"There comes a time in one's life when you must do something extraordinary." -- fax from Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch to James Cameron, who moments later decided to make the movie about "Romeo and Juliet on a boat." [1]

"Titanic: worst movie ever," blared a recent FoxNews.com headline.  In the interview that followed, Robert Altman, who's up for Best Director for Gosford Park this year, slammed the highly-acclaimed boat picture as "the most dreadful piece of work" he'd seen in his entire life.  [2]

He doesn't tell us why he thinks it's awful, nor did the interviewer have the fortitude to ask for his reasons.  Adjusted for inflation, Titanic is one of the top five money-makers in film history, and the first movie ever to surpass $1 billion in box office receipts worldwide.  In 1998, it won 11 Academy Awards, including Best Director.  Does Titanic's phenomenal success make it an artistic masterpiece?  No--though in many ways it is.

For all its advanced film techniques, Titanic depends on stock story lines and characters to tell its tale.  That so many people still loved it is a tribute to its creator, James Cameron.

In an industry that cowers at risk, Cameron is a daredevil who pursues his work relentlessly and for whom no detail is too small to get right.  He demands the same level of attention from everyone around him, and God help the crew member who doesn't deliver.

"There will always be twenty bean-counters and twenty logicians standing around waiting to tell you why you can't do something," Cameron once said.  "It doesn't mean you can't do it." [3]

He started his movie career in 1979 at Roger Corman's New World Studios, whose other graduates include Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, John Sayles, and Ron Howard.  Unlike them, Cameron had not been to film school.  He got his break one day when two producers saw him directing a scene in which mealworms were consuming a dismembered arm.  Cameron had rigged a unit that zapped the larvae with an electric charge to enliven their performance.  When he yelled "Action!" a technician turned on the juice, then switched it off when he said "Cut!"  The producers were so impressed they later gave him his first directing assignment, Piranha 2: The Spawning.

After the sleeper success of The Terminator (1984), he went on to make Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), T2: Judgment Day (1991), Point Break (1991), and True Lies (1994) -- all of which made millions.  His only box office loser was Strange Days (1995).

When Cameron officially pitched Titanic to Twentieth Century-Fox in March, 1995, it was anything but a sure sell.  Though the tagline was captivating enough--Romeo and Juliet on a boat--the idea of a three-hour costume epic didn't strike the Fox executives as a gold mine waiting to be tapped.  Still, without officially greenlighting the project, they gave Cameron $2 million to shoot the original wreck in the North Atlantic, as part of the first step of production.

Cameron's $200 million "chick flick," as he jokingly calls it, ran $80 million over budget and five months beyond the summer of 1997 deadline.  When the 163-day shoot wrapped, he had 12 days worth of film--about 1.3 million feet--to edit into a three-and-a-half-hour show that would entrance moviegoers and maybe make a little money.  During post-production he would use over 500 shots from 17 different special effects firms.

Titanic gives viewers much to enjoy--a heartbreaking story with humor and tension, historically-accurate sets and costumes, spectacular action and effects, and haunting theme music composed by James Horner.  Unfortunately, it also pays homage to the inviolable Hollywood dictate that business and money are the scourge of mankind.

The villain, Caledon Hockley, is the heir to his father's fortune.  In the screenplay Cameron describes him as "handsome, arrogant and rich beyond meaning."  He tries to buy everything in life, even his fiancee, Rose, by giving her the Heart of the Ocean--"a malevolent blue stone," in Cameron's words.  It is a 56-carat malevolent stone on a necklace, worth more than the Hope diamond.

By contrast, the hero, Jack Dawson, is broke and rootless, scratching out his existence doing sketches of women for a dime apiece.  He wins his ticket onto the Titanic in a poker game.

As Rose's relationship with Jack gets serious, Ruth, Rose's mother, forbids her to see him, fearing her intimacy with the penniless artist will jeopardize her engagement to Cal.

"Our situation is precarious. You know the money's gone!" she tells Rose when they're alone.  "It is a fine match with Hockley, and it will ensure our survival."

"How can you put this on my shoulders?" Rose protests.

Ruth is terrified.  "Do you want to see me working as a seamstress?"

Later, when the boat is sinking, Cal pulls a thick stack of money from his safe and says to his man-servant, Lovejoy: "I make my own luck."  Out on deck, he tries to secure salvation on a lifeboat by stuffing the cash in Officer Murdoch's pocket, saying, "Mr. Murdoch, I'm a businessman, as you know, and I have a business proposition for you."

The tale itself is put in motion by treasure hunter Brock Lovett, who's obsessed over finding the Heart of the Ocean in the sunken wreck.  On one of his dives he discovers a drawing of a naked woman wearing the necklace, which 101-year-old Rose recognizes when it's shown on TV.  She contacts Lovett, who has her flown to the diving site.  She tells the story of her romance with Jack and the drawing he made of her before the sinking.  In exchange for her narrative, which he hopes will help him locate the lost diamond, Lovett agrees to give her the drawing.

At the movie's end, in the calm of night, old Rose climbs the stern railing and lets the necklace drop into the sea.  She didn't need it anymore now that she had the drawing.  Remembering Jack was all that mattered, she told Lovett, because "he saved me, in every way that a person can be saved."

He had saved her from selling her soul.  That's why she was able to cling to the necklace in secrecy her entire life.  Cameron can deliver this message because he lives it.  During the thick of the film's cost overruns, when Fox was pressuring him to finish the movie quickly to stop the hemorrhaging, he reassigned his profit participation back to the studio.  Assuming the movie would gross around $400 million worldwide, he was saving Fox between $10 and $20 million with his gift.

It was a selfish gesture worthy of Howard Roark: finishing the movie right was more important to Cameron than a thick stack of money.  Fox responded with an equally selfish gesture.  When ticket sales topped $1.2 billion in March, 1998, they offered him between $50 and $100 million as compensation for giving up his original profit arrangement.  They didn't want to lose him.

Stripped of its sensational aspects, Titanic is a morality play about the evils of wealth in the wrong hands.  Perhaps someday James Cameron will turn his genius into portraying money as a force that enhances personal happiness, instead of the nemesis of anyone owning more than a dime.  From all accounts it was Cameron's virtues that created his fortune in real life.  Why can't we see those same virtues depicted in the films we watch?  We need to see not just the Cal Hockleys of the world, but the James Camerons as well.

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1.  Parisi, Paula, "Titanic and the making of James Cameron," Newmarket Press, New York, 1998, p. 30.

2.  "Titanic: worst movie ever," http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,47613,00.html

3.  Parisi, "Titanic," p. 5.

Titanic screenplay, http://blake.prohosting.com/bamzone/titanic.txt