Titanic

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 22, 1997 | by Jeffrey R. Sipe

The Titanic has risen, first as a Broadway musical, now as a hugely expensive film. Both feature innovative special effects, but the stories are surprisingly good - if not quite historically accurate.

The launch of the Titanic on April 12, 1912, was the crowning achievement of the Industrial Age, on par, many claimed, with the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China. Ironically, the Tony Award-winning musical on Broadway and director James Cameron's screen version depicting the ship's tragic maiden voyage are technological wonders themselves.

Touted as the most expensive film ever made, Titanic is rumored to have cost a staggering $250 million-plus, a sum that may lure crowds to the box office out of curiosity. Production problems (not unusual, given the 2,000 extras and highly sophisticated special effects) prevented the film from being released on schedule in July.

As it turns out, the wait was well worth it, though certainly a disappointment for critics salivating at the chance to sling darts poisoned with catastrophe puns. Not only are the special effects awe-inspiring and their insertion into the narrative seamless, but the story actually carries the film through to the SFX-fest that makes up the final 80 minutes of the three-hour epic.

Titanic follows the fate of Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an American hustler who wins his ticket on the doomed ocean liner in a last-minute card game near the ship's berth at Southampton. During the voyage, he saves blue-blood beauty Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) from jumping overboard in a fit of despondency. The ensuing relationship is classic "rich girl/poor boy" -- or in this case, "first-class/steerage" -- made bearable by winning performances turned in by the two young stars.

There is, of course, a villain: Rose's gratingly pretentious boyfriend, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). Although Cal initially swallows his considerable pride and invites Jack to dinner in first class, Cal ultimately locks him away in a hidden room once the boat begins to sink -- the maritime equivalent to tying someone to the train tracks.

"There was no plot to the [real] Titanic," the film's historical consultant, Kit Bonner, tells Insight. "It was a purely commercial venture based on the greed of the men at the White Star Line."

The task of ensuring the film's historical authenticity fell to Bonner, a maritime historian with a background in the U.S. Navy. Replicating the physical aspects of the doomed ship was the least of his problems. "We had the plans for the ship along with a few photos," explains Bonner, "and we had examples of the china they used. The physical re-creation was not difficult."

A bigger problem was convincing actors and extras to convey a subdued reaction to impending doom. Actual passengers apparently displayed unfathomable dignity as the ship slowly met its fate. And the band really did play until the bitter end. As Bonner describes it, the Titanic set sail during a more graceful era. "We had to get people to slow down, to be more deliberate in their approach."

On Broadway, verisimilitude is a different animal. Theater allows an impressionistic re-creation of historical events, and no one in the audience of Titanic, the Musical is disappointed when the ship sinks without a deluge of water. But the show's producers and set designers did concoct a hydraulic system that tilts the stage precipitously as the ship goes down -- tea carts, chairs, tables and a piano slide offstage into the imagined depths of the North Atlantic.

Despite such impressive staging, human drama holds the musical together. The show's first act explores similar class issues taken up by the movie. Characters based on real people -- John Jacob Astor, Ben Guggenheim and Isidor and Ida Strauss (founders of Macy's department store) -- sing away in first class while Irish and Germans dance and drink in steerage, their eyes wide at the future that awaits them. Only as the ship is finally sinking do the classes come together on deck in a mass of humanity, one indistinguishable from the other.

As history, Broadway's and Hollywood's Titanics both take liberties. In the musical, Capt. Edward Smith is a courageous man who carries out his duties. In reality, says Bonner, "he wimped." On the other hand, Broadway does take up the issue of the California, a ship that was no more than 10 miles from the sinking Titanic but failed to respond to radio calls or heed clearly visible distress flares. Had the California responded, it is quite possible that no lives would have been lost, an element of the tragedy the movie ignores.

Both productions cast Bruce Ismay, a White Star executive, as chief villain in the disaster. Ismay urges the crew to push the Titanic to ever higher speeds, an action that may have contributed to the ship's inability to avoid the iceberg. Bonner discounts that possibility. "The point of all of these ships was to get people and goods back and forth between England and America as quickly as possible. The faster that they could go, the more trips they could make. Ismay may have urged Smith to go faster, but that doesn't make him a villain."