but it's no air Force one. Can you imagine how galling that must have been for James Cameron. I love that so much. I like to think about it every day when I wake all at all. Exacutives feared the movie would be as big a disaster, pregnant pause as the Titanic itself. Things got so bad that Cameron forfeited his eight million dollar director salary and percentage of the gross as a token of confidence to trying to lay budget concerns at the studio as a good faith measure. As he told Howard Stern, we told them a hundred and twenty million, and that's what we thought it was going to cost. That's why I wound up giving them back all my money, because I said, guys, I don't want you to think we lied to you just so we could get you to make this movie. The studio was so worried about all the money that they had sunk into Titanic that they also demanded profit participation points on his next movie too. Upon hearing this, Cameron says he told the head of Fox, you made yourself. Do you think he meant that you might yourself because my movie will flop? Or you may yourself as in I cordially invite you to go for yourself. Yes, I think the ladder. Yes? Okay. What was his next movie after? Was it Avatar? Yeah? Jesus uh. It seemed like a mathematical impossibility to make back the studio's money. As shipbuilder Thomas Andrews says in the film, she Will sink it is a mathematical certainty. Fox calculated that even if Titanic outperformed the most successful three hour movie in memory, Dances with Wolves, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in uh, the studio would still lose seventy million dollars. To be a success, Titanic needed to repeat its twenty eight million opening weekend ticket sales and stay the number one movie in America for many, many, many, many many weeks in a row, in a way no movie had in nearly a decade. Narrator voice it would. He would say later that in the six month lead up to the release, he was certain that they were about to lose a hundred million dollars, he told e W. We wrapped in early March, and the next few months were rough because we were getting heavily shelled by the press that thought we were the biggest idiots in the history of Hollywood. Titanic was going to be the next water World. The film studios had me utterly convinced that there was no conceivable way that the film would be profitable. So the only thing I had left to cling to was that we would make a quality movie, but even that was in doubt. He admitted at the time that while he feared Titanic would be all things to everyone or nothing to anybody. Not enough action for the action crowd, not enough romance for the romance crowd, a chocolate covered cheeseburger, okay uh. As he edited, he had a razor blade taped onto the screen, which the note saying, use in case the film sucks. And to clarify he did not mean to edit the film, as he said, when everybody everybody doubts you, it's hard not to doubt yourself. But I was looking at for the footage saying, guys, I'm seeing a good movie here. An early version was about thirty five forty minutes longer, but he said that it was quote soggy and too long. Yes, James, it was four hours too many water. I made some draconian decisions and chopped out a subplot that ultimately transformed the film, which you speculate was the romantic subplot between Bill Paxton's character and Rose's granddaughter. Makes sense. Cameron also had problems coming from outside the studio as well. All the horror stories from the set of Titanic, not to mention the delays, has resulted in some seriously bad press as a result. From the very start, the critics were out for blood slamming the movie in the press for a full year before it even come out. Stories of Camera's dictatorial attitudes on a set meant that a decent amount of the trashing was directed at him personally. He later said in an op ed in The Hollywood Reporter, we were being pummeled relentlessly in the press, especially in the industry trade papers, about epic cost overr owns, set safety, delivery dates, and just about everything. We were the biggest morons in Hollywood history, and the press had the long knives out sharpening them. As we approached our release. Critics said it was a bloated leviathan, a behemoth, and a tiresome epic that, according to Washington Posts, death and Howe left viewers quote thinking that unpartable, thought okay, sink already. Camera and as he's wont to do, did not take this lying down and thought back by giving numerous interviews, writing letters to print media, and even taking out ads in the trade press to present his side of the story. And he especially went hard for l A Times critic Kenneth Turn, who, to be fair, had come hard for him first with a particularly scathing review. He writes, just as the hubris of headstrong shipbuilders who insisted that the Titanic was unsinkable led to an unparalleled maritime disaster, so Camera's overweening pride has come and necessarily close to capsizing this project, calling it a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romance. And then he would go on to slam the Titanic in three subsequent interviews. How how many reviews do you need to when you meane hours and fifteen minutes in the biggest movie in the country and in theaters for like nine months. Probably a lot of the additional ones were like, wait, why are people still going to see this movie? I said it was bad, talking about like grasping in your own obsolescence. James Cameron responded in characteristic fashion with a twelve hundred word open letter to The Times, which featured the memorable line forget about Clinton, how do we impeach Kenneth turn? He added, poor Kenny he sees himself as the lone voice crying in the wilderness, righteous but not heated by the blind and dumb, great unwashed around him. It must be a great burden to be cursed with such clear vision when you're misguided, flock break past you like Lemmings, unmindful. I mean basically what we just said, but so much more savage. This beef became a national news story, and years later Camon remained piste off by the incident, saying what bothered me was that somehow he decided to vilify Titanic as an example of everything wrong in Hollywood. This is so gross. I'm paraphrasing this. Look into my eyes as you read it is this phrase gross is made to my core. Excuse me, you can't take the one film that had the hair on its balls. You to go out and be three hours long, and be a mainstream picture that didn't cow tow to every so called piece of mainstream knowledge of what you have to do to survive, that involved itself in things that every studio executive in town would have run screaming from, and say that it's emblematic of everything that's wrong in Hollywood, and do it over and over. You just can't do that. There's one newspaper in this city that sits on the breakfast table of everyone I work with the l A times. You're attacking me in my house, and Cameron added, in one particularly revealing quote, I'm going to fight back. It's that's simple. If you did it tomorrow, I do the same thing. I'm a crusty Canadian farmer at heart. You come onto our land, we put some buckshot in your ass, disturbingly close to saying we'll put a boot in your ass. It's the American way. Well. Titanic had its premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival in November, where police were needed to control the thousands of hysterical girls surrounding the theater. One screamed, Leo, I'm ready to die for you. I guess she was a Romeo and Juliet fan. This voted well for the wide release on December. This sounds like a joke, but it was just a modest success at first, barely winning its opening weekend with a point six million dollar take. But then it just didn't stop. It was a marathon, not a sprint. The highest single grossing day was in its sixtieth day of release, Valentine's Day, appropriately enough, which just doesn't happen. You don't have your biggest day to months into a film's release. Cameron said that they learned in late January, about a month and a half after the film was released, that it was going to break even, and he said that was the David he popped champagne because he said that had always seemed like an unattainable goal. You never thought it would break even. People not only told their friends to see this movie, but they went to see it over and over again themselves. The normal repeat viewing rate for a blockbuster theatrical films between two and five. The repeat rate for Titanic was twenty percent. A month after the release. Fox estimated, somehow, I don't know how they got this figure that seven percent of teenage girls had seen it twice. In March, Associated Press ran a cute story about a twelve year old Italian girl named Gloria who had gone to Sea Titanic at the only movie theater in her small town every single night of its release, and planned to until it left the theaters. At the time of the report, she had seen it fifty times and still wasn't tired of it. The theater no longer charged her admission and even saved her favorite seat for her every night. Hi go tell us about the money. Enough enough of all these cute stories of adolescent love. Tell us about the cold, filthy lucra. Titanic held, and probably until Avatar to the Way of Water, holds the record for the longest theatrical run, staying in theaters for nearly ten months. It was still it was still in theaters when it came out on VHS on September one. Screenings of the movie were so popular that Paramount had to send replacement film reels out to theaters when the originals wore out. Titanic was the top grossing film for seven sixteen consecutive weeks, and became the first film to gross over a billion dollars. Kate and Leo were apparently so green that they didn't know this was a big deal, with Leo saying a billion dollars, So that's good, I thought, And maybe he was being sarcastic. I don't know it is because even even the newbies seems, you know, anything with billions with a B he's good. I mean, he might be kind of an idiot, remember the fart thing. The box office receipts were even more impressive, considering the three hour film could only be shown three times a day instead of the usual four. It became the highest grossing movie in US history, shattering the record that had been held by Star Wars A New Hope Ah, which crushed ten year old me as. I mean, George Lucas took out an add variety where Han and Leah posed like Jack and rose as in public congratulations to James Cameron was magnanimous of him, something James Cameron would never ever do. Just imagine James Cameron taking out a full page added variety that has like one of the nov like pushing Jack into the water when Avatar just despite himself and his own movie it was it would have It was the highest grossing film of all time from until two thousand and ten, when James Cameron surpassed it with his own film. His next film, Avatar, now in Titanic, sits at the number three spot on the list with two point one billion dollars. Avatar is still number one two point seven bill and Avengers Endgame is number two, and Jordan's we can't forget Selean Dion. We can't. We saw what happened in the Rolling Stone did on their Best Singers list. They got picketers, so we cannot forget Selean Dion. The soundtrack song My Heart Will Go On debut at number one on the Billboard Hot one chart on February and sent the Titanic soundtrack into a sixteen week run at number one, an unprecedented feat for a largely orchestral soundtrack album. The song also went on to win Best Original Song at the Oscars, where Selene Dion performed wearing a one point four million dollar recreation of the heart of the Ocean neck was that Aspury and Gerard were commissioned to create. It was a one hundred and seventy one carrot heart shaped ceylon sapphire surrounded by a hundred and three diamonds was auctioned off for charity to benefit the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and Southern California's Aid for AIDS Foundation, and has reportedly not been made available for public viewing ever since. The soundtrack recording became the best selling instrumental movie soundtrack of all time, and for several weeks, the book about the making of the Titanic film was at the top of the New York Times best seller list, the first time that such a tie in book had achieved this status. All in all, it was a bonafied phenomenon. Titanic was nominated for fourteen Academy Awards, tying the records set by All About Eve in nineteen fifty. Hilariously, the movie had been nominated in almost every category except screenplay, which we had talked about in the first episode of this trilogy. Wasn't great and Best Actor Leonardo DiCaprio got passed over, and it's perhaps not a coincidence that he was a no show at the Oscar ceremony in March. To quote Michael Jordan's Cameron took this personally. I don't think Michael Jordan said that, not documentary, but the Memes said that he said that James Cameron told Rolling Stone I thought it was kind of a snub, not of the film per se, but of all the other people who did care and had sweated blood for the movie. So I kept calling and saying, you gotta go to the Oscars for the team, and frankly, you have to go for yourself because the consequences of not going will be that you're gonna look like a spoiled punk. So he didn't go, and you look like a spoiled punk. And Leo knows that I feel that way, so I'm not saying anything out of school. He agonized over it, but there was something about it that just wasn't him. That was a message I got on my machine like the day before, just day me bro apparently getting four million dollars to do a juice ad that air is only in Japan is him, but going to the Oscars is not. Again James Cameron with the body shots there. Wowk wins Lett got a Best Actress nomination, which is the least they could do considering all she went through, and eighty seven year old Glorious Stewart a k a. Old Rose was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the oldest person ever nominated for an oscar at the time, a record she held for nineteen years until two thousand and eighteen, when Christopher Plummer was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at age eight. I think for all the money in the world is the movie? Uh. Stewart, however, still holds the record for the oldest woman nominated for Best Supporting In addition, Titanic was the first film to have two cast members wins letton Stewart nominated for playing the same role. I wonder if Marlon Brando, I guess it was a different movie. I guess it was Godfather one and two. I was gonna say Brando and um de Niro. I guess that's the caveat that it was in two different movies. Sadly they both lost in their respective categories. Kate Winslet to Helen Hunt and As Good as It Gets and Glorious Stewart to Kimbassenger in l A Confidential, A favorite of our friend Craig, friend of the pod Craig who thinks that Titanic robbed Ella Confidential of a Best Picture win Which show say something controversial yet brave? No six hours in No, I'm committing to this bit. Kate was win an oscar for the Reader in two thousand nine, but sadly Glorious Stewart would not. But at least she got a cameo on Britney Spears. Oops, I did it again. Video So worthy consolation all around. Despite these losses, Titanic won eleven Oscars during the ceremony on March, tying the record previously set by Ben her Ine. Wow. I think the ceremony was a year to the day after the film wrapped. That's like that. And I think that they broke ground on the studio that they built specifically to film it on some anniversary of work being begun on the original Titanic. I like that. I guess there are only so many days in the year, and this went on for so long that you're you're bound to have stuff line up. But still I like that. Titanic was the first movie to win all seven technical categories that it deserves cinematography, editing, production design, costume design, sound mixing, sound editing, and visual effects, and it was also the first Best Picture winner to be produced, directed, written and edited by the same person, James Cameron. It was also the first movie to win both the Academy Award and the MTV Movie Awards for Best Picture. Again, it just shows that its appealed everybody, and it was also the only film to win both the Academy Award for Best Picture and Nickelodeon's Kids Choice Award for Favorite Movie. Again, appeal to everybody. Stargy film. People loved it. Teenagers and Gen xers loved it. Little baby millennials like us loved it. Everybody loved Titanic. Ah James Cameron famously ended his Oscar speech for Best Director by shouting the line he ad libbed one day on the Titanic set, I'm king of the World's seems like a gimme, which is a perfect, you know, a perfect reference for this triumphant moment. But apparently this resulted an even more bad press for James Cameron. I don't remember this at all, but apparently he was mocked repeatedly. He later said, after jumping up and making a fool of myself with my acceptance speech for Titanic, I'm sure nobody wants to see me the Academy Awards again, or maybe they want me to win again and see if I can make an even bigger fool of myself. In keeping with the theme with James Cameron, bigger is better. But I am sure he got over it. He went home with three Oscar statues that night, Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing. I haven't figured out what to do with them yet, he said, soon after. I thought of drilling a hole through the head of one and wearing it on a chain around my neck. And honestly, I'm shocked by his restraint that he didn't do this. His journey that began over a decade earlier watching the nineteen seven National Geographic documentary about the discovery of the Titanic was now over. It had cost two million dollars and an untold amount of human suffering. But he had made large boat, and as such we have made our large Boat trilogy. After all of this, there's really only one thing to say. In two thousand and seventeen, Titanic was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being culturally and historically and aesthetically significant. Boom. That's not the perfect ending for this. Well, damn it, I don't know what is. As we said earlier, it took James Cameron something like a hundred and sixty shooting days to make Titanic, and in a nod to his obsession with historical accuracy, I had intended to spend a hundred and sixty days making this episode, but Hagle reported me to my heart's hr. So you'll have to be satisfied with the fact that this trilogy was twice as long as the actual movie. But three episodes, six ish hours and seventy two pages notes later, I think I am finally out of stuff to say about Titanic, and frankly, I feel like the king of the world. I go, what about you? I don't know if my heart will go on, but my voice loss will. Yeah, he croaked towards Leek. No I was I was trying to do for heart, my heart will go on, and it went and it turned out in the Hobbit theme. Folks, thank you for listening. This has been uh large boat Part three large harder because this we gotta do a lightning round it, just like type proposed Titanic sequels. I want to I want to see like what led cal to h to off himself the gritty character like a prequel Titans They do a pre boot of Titanic. It is called cal It's just like a slow, ominous piano music in the background, like Don he thought he was in love, but there was something between them? Is that? Is that a play on the on the posters slogan nothing on Earth could come between them? Was all the posters just crudely photoshopping Billy Zane in there? You know what? You know? What I really want is like a marriage story like Noah bum Bach, like quiet slow burn, John Cheever esque, like dull mid century on We of the Suburbs, Frannie and Zoe, gifted child Royal tennon bombs like like Rose survives and marries the dullest man on earth, and then we just get like a long like three cuts in the entire movie. It's four hours. It's My Dinner with Andre, but it's just Roses sad upper class life. I don't say anything about her husband. No constantly he will be played by John c Riley, constantly, constantly flashing back to Jack in full on like Mr Cellophane in Chicago mode, like just complete non non person I hope so or alternate take. It's a it's an occurrence at out Creek Bridge situation, and we get or like a like a last Temptation of Christ's situation, where we get a whole movie where Jack like, it's like they survive happily and it's like a revolutionary road revolution road, or like Douglas Cirque, like fifties women melodrama, and then at the end of it, we just smashed cut to her drowning and the whole thing was an elaborate fantasy right before she died. That's my pitch for a Titanic movie directed by Terrence Malick. Oh, that's pretty good. Another Tannic Titanic pitch. She's just looking at the snow globe of the ship in it. Uh, that worked better than I Yeah, Actually, what about um? Did any of the dog survived? Do we do like a mile o on Otis, like The Incredible Homeward Bound, like a dog focused Titanic movie where it's just like a dog. Or Life of Pie. We do like a life pie where it's like a dog and a lifeboat and the dog where they wants to eat let's say a child, and it's just the two of them in a lifeboat and they learn life lessons to each other. The dog is played by John c Riley. The child is played by Robert de Niro, digitally d aged. Oh man, yeah, what if we get Oh, we didn't even talk about we could do a prequel to Jack or to Titanic, just called Jack and it's it's it's it's footage from the Robin Rob Williams movie. That's exactly his face, his treehouse, curly, crudely pasted over, crudely photoshopped over. DiCaprio. No, it's called Jack and it's it's a horror movie. Um, and he's Jack the Ripper. Oh my god, we've got We've cracked it. It's a it's a gripping, psychological horror movie, directed but period accurate, directed by Robert Egger's showing what happened before Jack on on the Titanic. He was Jack exactly. There are rumors that Jack the Ripper was an American. I don't know that that those are actually true. I'm saying them so yes, but yeah, he was Jack the Ripper. He had to get out of town. And so we're gonna get the whole White Chapel murders. It's gonna be historically accurate. They're going to digitally d age Leonardo di Caprio down and um Robert Edgers will actually have him sharpen his own knives and construct his own Victorian hovel to live in, and then the whole movie will end up with him winning the tickets in the game That's really good. No, No, the movie ends with I'm the King of the World, completely inverting the whole emotion of that scene. All this and we it's like, instead of just like, oh, we're joyful for this, like vagabond who who we're seeing, we're seeing the grim triumph of a say it? You know? What they would do for the trailer then would be a slowed down, sinister version of the Who's Happy Jack? So slowed plus weever? Happy Jack kind of sounds like an Irish folk song. Yeah boom was boom boom boom. He's like, I didn't always go by Jack. I used to go by the rippers. I don't know what's the nickname was? What's the long name for Jack? Is it Jackathan? They used to call me Jackathan when I was in Whitechapel, Happy Jack Gold? Oh God, why don't they pay us more for this? Don't be rolling? Where how I am? We're into bonus material at this point. This is that we're just gonna put out a supplementary episode. This is Jordan and I developing the plot of the Titanic sequels and reboots, and all of it is trademarked. All of you om me money, all right? Uh, this has been large boat, too much information coal and large boat boat harder, sinc harder. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. 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