Titanic (Part 1): Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.

(00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known stories
behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We
are your deep sea divers of details, your unsinkable Molly
Brown's minutia, your French girls of facts, hitting you with
Titanic based trivia like a sweaty hand on a fogged
up window of a sweaty vintage automobile. My name is

(00:31):
Jordan run Tog and I'm Alex Sago, and today we
are doing what is quite possibly my favorite episode we've
ever done, even more than my beloved Beatles Too Parter.
I've been writing it for the last six weeks, but
in reality, I've been researching it for the last quarter
century for longer. Yes, I'm talking about James Cameron's Titanic,
which recently turned twenty five years old. Hard to believe.

(00:53):
It came out on December, just a few days before
my tenth birthday, which made the season all the more
rush for me. This is a movie that defies hyperbole,
and frankly, any attempt at an introduction feels superfluous. Because
it's Titanic. The popularity of the movie speaks for itself.
It's arguably the most transcendent, inescapable, and impressive cinematic experience

(01:14):
of the second half of the twentieth century. This episode,
I'm pleased to announce is a t M I first,
it's our first three parter. I was trying to make
it a two part in honor of the original VHS
release in the nineties, but there was just too much stuff. Honestly,
I think the double VHS set played a role in
the film success because it could be two separate movies
depending on your mood. If you watch the first tape,
it was a fish out of Water rom com ending

(01:36):
in car Sex, and the second tape, if you started there,
it was an action adventure popcorn flick. And this is
just one of the many insightful theories that I'll share
about Titanic throughout this episode. High Go, We've talked a
bit before this, and I'm very aware that this movie
doesn't mean the same to you that it does to me.
But what are your thoughts on Titanic. It's a big
boat from the makers of large Plane, Large Boat. H Yeah,

(02:02):
I mean, what do you say about Titanic? Man it's
like it was the biggest movie of all time until
another James Cameron movie became the biggest movie of all time.
I mean, I have a huge soft spot for James
Cameron because he made one of my favorite movies of
all time Terminator to Colon, Judgment Day, that's right, and
Aliens and Aliens. Yeah, he's so funny man. Because he's
such a I think all of the extra Cameron the

(02:26):
Killer activities tend to dwarf him as being just like
an actual auteur, but he is responsible for some of
the greatest movies of all time. And uh yeah, I
I remember this movie primarily as like a fourth grader
who was really into Star Wars and was just really
upset that it was going to beat Star Wars is

(02:47):
not at all time, But I was only felt about
Lord of the Rings, actually, and I was way too
old to be angry about stuff like that when Lord
of the Rings. That was in high school. When the
Lord of the Rings beat Titanic for whatever record, it beat,
just seen your fists, like Peter Jackson. Yeah, I mean
it's yeah, it's it's incredible. It's I don't really understand

(03:10):
how it did that. I mean obviously it's got all
these antecedents in like poside adventure and all this stuff
that you love, and but it's yeah, yeah, but it's
like I don't know who would have predicted this, Like, yeah,
it's coming through the like mid nineties like maximalist action
and transportation movies. But also like, are you like getting

(03:31):
this to like Speed Yes, okay, Speed, Speed two, Cruise Control,
the four action plane movies we talked about when we
did Air Force one. You know, we had Dante's Peak,
we had uh, there's another volcano disaster one. So it
does seem like there was like a ground swell towards
like big disaster movies I guess coming off of Jurassic

(03:53):
Park as well, Like that's true, which I think was
the highest grossing movie of all time. For yeah, all
that Stolberg in you know Golly Whiz g willakers like
spectacle filmmaking, But like who would have picked that it
was Titanic, Like like it could have just it feels
like you could have just as easily been like Hindenburg,

(04:15):
James Cameron's Hindenburg or like some other big disaster like
the Molasses. Like I'm like one of those great molasses floods, yeah,
like which is the Boston thing of at least. Yeah. Yeah,
but it just it's just funny to me that it
ended up being Titanic, you know, I must just have
a blind spot towards it and like where it occupied
in like U S. History as far as like big

(04:38):
nation gripping tragedy. You know, well, it hits a lot
of stuff. I mean, the juxtaposition between rich and the poor,
gender roles with the women and children first and the
men kind of stoically staying back, and the sor there's
nobility of the Gilded Age and in the max sense
of that juxtaposed with the arrogance and you know that

(04:59):
the folly, you know, you think of that that Jim
Morrison line the future is uncertain, in the end is
always near. Uh yes, I just compared Jim Morrison to
The Titanic. Just a bumpy start for this episode. But
I do think that the Spectacle played a huge role
in this too. I mean it was the most expensive
movie ever made at that point two million dollars. Uh

(05:20):
that's about a million dollars per minute of screen time,
which is just ridiculous. I mean, the cost to construct
the Titanic back in nineteen ten and nineteen twelve was
about seven point five million, which injusted for inflation, is
about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty
million dollars, which means that the movie Titanic costs more
to make than the actual Titanic, which I enjoy, and

(05:43):
so much more in actual human suffering. Yeah. Pretty, I mean, yeah, well,
we'll talk a lot about was one James Cameron. Yes,
but I mean this movie. It made a huge impact
on me, as it did on so many. I'd say
that the Titanic and the Beatles are my twin obsessions,
which is strange because I've noticed that there's a great
deal of overlap between classic rock super fans and Titanic enthusiasts.

(06:08):
I know, I don't understand why, but just anecdotally on Twitter,
I've seen a lot of overlap between the two. Maybe
it's the fact that Liverpool's the home base for both
the Beatles and it was the Titanic's homeport, So I
don't know. I'd love some some study on this. But
like jazz fans and Serial Killer aficionados, I didn't know
that I need jazz and like heavy no on making

(06:28):
that up. Okay, that's just your just just New Year,
same high. But you know, unlike a lot of my
millennial peers, I was actually obsessed with the Titanic long
before the movie came out. And I say this not
for any kind of like, you know, I was into
this before it was cool, cred because it was never cool.
But I just want to give you an idea of

(06:50):
how excited I was for this movie. And I heard
news reports about the production of Titanic for years prior
to the release, and so this was just a huge
one for me. I got when I rented the National
Geographic special about the Discovery of the Titanic from my
local library when I was in kindergarten. No idea what
compelled me to watch it, but soon I knew it
so well that I was able to write the narration

(07:11):
from memory. And I would really freak out my teachers,
who thought I was actually capable of coming up with
lines like her name was a synonym for tragedy on
my own at age six. Um, but I actually freaked
out my teacher. Is quite a bit with my Titanic interest,
because somewhere at my house there are stacks of like
crayon drawings that I did of the ship going down,

(07:32):
with like people jumping off the back um like in
my child hand. It's kind of disturbing. I dressed up
as Captain Smith for Halloween when I was in first grade,
which again, yes, it was before the movie came out,
so no one had any idea who the hell I was.
So I actually felt really validated and happy when the
Titanic movie came out because suddenly my obsession was cool

(07:53):
and I could share what I thought was so interesting
about it. It's like I'm doing today. In addition to
the production, it's about this movie will compare and contrast
how elements of the film stacked up with the reality
of that night back in April. Well, this is certainly
could be the longest episode we've done, so in the
interest of preserving time, I'm not even gonna give any teasers.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's my great pleasure to present episode

(08:16):
one of our three part epic detailing everything you didn't
know about the making of James Cameron's Titanic. Take her
to see Mr Murday, Let's stretch her legs. Do you
ever watch Riot tracks? Oh? With the Mistry Science Theater three.

(08:38):
They're kind of hit or miss, but the Titanic one
is so good because they just do that big slow
pan up to the captain and then he just think
one of them just goes, I'm going to sink this bitch.
Spoilers Well, the story of the Titanic film really begins
with the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in

(09:00):
nineteen eighty five, after it was missing for seventy three years.
It was discovered by an expedition led by Dr Robert
Ballard of the Woods Whole Oceanographic Institute. And the interesting
thing here is that he wasn't actually supposed to be
looking for the Titanic in the first place. It came
out a few years ago that Ballard and his team
were actually on a top secret mission for the U. S. Navy.

(09:20):
Back in the sixties, the Navy lost two nuclear subs
under mysterious circumstances, the Thresher and the Scorpion, and Dr
Ballard was sent to try and locate the Rex to
try and determine if the Soviets had gotten there first,
which would have been bad because it was the Cold
War and they would have been able to steal a
bunch of our military secrets and all that stuff. So
the whole searching for the Titanic thing was just a
cover story for what they were doing in the North Atlantic.

(09:43):
But Dr Ballard found the missing subs and completed his
mission so quickly that he actually had twelve days left
over to search for the Titanic. And what the hell
are here was like turning out your couch cushions and
your already clean in Like I was, well, see what
we can turn up? So what we got in here?
And he actually found the titans by using many of
the techniques he'd holand while searching for these missing subs.

(10:03):
There's the National Geographic documentary that I mentioned earlier about
the discovery of the Titanic from seven that features footage
of the very moment Dr Ballard and his team locate
the wreck and Ballard let's out a triumphant well I'll
be damn, which she's hilarious. Uh. And you'll remember this
was a recurring line in the Titanic film when Bill
Paxxton's sea explorer character brock Lovett cracks the safe and

(10:25):
finds the drawing of Rose with the heart of the
Ocean diamond. Uh. And that's sees what he says, I'll
be damn, and then Old Rose sees the drawing on
TV says the same thing, I'll be damn, And that's
when she gets in contact with Bill Paxson's character Brock
and kicks off the plot of the movie. So James
Cameron watched this seven National Geographic documentary and it made

(10:46):
a big impression on him. As it did Meet, he
made a note at the time, do story with bookend
of present day wreckage scene intercut with memory of a survivor,
needs a mystery or driving plot element. Thus the seed
of the Titanic movie were sown. Cameron was extremely interested
in undersea exploration, and he actually wrote his nineteen eight

(11:07):
nine film The Abyss after seeing another National Geographic documentary
about remote operated vehicles similar to the ones that Dr
Ballad used to find the Titanic. So it was interested
in all this stuff was already well established. But the
thing that was so tantalizing about the Titanic plotline was
that it was real. In there was an Imax documentary
film called Titanica that featured fantastic, high quality for the

(11:30):
time footage of the wreck. I remember going to see
this in Boston at the Museum of Science as a boy.
For James Cameron, this Imax documentary sparked the idea that
he could go down two and a half miles in
the North Atlantic and film the wreck for real and
incorporate that footage into his own movie, which had never
been done for a feature film, essentially using the actual
wreck as a set, and the challenge truly appealed to him.

(11:52):
So in a sense, the movie Titanic was a giant
excuse for James Cameron to visit the wreck of the
Titanic on Hollywood's dime, which I appreciate, and he was
really open about this. He later said, I start a
joke about this, but it's more true than that that
I made the movie because I wanted to do an
expedition to the wreck of the Titanic. God love him.
And that is when we segue into the James Cameron
corner of the James Cameron Deck, the Cameron Deck, the

(12:15):
camera deck. Um. Yeah, Cameron is so fascinating to me. Man.
He is one of the most autocratic, dictatorial directors of
all time. He has his many horror stories about his
directing style, as he does people who were like fanatically
dedicated to him. You know, he shoots, he writes, produces edits,
he helps do set and makeup and uh, you know, stunts.

(12:38):
There's multiple anecdotes from Titanic and other films where he's
just like roams around the set and we'll just like
go in on someone and adjust their makeup. Actor Danny Nucci,
who played Fabrizio and Titanic, said that camera would get
in there and just like even adjust the shape of
blood spatter or a scar according to his vision. Um.
Where they were chopping up pieces of ice for the

(12:58):
iceberg scene, camera got in there with a pick axe
to sculpture the ice according to how he wanted it,
just the ice on the deck, like the little pieces
that you like couldn't even really see. We're not even
talking about the iceberg. It's we're talking abouts of stuff
on the deck. There's something really pathological there. But God
love him, he gets results. Um Stephen Lang who is
the most notably the villain in Avatar, But it's been

(13:21):
a couple of Cameron things, he says. Uh. He told
the Ringer recently, the two onset jobs that Jim Cameron
respects the most are acting and catering, because those are
the two jobs he knows he can't do better than
everybody else. There was a two thousand nine New Yorker
profile by Dana Goodyear called James Cameron Man of Extremes, uh,
and there's some great anecdotes in it which we will
share now. At fourteen, James Cameron saw Stanley Kubrick's two

(13:44):
thousand one Space Odyssey, and at that moment he knew
he wanted to make films, which bodes well for for
someone being an extremely exacting research excess actor abusing R.
He started experimenting with his own models and sort of
you know, d I Y kid grade special effects um.
But Kubrick was kind of the top of the mountain

(14:06):
for him as far as that stuff goes on. He
called him his hero after he made the one of
his sort of rare misfires true Lies, the spy spoof
with Arnold, which is do you have the anecdote int
here about how he yelled at Arnold in Washington? D
c Oh, yeah, I don't have it in here. No. No,
There was like a downtime during the set. It was
in twenty minutes or something. They were going to change it.

(14:27):
They were going to change a light bulb or something,
and they were in a car Tom Arnold, Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and Arnold Schwartzenegger, because he loves being American, Um was like,
I'll just take you guys on a brief loop of
this part of d C and point out some of
the stuff. And he got back at James Cameron like
smashed like punches. The hood of the car was like,

(14:47):
where the hell were you? And Tom Arnold was like,
this thing that was supposed to take five minutes took
fifteen because it was James. And James blew up at
Arnold and he was like, are you gonna let him
talk to you like that? And Arnold Schwartzenger was like, yes, yeah,
I don't like I screwed up. Yeah. He took it
very well. Um yeah, and uh. He after he finished

(15:08):
that movie, he called up kuber who is just, you know,
at that point, kind of into his Howard Hughes era
of just living in his baronial estate, finishing eyes wide shut.
I guess, uh. And according to that New Yorker profile,
they spent a day in the basement of Kubrick's house
in the English countryside watching true Lies Kubrick's flatbed editing station.

(15:28):
Cameron went over the shots. Well, I think the point
is that Cameron invited himself over to his hero's house.
I think it's really the main takeaway here. And it
proceeded to show him his own movie. Here's how I
made Arnold shoot this missile out of a jet through
an office building into a helicopter. Um. Then in the

(15:48):
mid nineties, oh boy, James Cameron and women. Dude, what
we talked about when we talk about James Cameron and women. Uh.
In the nineties, he was in a long term relationship
with his terminator, Starry Lynda Hamilton's. She wanted to get married.
Cameron dragged his feet. According to Linda, he used to say,
anybody can be a husband or a father. There are
only five people in the world who can do what
I do, and I'm going for that. And again, this

(16:10):
is funny, it's it's uh. I just found this interview
where he basically talks about how the Second Avatar is
just like He's like, well, now this is my family
movie because I have five kids now, so this is
my like movie about what it means to be a dad. Um.
And I made the comparison to Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, which Steven Spielberg famously said he would never
have shot the same way if he had been a dad,

(16:31):
the movie would have been different. He was like, I
never would have had a dad abandoning his kids. Um. Yeah,
it's it's funny. You see James Cameron's progression from like
I do not want children there or the enemy of art,
to like, now I am a dad and that is
this genesis of all art because it's all about me.
James Cameron apparently has a weird, conflicted relationship with his dad.
I just found this possibly apocryphal story that when Aliens

(16:54):
blew up and became this huge film and really anointed
him as this enormous director, someone asked his dad if
he was like proud of him or what he thought
of his son success, and his dad said he's had
enough praise. Um. Lynda Hamilton's got pregnant and moved out
when Cameron's first child, Josephine, was nine months old. The

(17:14):
pair ultimately split up following the release of Titanic, and
James Cameron then got together with actress Susie Emmis, who
appeared in Titanic as Old Rose's granddaughter, which we will
cover later, and example three before he started production on
the movie The Abyss, one of the most ambitious movies
ever considering he was filmed mostly underwater. Uh film. Ed
Harris still has taken a vow of silence over will

(17:37):
not discuss the making of Does that traumatic for him?
I think someone almost died. There's like if you kind
of read between the lines on this, they talk about
like I think and Harrison's and other people talk about
like driving home from the shooting and just like spoted
like having a post traumatic stress, just like a bursting
into tears in their car. That sounds like every day
on the Titanic set. Yeah. Yeah, And uh so with

(17:59):
that as the preamble. When he wanted to make The Abyss,
Cameron went to the president of Fox and said, I
want you to know one thing. Once we embark on
this adventure and I start to make this movie, the
only way you'll be able to stop me is to
kill me. And the Fox president later said, you looked
into those eyes and you knew he meant it. He
just he talks like a superhero, like a cartoon, like

(18:20):
a comic book character. I think that's in fact, like
a line in one of the Marvel movies about Captain
America's like, it's like an action hero cliche to say,
like you're gonna have to kill me. Oh yeah, that's
what we're talking about. Yes, oh god, um yeah. So
Terminator was his first real big success. I believe he

(18:41):
was living out of his truck when he made that movie.
He had just done, I think right prior to that
was Piranha, Piranha too, because he was uh he was
Corman affiliated, right, Roger Corman affiliated. Cheap uh um. And
then so he got the Alien sequel Aliens hit a
reputation as an action director whose work had slightly more

(19:02):
depth than the average, and he made so much damn money,
which is really the James Cameron story. High risk, high
reward baby Terminator to the first film to cost over
a hundred million dollars, also the highest grossing movie that year,
Titanic the first film to exceed two hundred million dollars
in budget, and you know, God love him. He sets

(19:23):
an ambitious schedule for himself and then expects everyone else
to follow it start to finish. Terminator two from writing
the script to the premier thirteen months yeah, dude. You
take thirteen months to write a script, you take thirteen
months to edit a film. You take thirteen months to
like do sound mixing. Good lord. He shot that movie

(19:45):
six days a week, using the seventh day to edit.
On the seventh day Cameron edited. Crew members made shirts
that read you can't scare me. I work for James Cameron.
So in the spring of James Cameron went to Century
Fox to pitch a movie that he described as Romeo
and Juliet on a boat's. Yeah, that's the elevator pitch. Uh,

(20:11):
there was no script at the time, and give him
keep that in mind. Studio Brass where initially understandably lukewarm
on the idea. According to Cameron, he said, they were like, okay,
a three hour romantic epic. Is there a little bit
of Terminator in that? Any Harrier Jets, shootouts, car chases?
I said, no, no, no, no, no, it's not like that. Uh.
Titanic was the first film he had made that did

(20:31):
not include or mentioned nuclear weapons, which is such a
funny little statistic to me. Love is the real nuke.
The rule nuclear weapon was the friends we made along
the way. Um, he asked them for a hundred million
to make the movie more than Terminator two, which would
just mentioned was the most expensive film ever made at

(20:52):
that time. They freaked and gave him the green light
on it, with a caveat that one should be done
for a dred ten mill and to be ready to
release in July, where we punching Ron Howard as the narrator,
saying he would fail on both of those. Studio really
wanted to keep Cameron happy because of again the money.

(21:14):
Apparently they wanted him to do Spider Man and Planet
of the Apes, both of which went to sort of
his peers in big budget fantasy sci fi land, Sam
Ramy for Spiderman and Tim Burton for Planet of the Apes.
Fox also gave him two million dollars to fund his
his little deep sea uh work vacation, um, which is
all he really wanted. Ah. I think that quote in

(21:37):
the office from Creed where he's like, uh, well, if
I can't go scuba diving, what's this whole thing been for? Um?
His justification was, sure, it's more expensive than just using
the models, but it would be great publicity for the movie.
So Titanic Production metaphorically and literally set sail under the
decoy title Planet Ice, joining the pantheon of great production
shooting title decoy names such as Group Hug for the

(22:01):
Avengers and The First Star Trek Reboot Corporate Headquarters, as
studios give their high profile productions fake names and discourage
news leaks. Basically, it's important to remember that Fox signed
off on this hundred plus million dollar project with no
script at all, just a rough storyline, and this decision
raised more than a few eyebrows at Fox. It was

(22:23):
obvious from the start that Cameron wanted to make a
capital E epic. He talked a lot during the production
about wanting to make a movie on the scale of
Doctor Javago, the historical romance drama. For Cameron, it was
easy to create a spectacle, but he needed to craft
the human story to create what he called an emotional
doorway for people to appreciate the true tragedy of what

(22:43):
happened on Titanic. In addition to disaster on a grand scale,
he needed intimate moments. He later said, the fate of
our Titanic movie lay in our ability to steer her
properly past the icebergs of bombast and create a living
heart for the film. Out of gestures, lances, tentative smiles,
halting awkward sentences, and the vocabulary of nascent love. That is,

(23:07):
I believe part of the intro to the paperback coffee
table book James Cameron's Titanic, which everyone I knew had
as a kid um, and he wrote extensively in this
intro about humanizing the tragedy of the Titanic. He said,
I wanted an audience to cry for Titanic, which means
to cry for the people on the ship, which really
means to cry for any lost soul in their hour

(23:29):
of untimely death. But the deaths of innocence is too
abstract for our hearts to grasp, although the mind can
form the number easily to fully experience the tragedy of Titanic,
to be able to comprehend it in human terms, it
seemed necessary to create an emotional lightning rod for the
audience by giving them two main characters they care about,
and then taking those characters into hell. The story of

(23:52):
Titanic and her fate seemed a magnificent canvas on which
to paint a love story, a canvas offering the full
spectral range of human emotion. The greatest loves can only
be measured against the greatest of adversities and the greatest sacrifices.
Thus defined Titanic and all her terrible majesty produces this
as does no other historical event. So, like you were

(24:13):
talking about the top of the episode, that's kind of
why the Titanic story has resonated with people for hundred
and ten years now, but not with you. I just
can't believe he writes like that. No, I just can't
like that. Is that's a purple prose as we call
it in the industry. So with this, uh, you know,
crafting the human element as his m O, James Cameron
conjured this fairytale life story of two people who fall

(24:36):
in love across class boundaries, Rose de Witt Bukatur and
Jack Dawson, and James Cameron has been pretty open about
the fact that Jack is an idealized version of himself.
Like Cameron, he comes from a town called Chippewa. Cameron
was from Chipwa, Ontario, and Jack Dawson was of the
Chipwa falls Dawson's in Wisconsin. And like Jack, James Cameron

(24:57):
loved to sketch Camerontrold rolling Stone in nine there's a
lot of me and Jack, definitely before clarifying, actually, I
shouldn't say that Jack is the guy I wish I
could have been. I wished I had his courage and
openness and his descriptions of Jack in the screenplay are
adorably and somewhat hilariously fawning. As Jack Stargaze is on

(25:17):
a bench before meeting Rose, he's described as thinking, quote
artist thoughts, interior artist thoughts, and his sketch book isn't
any old sketch book, but quote a celebration of human condition.
I don't know why I'm sningering. This script made two

(25:37):
billion dollars. Yeah, I mean, what are we doing to
insects or the podcast? Just like it's just so so funny.
It's so funny. I mean, it gives us all. Let
this give us all hope. I'm imagining these original shooting
script Its just every time it says Jack, it says
parent in brackets. It's just actually me, James Cameron picture

(26:00):
little hand drawed hearts all around like Jack comma handsomely.
And finally, as Rose begins to fall in love with Jack,
she does so because, according to the description in the script,
he's quote so open and real, not unlike anyone she's
ever known, like me, James Cameron, the way women fall

(26:22):
in love with me, handsomely God love him. And I've
also seen reports that, in addition to basic and slightly
on himself, Jack was based on, or at least named after,
the rugged, outdoorsy author Jack London, who wrote White Fang
and Call of the Wild. The character Rose also had

(26:42):
a somewhat personal connection to James Cameron. She was named
after his grandmother and also has some of the personality
of his mother. He later said, Rose is afraid of
being trapped and not being fulfilled. My mother was an artist,
but she was chained to being a mother of five kids,
so she didn't really to be an artist. Yikes, jim uh.

(27:04):
The character of Rose was also inspired by a real
life woman by the name of Beatrice Wood, and Cameron
was reading her autobiography during the development of the script.
She came from a wealthy American family, but she was
more interested in avant garde abstract art, just like Rose.
She claimed she never married the men she loved and
never loved the men she married, which is a tremendous

(27:24):
line and somewhat mirroring the star Cross Lovers plotline and Titanic.
Beatrice Wood fell in love with an Indian scientist when
she was younger, only to be separated by cultural circumstance.
Beatrice was specifically an influence on the character of Old
Rose because they were both these vibrant personalities, and Beatrice
was nearly a hundred when Titanic was released before she

(27:45):
died in but I think James Cameron went out of
his way to meet with her on several occasions, which
is nice. Now we've got to talk about the dialogue
and Titanic, which, if the passages we just read to
you are any indication, it's famously bad, so bad that
it actually inspired a contrarian click baby piece on e

(28:06):
W called James Cameron's Dialogue and Titanic is actually great.
Despite this headline, it features this tremendous admission from writer
James Hibberd the mockery of the dialogue is partly due
to Titanic lines being pretty on the nose, like so
on the nose they punch you in the face. He
then goes on the quote. Several reviews of the film

(28:28):
specifically target the dialogue slates. David Elstein wrote Titanic carry
some stinkers that wouldn't make the final draft of the
Days of Our Live script. Ouch Kenneth Turn of The
l A Times had this to say, What really brings
on the tears is writer director Cameron's insistence that writing
this kind of movie is within his abilities. It is
even close and salon Stephanie Zatrak was even more blunt,

(28:54):
criticizing quote loads of blockhead dialogue. But James Hibbard defends
the dial dog and his piece on e W sitting
its efficiency. He says, quote within seconds of meeting Jack Dawson,
Rose de Whippy Cator and Cal Hockley, who's Roses jerky fiance,
you know precisely who these characters are and what they want.
Vagabond Jack immediately reveals his poverty, lack of education, and

(29:17):
gung ho spirit. You know, when you've got nothing, you've
got nothing to lose, which I've never been able to
determine whether or not that's a conscious rip on Bob
Dylan's like a rolling stone. Um. At another point in
the movie, Jack says, I'm just a tumble weed blowing
in the wind. So I don't know. Maybe James Cameron
is just a big Bob Dylan fan, because that's two
Dylan rips and one script, which is kind of the limit.

(29:39):
Um back to James Hberd's piece, Rose quickly shows her
desperation and initial tone deaf privilege in a voiceover. It
was the ship of dreams to everyone else, but to me,
it was a slave ship taking me back to America.
In chance, I don't think that was necessarily meant to
show that she was tone deaf. I think that was
just a line in. Yeah, they probably through slavery references

(30:02):
a little more cavalierly. My favorite James Cameron dialogue of
all time is in Terminator two. It's uh, when Arnold
Schwarzenegger strokes little Eddie Eddie Furlong's face and says, I
know now why you cry. So it's something I can
never do. This sounds like such a threat delivered in
that in that Austrian Stentorian barytone. You know, Bob Dylan

(30:26):
apparently repaid the favor. There's the fourteen minutes song on
Tempest that came out in which is uh, has a
bunch of references to the Titanic. Do you even know this?
Remember this? It's sort of sounds familiar. It even includes
the line Leo took his sketch book. He was often
so inclined he closed his eyes and painted the scenery

(30:47):
in his mind. I didn't know it actually was about
the movie. I thought it was about the actual historical incident. Wow,
I believe it is. But it uh, you know, touches
on on Leo as it does so as those most things.
Oh boy, where do we get to Leo? Yes? But
what Titanic lact and subtle dialogue. It made up for

(31:08):
an insane obsessive research, which I deeply respect. This is
where I feel very close to James Cameron. He spent
six months pouring over every detail of the ship, which
doesn't seem like a lot to me. But I'll give
it to him. I under said in the intro to
the Titanic Production book quote, I wanted to be able
to say to an audience without the slightest pang of guilt,
this is real. This is what happened, exactly like this.

(31:31):
If you went back on a time machine and stood
on the deck, this is what you would have seen. Swoon.
I love that there are some historical points, however, that
were fudged or excised for dramatic purposes, as we'll get
into later. For example, there's an entire day of the
ship's voyage that's just missing in the movie and wasn't included,
which you know makes sense. You know, you can't have

(31:52):
you can't have it all. Although I don't know, considering
that they fell that deeply in love in just two days,
maybe they could have used the third day just to
make that a little more believable. It's like that James
Cameron is like, we're gonna obsessively detail every inch of
this damn ship. And then so I was like, oh,
they fall in love in two days. He's like, yeah,
that's that's what how it happens, right, based on my research,

(32:15):
that's she's going through like carpet swats, and like, yeah,
as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Overall, though, the

(32:37):
accuracy in Titanic is pretty stunning. We'll get to the
recreation of the rooms and the props later, but even
little moments occurring in the background were true to life.
Everything from the hymn that they sing in the scene
when Jack gets thrown off the church service engineers warming
their soup on a steam pipe that was something they
used to do. And passengers getting reprimanded by crew for

(32:58):
damaging White Star Line property as the ship was sinking.
That really happens. And also the man leading prayers on
the stern of the ship just before it went down.
These were all effectively true incidents. One of the most
poignant little moments occurred in the scene where Jack sneaks
onto the first class boat deck to see Rose and
he walks past a little boy playing with his toy top.
That's a recreation of a famous photo taken of a

(33:20):
boy named Douglas Spedon who was a first class passenger
who made it off the ship, only to die three
years later and one of the first automobile accidents in
the state of Maine. I think he was like nine
years old. Uh. This gets to an interesting point about
photographs of Titanic. There are actually very few depicting ship
life because the Titanic sank on her might and voyage.

(33:40):
The only reason there are any at all is because
the Titanic actually made two stops before heading out onto
the North Atlantic, where she sank Cherburg, France, on the
same day she set sail in April tenth, and then
the following day in Ireland, and there were a lucky
seven passengers who spent the night on Titanic before disembarking
the next day. Think it was also a crew member

(34:01):
who jumped ship, which I would love to interview that guy,
like what compelled him to leave? Um. Of these seven
passengers who left the ship early, it was a priest
named Father Francis Brown, who took some of the only
photos we have of life on board the Titanic when
she was at sea, one of which being this photo
of Douglas sped and playing with his top. And there
are also some more photos from a group called the

(34:21):
O'Dell family, who put them in their family scrapbook. Um,
that was really kind of it. Obviously there are probably
many others on board took photographs, but has thought that
all these cameras went down with the ship and their
film was destroyed by seawater. It's possible that somebody took
their small camera off the ship in their you know, coat,
and developed the pictures and they're in some family trunk
and an attic somewhere in England. But and you will

(34:44):
find that I will find them. James Cameron. Uh. As
far as we know though, those are really the only
two groups of photos that showed life on board the
ship on the final voyage. So these photos from Father
Brown and the Odell's are extremely valuable because again they're
the only as we have of the ship on our
one and only voyage. Bizarrely, the priest in Finnegan's Wake

(35:05):
by James Joyce is based on Father Frances Brown, this
Titanic photographer, because James Joyce knew him. Yeah, that's weird. Uh.
Father Brown's story is interesting. He actually befriended an American
couple on the one night that he was on board
the Titanic, and they offered to pay his way to
New York and back, simply because they like spending time
with him and they didn't want him to get off

(35:27):
in Ireland. But when Father Brown sent the telegram that
was Superior asking permission to go on this journey, the
Superior sent the telegram back, apparently in all caps, reading
get off that ship. How's that for divine intervention? Good Lord?
I know. Yeah. It's worth noting that the interior of
the Titanic is not very well documented. In fact, there's

(35:48):
only thirty nine known photos of her interiors. Most of
the pictures and history books that purportedly show the famous
accommodations like the grand staircase and the lounge and the
smoking room are all photos for almost identical twin sister ship,
the Olympic, and because they were built to be pretty
much the same the public rooms, at least the ship's
owners White Star Line didn't feel the need the photograph

(36:09):
rooms that the public had seen before on the other ship,
so instead they only photographed areas that were different, you know,
special first class parlor suites, the Cafe pre g M,
which is this fake French sidewalk cafe built off one
of the decks, and a redesigned Turkish bath which is
like an early spa. So this makes James Cameron's research
all the more impressive, considering he had precious little to

(36:29):
go on when it came to researching how the Titanic
actually appeared inside, and he also went out so the
real Titanic to find out hey for effort. Yeah, Cameron
took a very hands on approach to research by going
down and visiting the wreck itself for close to a
month in the summer of um but he was already
an old hat at being underwater mag his point after

(36:52):
having done that, having done the abyss um, this footage
would The footage that he shot during this period would
serve as part of the book ends of the movie
that are set in the present day. The story treatment
for the movie opens with the evocative bit of cameron
esque doggerel. In the blackness, we hear the lonely ping
of a bottom sonar. Then two faint lights appear close together,

(37:13):
growing brighter. They each resolve into clusters of lights which
are soon revealed to be too deep submersibles falling towards us.
We are somewhere in the ocean deep looking up at
two subs free falling like express elevators. Soon they are fireflies,
then stars, then gone that. I'd love to read James
Cameron's like book list, Is it like? If it's all

(37:33):
like he reads like pulp novels. The Titanic was two
and a half miles down and the pressure from the
water exerts six thousand pounds per square inch. In other words,
if there's a crack in your sub at that depth,
you are squished instantly, which is why the subs have
these portholes made of six inch seven inch plexiglass um
God do decompression stuff like freaks me out so much.

(37:56):
It's why the bends and like all these was other
Have you seen Deep Star six not? That's like a
budget I think it's Corman. Actually, uh, it's a budget
like underwater horror movie from around the same time as
The Abyss. And there's a character who like blows up
because he tries to go up to the surface too quickly.

(38:17):
We're not supposed to go down there. That's not that role.
That is not where we're supposed to be. I'm scared
of fish. Oh yeah, the fish. That's Lovecraft's whole thing
is Yeah, there's weird fish, and that's scary. I'll do fish.
I grew up on a lake. When I was a
little kid by next to your neighbors would take dead
fish on rakes and fling them out, So yeah, I

(38:38):
really I'm mostly afraid of dead fish. Actually, I think
that's why I like sushi now. I absorbed their power.
One of my one of the drummers in my band,
used to have tarantillas and he would throw their shells
at me after they molted, pretending that the the Oh yeah,
I would like, yeah, weirdly, I'm okay with spiders, though

(38:59):
I'm kind of wish it with you on fish. Though
at the time there were only five submarines in the
planet capable of diving to the depths of the Titanic,
James Cameron hired two of them, the Mirror one and
mir two. As the name suggests, they were Russian. It
was mere mean isn't like peace or some like thing

(39:20):
that Russians don't believe in? Ah like sobriety or warmth, brevity?
It does mean, it means peace and worlds. Yeah. The
majority of the crew on the research vessel, the Keldysh,

(39:42):
which is the same crew that he used to shoot
the Bill Paxton scenes for the movie. The Russian scientific
director and his crew were not exactly thrilled by having
their research vessel commandeered to make uh, you know, decade
in Western cinema, but the Soviet Union had just collapsed
and money was tight, and so American dollars were useful.
J Cameron paid them in levies in Soviet Russia. Movie

(40:03):
makes You Too Easy? Too Easy? Would understand yako the
yakov shnof references or else? What's this all for? What's it?
All for there had been a Titanic Imax movie shot already,

(40:23):
but then had been filmed with cameras inside a submarine
viewing the wreck through the porthole like a sane person.
James Cameron said, pitch on that, and he wanted to Uh,
he wanted to be outside of the sub I want
to be outside of it. I want to be in
the water. God, what an insane person he is against

(40:44):
six thousand pounds per square and sparing down on you.
I'm shocked. When he made the Terminator, he was like,
so we're gonna build a death robot, guys. Uh, it's cheaper, numbers,
It cheaper. I'm going to code a sentient piece of
AI that will murder the world myself. Um. That later

(41:08):
became Twitter. Uh. Obviously, no cameras existed that could withstand
that pressure, so he developed a new one encased in titanium. Uh. Unfortunately,
for reasons beyond all of us, it only held twelve
minutes of film at a time and couldn't be reloaded

(41:30):
mid dive, so they had to rehearse every single move
that it was going to be making, like the lunar landing,
in order to capture the footage. It was not easy
having two subs flies close to one another as possible
in coordination with lighting braces all around a submersed, treacherous
metal wreck covered in steel cables in the freezing pitch
black of the ocean depths because light stops penetrating at

(41:53):
a certain distance. With a crew that does not speak
much English, each dive cost between twenty five five and
forty grand and they had twelve minutes of footage from it. Uh.
The Russian pilots knew how to drive their subs, but
not necessarily what made a good shot, So they had
to practice with miniature cameras on a model of the
wreck obscured with smoke to simulate the ocean depth. Oh

(42:16):
to be a fly on the wall of those rehearsals.
It was like a little lipsick camera. They were shooting
this movie in one of the most extreme environments ever attempted.
I mean it's I don't know what was the analog
shooting in like Death Valley in high summer. I would
say that's even easier, Yeah, because there's oxygen and not

(42:37):
six thousand pounds per square inch bearing down on you
and light. Yeah. Yeah, James Karen went on twelve of
these dives to the wrecked during the production of Titanic,
and each one was like a twelve to sixteen hour
round trip, which means, by your calculations, it means he
spent more time on the wreck of the Titanic shooting
the movie than the actual Titanic passengers did. In he

(43:03):
spent more time on this wreck than the actual passengers,
and more money than it costs to actually make the boat.
Jesus Christ, the crui space in the subs was seven
feet and a sphere, and you were stuck there for
more than two hours just making it down to the
bottom of the ocean. As he evocatively wrote in his
characteristic pros in the Titanic Production Boat, after twelve trips

(43:25):
into the abyssal depths of the North Atlantic, I can
honestly tell you that getting there is not half the fun.
Imagine two Russian scientists and one Hollywood filmmaker crammed into
a space smaller than your stereotypical clown car, free falling
for hours through two and a half miles of blackness,
with the weight of the ocean tightening around you. I'm

(43:45):
getting a panic attack just reading this. Tightening around the
freezing metal cruise sphere. Even worse, there was plenty of
time to reflect on the fact that we were completely
dependent on the successful functioning of countless technological systems in
order to reach and photog raft the ultimate symbol of
technological failure, Titanic. On one of these trips, they all

(44:06):
almost died when a heavy underwater current which they call
a bottom storm, not not touching that one, blew them
off course, draining their battery. When it came time to
return to the surface, they were almost out of power
and nearly froze to death. He had another kind of
bottom storm when he got off the sub. It paid off, though,

(44:27):
because that's where you get so many of the amazing
shots in the beginning of the movie of the wreck
coming out of the bottom of the ocean, lit by
these incredible rigs to appear even more grand and ghostly.
On the last five they decided to pilot their remote
operated vehicle inside the wreck. This was basically a camera
with thrusters attached to the sub by a leash, hence
his nickname of Snoop Dogg. He was meant to just

(44:49):
be a prop, but he was actually fully functional and
small enough to get inside the wreck where the submarines
were too big to go, and that is how they
saw rooms that hadn't been seen by human eyes since
the ship sank in nineteen Well that's so cool, right,
like just like the concept of that is insane. Yeah,
it's it's the mind fairly reels. Uh. It had long

(45:09):
been thought that wood boring mollusks had eaten all the
people mollusks uh had eating all of these ornate fittings.
But they found hand carved oak columns and wood paneling,
including white paint in the reception area a k a.
The room where cal tries to shoot Jack and Rose
as the ship sinks. The doors in the entrance vestibule

(45:30):
that old Rose seas and the research festival monitor are real.
They made their way into the millionaire suite on B
deck that had been booked by JP Morgan before he
canceled his ticket. Inside are the remains of furniture, walastconsins,
and the fireplace. The room was recreated for Calendarrose, a
sitting room where famous drawing like one of your French
girls seeing curs. But in the end James Cameron did
not get quite as much usable footage of the wreck

(45:52):
as he wanted due to the poor conditions the aforementioned
bottom storm. As a result, it's some of the wreck
footage in the movie was filmed on the extremely elaborate
one to twenty scale model on a sound stage where
some of the wreck interiors were recreated as well. Uh.
Some people felt that James Cameron misled the public into

(46:12):
just how much authentic Titanic footage actually made its way
into the movie. But those people are dicks. Yeah, the
man took his and many other lives into his hands
to get what he did, and you people are like
needs more. His total Titanic dive count was thirty three

(46:34):
U sep. Yeah, he went. He made some documentaries, Ghosts
of the Abyss, and I think he made a few
national geographic ones like Return to Titanic or something years later,
and he's some thirty three dives, so the Titanic, which
is he's insane. Yeah, that's on Titanic. There was actually
this article that was written by Paula Paris specifically about

(46:55):
these dives, and it's called Lunch on the Deck of
the Titanic because apparently James Cameron insisted that during each
dive they parked their subs on the Titanic's boat deck
and eat lunch. He told her, we'd have some tea
and stare out the portholes and think about all the
events that had happened here. I had already written the
treatment for the movie, so I already knew who did

(47:16):
what to who, and what had happened where, and what
dramas had played out exactly where we were sitting. I'm sorry,
something about eating while on the wreck of the Titanic
just freaks me out to my core. There's an interview
with one of the bottlemakers who worked on the wreck model.
He says that Cameron came into the workshop one day,
looked at the model they were building on, walked over
and ripped off a piece of railing on the wreck,

(47:38):
and one of the builders said, what are you doing.
That's that's in the picture we're building this from. And
James Cameron, a little too casually said it's not there anymore.
I knocked it off. These dives all went down in
the summer of and a year later, in August, Cameron

(47:59):
returned to the Atlantic on the research fashion the Keldish
with the subs to film the movie's modern day framing
sequences with Bill Paxton and Old Rose, who's played by
Gloria Stewart. In short, they basically just filmed fake versions
of what James Cameron had done the previous summer, same boat,
same subs, much of the same cruise, starring as themselves,
including the sub pilot. But this was tricky because in

(48:20):
addition to the American versus Russian cultural differences, there were
now the scientists versus Hollywood filmmaker cultural differences. The researchers
were used to launching and recovering subs once maybe twice
a day. Now they were doing it twenty to thirty
times to get the shots that the Cameron wanted. It
got tense. This brings us to one of my favorite
parts of this movie, Bill Past and any movie movie

(48:43):
he got Paxton fine, you know, finding out Paxton's in
your movie is like finding twenty bucks in your pocket.
I totally forgot that he was in this until I
re watched it recently. There's this great piece at paced
by this writer. I like, who's on the He's a
host of one of my favorite podcast, the New Flesh
Horror Movies podcast writer named Jesse Hasson. Jurny talk about
Bill Paxxton being sort of the ultimate James Cameron analog

(49:04):
in this film because of what you got at earlier
about like, you know, he starts out the movie being
jaded and thinking of it is a payday, and he's
really just kind of obsessed with the technical specs of
everything and sort of the very boots on the ground approach,
and then by the end of it, he's been totally
taken over by the human story and the the emotional
elements of it. And you know Jesse, right, so he's like,
this is the Cameron analog, you know, someone who became

(49:26):
obsessed with technical details of this but ultimately still wanted
to create something that had all this human emotion to it.
That's very true. Also, watching the movie recently, I noticed
that there was a lot of what I took through
romantic chemistry between Bill Paxson's character and Rose's granddaughter played
by Susie Amos. I later learned that there was a
whole subplot of a budding romance between Bill Paxson's character

(49:50):
and the Susie Amos character. H James Cameron later married
Susie Amos. Oh, So yeah, ultimate James Cameron analog are
absolutely right. Bill Paxton, as we said earlier, he's the
treasure hunter A brock love it. That's a terrible character name.
It really is. Some of these names are pretty bad, man.
I mean that's they're like not quite soap character, but close. Uh.

(50:13):
He's in the midst of his search for the diamond
known as the Heart of the Ocean. Paxton himself didn't
dive on Titanic for the shoot, but when James Cameron
embarked on an expedition to obtain more detailed images of
the wreck first two thousand three documentary Ghosts of the Abyss,
he invited Paxixton along for the ride, which means that
Bill Paxton has been on Titanic and also saw JFK

(50:33):
in Texas on the day he was assassinated in nine three.
So Bill Paxton is basically Forrest Gump, and he was
in Apollo thirteen with Tom Hanks, who was for Est Cump.
Good lord, I mean, I need like a beautiful mind
style graph of Paxton towards a unified theory of Paxton,
Paxton and Cameron. As you mentioned earlier ago way back,
one of his earliest roles was a minor one in

(50:54):
The Terminator. Uh. He also appeared as the cowardly private
Hudson in Aliens and also in True Lies. So that's
that's a pretty full, uh almost cover all for your
James Cameron Bingo. Um. His character is basically a modern
day pirate in Titanic, and he's never been able to
connect with the human side of the disaster at all.
Like you said, always interested in is the treasure. In

(51:16):
the beginning of the movie, they haul up the safe
from Rose and Cal's room. You know, it's paid a boys,
and then they open it on camera very recklessly for
something that's been on the bottom of the ocean for
nearly a hundred years. I just like chainsaw it open,
if I recall, which hurt the conservator in me. And
they opened up with great ceremonially, only to find that
the diamond isn't there. One of the few glaring impossibilities

(51:39):
in this movie, and there are only a few, is
that they're actually strict laws against taking items from inside
the wreck, which is essentially protected as a grave. Uh.
The only artifacts that have been brought to the surface
are from the debris field outside of the wreck, which
is basically all the stuff that's spilled out of the
ship when it broken to on the surface. Uh As
an interesting aside. Cameron has talked about seeing a perfectly

(52:01):
square safe size object on his sonar during every dive,
but he never had time to investigate it. So uh So,
when I opened the safe in the movie and there's
nothing in it, Broc's colleague the her Suit, Louis Bodine, says,
you know, Boss, the same thing happened to Horaldo and
his career never recovered. They're talking about TV journalist Horaldo Rivera,

(52:22):
a friend of John Lennon's Weirdly who hosted a live
two hours special in nine six called The Mystery of
al Capone's Vaults. Reopened a large vault that was supposed
to contain great treasures or secrets, or maybe even dead
bodies belonging to the famous gangster. Thirty million people tuned in.
It was the biggest audience for a syndicated TV special
ever at the time, but when they opened the vault

(52:44):
live on air, it was basically empty. The only things
they found inside were dirt and several empty bottles, including
one that Rivera clanmed was for moonshine bathtub gin and
after a few minutes he spent trying to make it happen.
He's just poking around. It's it's on YouTube, you should
watch it. A visibly horrified and disappointed, Geraldo gave up,

(53:05):
saying well, I guess we struck out and apologized to viewers, and,
like Louis Bodine said, his career truly never recovered, and
the term al capones vault became a euphemism in the
industry for basically, you know, an overhyped event that turns
out to be sort of a nothing burger. Let's talk
about Louis Bodine for a second. He's one of my
favorite characters in this movie, the long haired, straight talking,

(53:28):
eccentric member of the treasure hunting crew. He's play describe
you all right, straight talking Emma Securitis talking. Yeah. He's
played by James Cameron's friend Louis Abernathy, who's not really
an actor, but James Cameron imagined Lewis when he wrote
the role. After failing to find anyone who could deliver

(53:50):
the lines in his inimitable way, he just asked him
straight out, and Lewis supposedly said, if you want to
mess up your movie by casting me, buddy. Alright, Apparently
he ghost wrote a bunch, at least according to his LinkedIn,
he wrote some of the stuff with Cameron. We should
have reached out to him and tried to get a
couple of quotes from him. That would have been a
fun man. I screwed up, That's funny. I always get

(54:11):
his character confused with Philip seymour Hoffin's character in Twister,
which is also starring Bill Paxton. You know, kind of
larger gruff, slightly hippie ish. He wrote the movie. I
was just talking about Deep Star six really apparently according
to his LinkedIn, So you know he's I love that
he has a LinkedIn. That really means he's not a
real actor. I am dB page LinkedIn sure. Yeah. Uh.

(54:34):
Lewis provides a very crucial bit of exposition when he
shows the computer animation of the Titanic sinking to Old Rose,
and it's a great way of showing people who aren't
familiar with the ship sinking what actually happened on the
night and kind of getting them up to speed on
what they're about to see later on. It kind of
adds to the tension because you know, like, oh, a
certain point, this thing is gonna break. It kind of

(54:55):
is a real cheeky way of you know, James Cameron
himself no just giving people the end of the movie
at the very beginning. Although if you're watching Titanic chances sorry,
you know roughly how the movie ends. But now we
have to talk about the true queen of the production,
at least of the modern segments, Glorious Stewart, who plays
hundred year old Rose. James Cameron describes her in the

(55:17):
script as having quote eyes just as bright and alive
as those of a young girl. At the time of
the production, there were only eight known Titanic survivors, and
most of those were either too young to have memories
of what happened over too affected by age to be
able to discuss it coherently. But six year old Glorious
Stewart was the only person involved with the Titanic production
who was actually alive on the Titanic sank. She was

(55:40):
not quite two years old at the time. She'd acted
in a few Shirley Temple movies, and as what she
described as quote the highly visible woman opposite Claude Rains
in The Invisible Man. The press around the Titanic movie
was that James Cameron had gotten the silver screen era
actress out of retirement for this epic, but that's not
quite accurate. She'd had some smaller roles and stuff like

(56:01):
nineteen six is Wildcats with Goldie on. Uh. James Cameron
originally approached Faye Ray from the original King Kong movies,
but she supposedly turned down the role in Titanic, saying
not even accurately. I think to have done this film
would have been a torturous experience altogether. YEA. Gloria Stewart
had to undergo hours of makeup to become Old Rose.

(56:23):
She later said it wasn't a happy moment. I must say,
to see every wrinkle and liver spot, I thought I
didn't have multiplied several times. Uh. Gloria Stewart seems super cool.
She insisted on meeting with Kate Winslett before shooting, began
to study her movements and gestures because, as she generously noted,
I'm playing her, she's not playing me. So we killed

(56:44):
the bottle of champagne and we talked and talked. Gloria
was a hundred when she died in just like her
character and Titanic at least, I think James Cameron has
always been coy about the precise meaning of the ending
of the film. That she died or did she just
have a dream that she was going back to the Titanic.
According to Gloria Stewart's grandson, James Cameron refused to tell

(57:05):
her the meeting. When they shot the scene of her
in bed at the end of the movie, Cameron simply said,
just lie still, Gloria, you don't need to know. Another
cute aside, Rose brings all of her photos with her
on board the Keldish. One of them shows her on
a horse with Santa Monica Pier in the background, and
I think that's cute because at the beginning of the movie,
shortly after Jack and Rose met, Jack promises Rose that

(57:27):
he'll take her to the Santa Monica Pier whether they
go on a roller coaster and ride horses on the beach,
ignoring the fact that there weren't actually roller coasters there
in nineteen twelve, which is one of the few anachronisms
in this movie. It's a cute way of showing that
she did indeed do all the things that Jack promised
her she would I like that speaking of Old Rose
not traveling light. I think she's called Old Rose in

(57:48):
the script. I know James Camermon always refris to is
that I always feel bad calling her old Rose, but
I think that's her official name. One of the things
that she brings onto the research vessel is her dog,
a little Pomeranium. Pomeranians were two of only three dogs
known to have survived the Titanic disaster. The other was
a Pekinese. They escaped when passengers brought them onto the lifeboats.

(58:10):
They were small enough to sit on laps, and there's
also a possibility that they were just smuggled aboard and
coats and purses. Uh. Can you imagine being a freezing
lifeboat witnessing the death of people with a high strung
little like rat dog nipping at your feet. Well, Peakinies
were bread is like Chinese nobility dogs to no but

(58:31):
for warmth, like because you would just they would literally
just put them in their sleeves so that they could
to keep warm, so if nothing else, it was another
source of body eat and then you could eat it.
I think, you know what, I think that the Peakanies
on that that's around that Titanic was named Son yet Sen,
I'm not. I'm serious, I think so. Oh that's sad

(58:53):
that I knew that off top of my head. You
are correct, at Jesus Christ. This is the dog was
allowed to stay in her cabin as stewards considered it
too pretty to put among the bigger dogs in kennel's
too pretty for prison. Do you know what the other
dogs on the Titanic were? Uh? I believe there is
a King Charles Spaniel, a few air Dales, fox terrier.

(59:17):
I know, there was a French bulldog and a Great Dane.
I don't see the Great Dane, a chow Chow named
chow Chow, um Pomeranian named Lady Frew Frew that was
the aforementioned too pretty toy. And uh Rigel, a Newfoundland

(59:37):
purported to have been on the ship who saved survivors.
Oh that's a myth. Yeah, it's apocryphal. Yeah, all these
There was a kennel on board the ship. I think
it was behind the fourth funnel, and they were all
walked once a day by a steward. They had a
good life until they didn't um. There was a plan
to have a mini dog show in the first class,

(59:57):
but the ship sank I think the day before it
was going to take place. During the sinking, a passenger
freed the dogs from their kennels, and a survivor later
recalled seeing a French bulldog swimming in the ocean, which
I find weird because I was under the impression that
French bulldogs couldn't swim because of their freakish compact body frames.
Well they're fat, right, so they got they can float

(01:00:18):
a little. Well maybe, God, that's depressing. James Cameron filmed
the scene that the Picks camera drowned many dogs to
make this movie. He filmed the scene where the animals
are dramatically freed, but it was left on the cutting
room floor, probably as you said, because it was just
too upsetting to consider the whole dead dog angle. Uh.

(01:00:40):
There are numerous myths about these animals. One is that
they were freed by John jacob Astor, the richest passenger
on board. Rose points John jacob Astor out during the
dinner party scene when he's with his young wife who's pregnant,
and it caused quite the scandal. I believe, you know
a little likely there's in a delicate condition. Quite the scandal.
I think I have that right. Joe Jacob Aster is

(01:01:03):
also the man who supposedly pioneered the concept of velvet
ropes at his hotel, the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
You know that I didn't Supposedly Astor didn't want to
die alone, and he wanted to be with his Airdale
when the end came, which is sad. So that's the
story of him freeing all the animals. There's also a
story of a woman in first class named and Eliza

(01:01:26):
Isham I think it's how you say her name, who
wouldn't leave the Titanic without her beloved Great Danes, so
she stayed behind and died. Supposedly, a passenger on a
ship passing through the wreck site a few days later
saw a woman's body floating in the ocean, holding onto
the body of a large dog. However, this might be apocryphal.
There's no hard evidence for this story, and apparently when

(01:01:47):
you do a little digging, you learned that this woman
didn't even have a dog. There are so many tall
tales when it comes to the Titanic. In addition to
old Roses dog, her goldfish, and an assortment of other crap,
Rose brings her granddaughter, Lizzie, who was played by the
actress Susie Amos. I said earlier, watching this movie a
few years ago, I was struck by the obvious sexual

(01:02:09):
tension between her and Bill Paxson's character. Turns out I
was right. There's a long lost ending of the Titanic
movie that we'll talk about in the next episode, which
focuses on their budding romantic relationship. But it's also interesting
in me because actress Susie Amos went on to marry
James Cameron, So the woman he cast to be the
love interest for the character that, let's face it is
basically him, later wound up to be his wife. A

(01:02:31):
few years after the movie was made. I forgot he
also was married to the woman who wrote Terminator, Aliens
and the Abyss with him Galen Heard. They were married.
I thought it was Katherine Bigelow. It was a woman
who was like, I don't know her name. I think
she was like a waitress. And when he was working
as a trucker in his twenties, yeah, well, his his
track record is Sharon Williams divorced in eighty four, Galen

(01:02:53):
Heard married in eighty five, divorce eighty nine Katherine Bigelow
married in eighty nine divorcee. He just serial Lee left
women for the women he would then marry and then
leave for another woman. Oh that was his fifth marriage then,
but hey, his fifth marriage is by far as long
as they've been together since two thousand and remained so
to this day. So good for them. Highly weird. Oh well,

(01:03:18):
do you want to get to the real, the real
weirdest part of this story? My personal favorite story from
the Titanic filming? Well, let me ask you, do you
want to go to a real party? Yeah, some of you,
possibly surface levels familiar with Titanic Apocrapha made know the
story that someone dosed clam chowder on the set with

(01:03:39):
PCP or Angel dust Sherman Helmsley wet. I'm trying to
think of what else. He calls it. That Chappelle show skit. Um,
that's Angel dust Jake. I didn't know you'd like to
get wet Jake training day, man? I love that. We
should just do we do training day? We should? Um?

(01:04:02):
James Cameron was made made some enemies, let's put it
that way. Um, one of them, though it's never been
revealed who decided to take revenge on Cameron and the
rest of the production by spiking the Craft services chowder
clam chowder. Was it New England or was at the
red of the question. I think it's white, but it's
unsure whether or not it was lobster clam or muscle chowder.

(01:04:25):
There's been something okay, all right? Wow, they spiked it
with PCP. UM. Upwards of fifty people, including James Cameron,
were hospitalized with PCP hallucinations. Um. They were just about
to wrap filming in Halifax, the last day of filming
in Halifax, just after midnight on August. Can you play

(01:04:49):
some penny whistles in the background? What to set? They
play the pipe that James Horner score in so we
can really set the mood here. It's been twenty five
years and I still remember getting super high. Uh. They
were about to head to Baja Mexico to the Giant Titanic.
Said that they built on the water cast and crew
broke for lunch even though it was after midnight. James

(01:05:11):
Cameron time lunches after midnight on James Cameron shere and
people went for the chowder, which should uh supposedly very
good good chowder. So much so that people were going
back for second bowls and eating a lot more than usual,
which was not helpful. And that's when things took a turn. Uh.
People began to feel confused, the general atmosphere of Cameron

(01:05:35):
esque productivity broke down. A stand in suddenly fainted. An
onset translator summed up the experience pretty well, I feel
toxic and beside myself, which welcome to the party. Pal
Bill Paxton told him tament weekly soon afterwards. One minute
I felt okay, the next minute, I felt so damn anxious.

(01:05:56):
I wanted to breathe in a paper bag. Is PCP
just like being me? Because that's what that does to you,
Just makes you feel disassociated and anxious. That sucks. Uh.
The steadicam operator started seeing colors and fog, while others
saw streaks. Okay, I don't have that. James Cameron was
one of those affected. He said he was suddenly feeling
suddenly and distinctly woozy, fearing that this was the result

(01:06:19):
of bad seafood or a paralytic shellfish neurotoxin. In his words,
because nothing is normal with James Cameron. It's never food
poisoning or something. He suddenly thinks he's been hit with
the food goo that he probably attempted to butcher himself.
He's like, no, no, I got this. That's what actually happened.

(01:06:41):
James Cameron was trying to serve everyone blowfish and poisoned
them because he had tried to do the famously difficult
toxin removal operation himself, went off and forced himself to
vomit because he's gusts from breaking bad. I guess suddenly
couldn't find his way out of the set that he
had been working on for weeks. His buddy Lewis or Natha,
the aforementioned actor writer, later said, I was just shocked

(01:07:03):
at the way he looked. One eye was completely read
like the terminator I a pupil, no iris beat red.
The other eye looked like he'd been sniffing glue since
he was four. When Cameron returned to the set, he
discovered that everyone had gone and it was eerily empty,
like an episode of the Twilight Zone. The affected crew
were taken moaning, crying, and wailing to a nearby hospital,

(01:07:24):
where one doctor quickly determined, as he later told reporters,
these people were stoned. Much of this comes from this
fantastic Cracked article written by J. M McNabb, which is
this oral history of just this specific moment on set,
everyone was so freaking high that they started racing wheelchairs
down the hallway and performed a spirited congo line led

(01:07:45):
by legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Zoey's dad. As documented in
the Cameron biography The Futurists, the director used his walkie
talkie to radio his assistant director while he was standing
directly in front of him. She then left at Cameron
and stabbed him in the face with a pen before
being dragged away by hospital staff, all while Cameron sat

(01:08:08):
quote bleeding and laughing. It's James David Lynch movie. Bill Paxton,
understandably freaked out by the bedlam, quietly ducked out of
the e R with a teamster and went back to
the set, where he drank an entire case of beer,
which he said later seemed to help at the yeah quote.

(01:08:30):
The mania at the hospital eventually died down and evolved
into a game of hacky sack as the collective high mellowed. Thankfully,
no one suffered any long term ill effects, and mercifully,
six year old glorious Stewart didn't have any of the chowder,
uh she later she was later found chewing James Cameron's
face off oh Man. The next day, the police were

(01:08:53):
called in and they tested samples of the leftover chowder,
determining indeed that it had been laced with PCP. The
guilt the party. It was never apprehended. If you were
a friend know the identity of the person who dosed
the Titanic chowder on PCP. Get in Touch with Too
Much Information podcast will Vetimov five Bucks case was investigated
for two and a half years, with the Halifax Police

(01:09:14):
Department executing a warrant for Department of Health records getting
a list of everyone who had worked on the set,
but ultimately the case was closed to lack of suspects,
long after the movie had been released. But there are theories.
Some believe it was a prank by locals who wanted
to have a party in the last night of Hollywood
and Halifax. The CEO of the local catering company who
provided the chowder claimed that it was the Hollywood crowd

(01:09:36):
bringing in the psychedelic. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he added,
I don't think it was purposely done to hurt somebody.
It was done like a party thing that got carried
away Canada. Uh Still, James Cameron reportedly flipped out on
one of the servers early in the shoot when he
was given a hot cup of soup, which he abruptly
tossed aside, screaming, don't you ever serve me boiling soup again?

(01:10:00):
So pretty strong finger pointed at that guy, Bill Paxson. Meanwhile,
I believe it was an inside job, as does Cameron,
who says he has a good idea who did it,
even though he can't prove it. He later said we
had fired a crew member the day before because they
were creating trouble with the caterers, so we believe the
poisoning was this idiot's plan to get back at the caters, whom,

(01:10:21):
of course we promptly fired the next day. So it worked,
and it's a delightful afterimage to this entire thing. Production
had t shirts made depicting this Titanic sinking in a
big bowl of chowder. Uh. I didn't imagine James Cameron
as as a drug guy. But in an oral history
of the Terminator Too for the Ringer, he admitted that

(01:10:42):
he was high on ecstasy when he conceived of the
plot of Terminator two. He said, I was sitting there
once high on E writing notes for Terminator, and I
was struck by Sting song. I hope the Russians love
their children too. And I thought, you know what, the
idea of nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself.
That's where the kid came from. What Sting song is that?

(01:11:04):
I think Russians by the stick, Oh my god, this
is thick. Oh it's from the Dream of the Blue Turtles.
The lyrics are on either side of the political fence.
We share the same biology, regardless of ideology. Believe me
when I say to you, I hope the Russians love
their children too. Great tremendous work. They're from Gordon Sumner.

(01:11:26):
I just want to imagine that James Cameron is on
E listening to Sting Dream of the Blue Turtles. Yeah. Yeah,
it's a very funny mental image. Time to take one
ecstasy pill, do punch up notes on the Terminator and
listen to Dream of the Blue Turtles my favorite pastime.

(01:11:47):
Wait wait, wait, sizes arts. This wasn't even a new
Sting album, it was it was a Terminator one or two,
it says writing Notes from Terminators Okay says it wasn't
even a new Sting album. He just put on his
favorite sting album and he wrote one. So he was

(01:12:09):
just like, what can I listen to? Really takes me
back to my time living in the truck and directing
Piranha for Roger Corman, Phil Collins, No Rats, and Dream
of the Blue Turtles. I'm mentioning the whole American Psycho speech.
Have you heard of Dream of the Blue Do you

(01:12:29):
like Dream of the Blue Turtles? He's doing the whole
speech from from American Psycho to Lynda Hamilton's, But it's
about stings Dream of the Blue Turtles. We're going to
take a quick break, but we'll be right back with
more too much information in just a moment. Well, chronologically,

(01:13:00):
this is where we should segue into the gargantuan sinkabole
Titanic set that James Cameron built. But we haven't talked
about the principles of this film, who naturally took a
back seat to Bill Paxton as they must always first up,
Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, your two photogenic young leads. So

(01:13:20):
we have to talk about fantasy casting for Rose first,
who James Cameron described as an Audrey Hepburn type. Cameron
has refused to play the fantasy casting bit famously. He
doesn't want to talk about people who are also in
consideration for his leads, uh one, saying I would either
confirm or deny. I don't think that's cool to talk
about actors that either chose not to do it, or

(01:13:40):
were unavailable, or stupidly decided there wasn't enough meat on
the bone of the character, or whatever it was. He
just cannot He just always has to get his shot
to the body. And I love it. But the rumor
mill continues to churn with or without Cameron's approval, and
so we have a pretty good authority that those once
considered were a part of Rose work. Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, Madonna,

(01:14:03):
Jodie Foster, Cameron Diaz, and Sharon Stone. Who would you
like in there? Jordan's um, it has to be Gwyneth Paltrow.
From me, she's already she's she's Hollywood Royalty, She's hottie.
The rest of them were too like normal. Claire Days
has said that there was strong interest in her to
take the part of Rose, especially considering that she was

(01:14:24):
seventeen and had just filmed the actual Romeo and juliet
As opposed to Romeo and Juliette on a boat uh
with Leo in Mexico, But she said she was not
ready for the kind of attention that a movie like
that would bring. I was really clear about it. I
wasn't conflicted. I was feeling eager to have a different
creative experiences, and that felt like a repeat. So it
was going to propel me towards something that I knew

(01:14:45):
I didn't have the resources to cope with, So no
regrets on her part. Kate Winslett herself has said that
contemporaries like Uma Thurman and Winona Writer were more likely candidates,
but wins It was taken with the script immediately and
she wasn't going to take no for an answer. She
told Rolling Stone in nineteen and eight, I closed the script,
wept floods of tears and said, right, I've absolutely got
to be a part of this, no two ways about it.

(01:15:07):
She took a very proactive approach, obtaining Jim Cameron's personal
cell number and calling him while he was driving and
she later recalled, I think he pulled over and I said,
I just have to do this, and you are really
mad if you don't cast me. They are all kinds
of stories of the length that she went. She sent
him a brache of daily notes from England, which led
him to invite her to Hollywood to audition. She supposedly
sent him a single rose afterwards, with a card that

(01:15:29):
read from your Rose, although she later denied that she'd
done such a thing. But Cameron was not convinced and
kept auditioning other people, which led her to call him fuming,
you don't understand I am Rose. I don't know why
you're even seeing anyone else. It's like when Sean Young
broke into Tim Burton's office or whatever too in Catwoman
costume right, oh my god. Uh. Camera was nervous, partially

(01:15:55):
because this was her Winslet's first American film and about
ten times bigger than anything else she'd been in. Uh.
He did want relative newcomers so that the audience wouldn't
carry the preconceived notions of someone like Jodie Foster or
Sharon Stone to the characters winds that seemed a little
inexperienced to carry what would become a two hundred million
dollar film. She'd done a lot of historical movies and
was known, according to Cameron as Corset Kate. As Kate

(01:16:19):
later herself said, Jim took a risk in casting me.
She learned that she got the part where she was
filming Hamlet with Kenneth Branna, apparently during a fitting for
the strait jacket for her breakdown scene as Ophelia, which
fitting preparation for shooting a movie with James Cameron. She
was reportedly paid slightly less than a million dollars for
her part in Titanic, and received an Oscar nomination for

(01:16:41):
Best Actress for the part, but apparently she has a
hard time watching it these days because, as she says,
my American accent is appalling. I've learned so much more,
not just about myself, but about the job that I
do in the world of film. I look at myself
and Titanic and wish I could bring all this knowledge
that I now have into that. And now so over
to Leonardo DiCaprio, who I am sorry to say it

(01:17:03):
was so much less charming than Kate Winslet throughout the
casting process. Well, this is the pussy posse days, right, Yeah, yeah,
you didn't mention that any here once. I didn't know.
I did not. Uh. In fact, Leo was sort of
a brat, which I'm sure isn't the most shocking thing
in the world to learn. There were many occuas up
for consideration for the part. Kate Winslett actually set on

(01:17:24):
an episode of Colbart that she auditioned with Matthew McConaughey,
which is bizarre. He was apparently the top choice for
the studio, and McConaughey later said, in the most McConaughey
way ever, I went an audition for that. I wanted
that an audition with Kate Winslet, had a good audition,
walked away from there feeling pretty confident that I had it.
I didn't get it. I never got offered that. I've

(01:17:47):
also seen reports that he'd tried out for the role
of Calves Roses jerky fiance, which I just handsome enough.
I just can't see that unless he was some sort
of like new oil money bearing or something. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that fits maybe. Uh. Christian Bale's ex publicists claimed that
Christian also auditioned for the part of Jack Dawson but

(01:18:07):
didn't get the part. But I said ex publicists, so
maybe they were just being spiteful. I've also seen theories
that James Cameron turned down Christian Bale because he didn't
want two Brits playing Americans as the leads in his
two dred million dollar extravaganza. Also potential people Johnny Depp,
Brad Pitt, Jared Lado, Billy Crudup, Stephen Dorff, and McAuley
Culkin apparently man were considered for the role, as was

(01:18:31):
Chris o'donald, who was another studio favorite. Like any of those,
Um no, Jared let I'm not mad at God. Can
you imagine how unbearable, how much orders of magnitude worse
he'd been if he'd been in one of the highest
grossing films of all time. I think that's the only
thing that keeps him humbles. He keeps starting in a
bunch of flops. Uh. Tom Cruise apparently expressed an interest

(01:18:56):
in playing Jack Dawson. Course, asking price was way too
high and he was never seriously considered. We would have
gotten cold fusion from the singularity of Cruise and Cameron's
egos colliding on this set. He kidded me, it would
have been like a new galaxy being born. There's also
audition footage out there with Jeremy Sisto from Clueless in

(01:19:16):
the Jack role, which is truly weird to watch. It's
the scene where Jack is showing Rose his sketch book,
and for some reason, watching it just offends me to
my core. It's like really painful to watch. He plays
it completely differently. There's the line where Rose sees a woman,
a one legged prostitute according to the script multiple times
in the sketch book, and she playfully accuses Jack of

(01:19:39):
having an affair with her, and in the movie, Leo
dismisses it with a laugh and says, just just with
their hands, got cool hands. Jeremy's sister gets almost melancholic
and very pensively says, just with her hands. It's all wrong,
it's all wrong. It's unbearable. Jeremy's sister would go on
to play jesus Us in the titular film Jesus with

(01:20:06):
uh Gary Oldman is Punch his pilot. I know nothing
about this movie, but I just looked up his filmography.
When from almost playing Jack to playing Jesus, Oh yeah,
it's not great, but Jeremy's sister was pretty graceful by
not getting the part. He said, it was exciting to
be a part of the process. Anything James Cameron does
has this huge scope to it. He's trying to push

(01:20:28):
the limits on things. So I was just insanely inspired
by it. Had a little heartbroken when the role didn't
come my way. Also, speaking of Clueless, Paul Rudd was
also considered, which is a big thrill for him because
his dad's apparently a big Titanic nerd, and supposedly during
us audition he rattled off all sorts of Titanic facts,
which I could see as being a reason why he
didn't get the gig, with James Cameron just being like,

(01:20:51):
excuse me, we only have room for one Titanic expert here. Sorry,
this would have been right as he was coming off
of Romeo and Juliet. Paul Rudd, Yeah, no, he I'm
talking about the sixth Michael Myers movie, Halloween six, The
Curse of Michael Myers. Paul Rose in Halloween six, Jordan's
please please, You're embarrassing yourself. Uh. In the end, James

(01:21:15):
Cameron insisted on Leonardo DiCaprio even Kate Winslett was set
on it after she screen tested with Leo. She was
so impressed that she told James Cameron, he's great even
if you don't pick me, pick him, even if though
if you don't pick me, I'll set a bomb near
your house. The problem was that Leo didn't seem to
give a damn about this movie. I mean, let's face it,

(01:21:36):
James Cameron's movies had never been known for their acting.
Uh insert Chris Rocks. That's just like going to Hooters
for the wings line here. Um. By this point, Leonardo
Capri had already gotten the Best Supporting Actor nomination for
What's Eating Gilbert Grape, making him the seventh youngest person
ever to do so at age nineteen. I mean, his

(01:21:56):
career was launched when he read with Robert de Niro
at an audition, and Nero hand picked him to play
the lead in This Boy's Life. So when you're impressing
Robert de Niro, you don't necessarily want to do popcorn movies. Plus,
the character of Jack Dawson didn't interest Leo at all.
He was just so boring, so mainstream, so traditional. Leo
later told the l A times, I just wasn't used

(01:22:17):
to playing an open hearted, free spirited guy. I played
more tortured roles in the past. It was difficult to
be someone closer to me than anyone else. And he
just appeared in Romeo and Juliet playing like the most
angsty character in literature. And you know, his ability to
get young people to sit through two hours of Shakespeare
was probably part of the appeal for James Cameron, who

(01:22:37):
you know, probably worried about getting teams into the theaters
for what was essentially a period piece. Paul Rudd, who
was also in Romeo and Juliet as Paris, got Win
that Leo was auditioning for Titanic, and he says that
he encouraged him to take the role. Red tells the story,
it was my last day of filming on Romeo and Juliet,
and we all went out to a bar afterwards, a
bunch of guys working on the movie. So we were

(01:22:58):
in different cars and I was riding to the place
with Leo and he said, I just got off of
this movie and it's a big movie. He'd done indie
films up to that point, and he said, it's a
studio movie. It's Titanic, and I said, that's incredible. I
knew a lot about the Titanic because my dad just
talks about it all the time, and he declines to
mention that he auditioned in this anecdote, so that's interesting.
And Leo and I had a conversation about it, and

(01:23:19):
he was like, oh, I don't know what I'll do,
and I remember saying you should do it. So Leo
went in for a meeting, which went well, but he
still wasn't sold on the idea, leading the ever tenacious
Kate Winslet to seek him out when they were both
attending the con Film Festival, literally tracking him down to
his hotel room. Just a plus for effort here and

(01:23:40):
the only person who really gives James Cameron to run
for his money in the department here. Yeah. She later
told Rolling Stone, I was thinking I'm gonna persuade him
to do this because I'm not doing this without him,
and that's all there is to it. I will have him,
I will have him. He will be mine. So Leo
was persuaded to come back a short time later, thinking

(01:24:02):
it was just for you know, I get to know
you meeting with Kate Winslett. But James Camermon expected him
to read for the part and do a screen test,
and clearly with his Gilbert grape Oscar Buzz and Romeo
and Juliet Blockbuster magic dust, Leo felt that he was
above this and told Cameron, Oh, I don't I don't read.
So Cameron just shook his hand and said, well, thanks

(01:24:23):
for coming by. Cameron tells the story in a g
Q interview earlier this year. He said, Leo said, wait, wait, wait,
if I don't read, I don't get the part, just
like that. And I said, oh yeah, come on, this
is a giant movie. It's gonna take two years of
my life, and you'll be doing five other things while
I'm doing post production. So I'm not going to sick
it up by making the wrong decision and casting. So
you're gonna read, You're not going to get the part.

(01:24:45):
So Leo sucked it up and did the screen test.
I will break you a little man. Cameron said, every
ounce of his entire being was entirely negative, right up
until I said action, and then he turned into Jack
and Kate just lit up, and they went into this
whole thing, and he played the scene. Dark clouds had
opened up a ray of Sun came down and lit

(01:25:06):
up Jack. I'm like, all right, all right, he's the guy.
So Leo accepted the role for a reported two point
five million dollars, which, if my math is correct, is
more than double with Kate Wins like God because Hollywood
is a cess pool. But that didn't make him any
less of a pill. On the set. Leo, who just
turned twenty one at the time, second guess the script,
the character, and Cameron at pretty much every turn, ultimately

(01:25:28):
leading James Cameron the corner him one day and say,
hey man, why did you take the part. You don't
seem to like anything about it. To his credit, Cameron
knew exactly what was eating him. The part was too perfect,
too easy. Leo wanted James Cameron to give Jack a
limp or a tick or some kind of character flaw,
and Cameron later observed his character doesn't go through torment,
and Leo previously unsubsequently in his career, was always looking

(01:25:51):
for that dark cloud. It became my job to convince
him that it was a challenge to do what Gregory
Peck and Jimmy Stewart did in previous generations, which is
to stand there and be strong and hold the audience's
eye without seeming to do very much. It was only
when I could vince him that was actually a harder
thing to do that he got excited. They had, but
Cameron described as quote a cathartic moment when we both

(01:26:11):
just sat at my trailer and talked for a couple
of hours, and we hugged at the end and went
back to work. Leo may have wanted to play a
tortured character, but he soon discovered that he get all
the torturing he desired. On the set of this movie,
fourteen hour days with seventy to ninety work weeks were rough, though,
as we'll discuss, Kate Winslet had an even tougher job,
but Leo handled it far worse. While filming the first

(01:26:34):
class dinner party scene, in which his character coins the
phrase make it count to a bunch of upper class snobs,
Leo reportedly leaned over to Kathy Bates, his co star,
pointed at the cutlery that her character just showing him
how to use, and asked, which one of these do
I use to lobotomize myself? Funny considering he would later
play a character who ends his film spoiler alert by

(01:26:54):
getting a lobotomy in Shutter Island. Oh yeahity fair article
to pick him as not especially chipper wall on the
giant Titanic set in Mexico. To quote this article, DiCaprio
was sick of the brown lands, the Mariachi merriment, and
Cameron's big tub. So one day he way, I guess

(01:27:15):
even better. So one day he ambled over to the set,
took a good look at the four sound stages, the
seventeen million gallon water tank, the smokestacks rising majestically against
the sky, the hordes of extras running around in period clothes,
and thought, this is bullshit. It's even funny again if
you pipe in the James horners. Ah, this is bullshit.

(01:27:38):
I mean this, as a Titanic obsessive, this offends me
to my core. I mean, you're walking around the full
scale replica of the Titanic. But I mean he's he's
rich on young, not a nerd. Yeah, on top of
the proverbial world and women throwing themselves his feet Like,
I get it. I mean, it doesn't make him any

(01:27:59):
less of a ship. I get in. He apparently blew
off steam by going to a local club near the
set called the Rock and Roll Taco related to the
Bottom Storm, where he and his crew were thrown out
for dancing inappropriately. Tremendous, but in his defense, he had
a scary moment on the set involving his beloved pet lizard. Lizard.

(01:28:22):
He apparently would bring this lizard onto the set, which
is questionable behavior on the best of occasions, but especially
when the set in question is a miniature city recreating
one of the most famous maritime disasters in history. The
pet lizard was accidentally run down by a truck during filming.
Imagine being that driver. How screwed would you be? How

(01:28:42):
quickly do you think Cameron fired him? But thankfully bluezard
the lizard was not killed and Leo was able to
nurse him back to health. Trying to find out what
kind of lizard it was. I think it was like
fan pictures of him from like Tiger Beat or seventeen
or something. Yeah, yeah, there are the lizard. Yeah. Another
favorite activity to blow off steam, although this is a

(01:29:05):
bit more literal. Was too far into his jacket and
then sweep it over Kate wins Let's face, charming, disgusting.
A bearded dragon oh, I thought that. I thought that
was the term for Oh yeah, they're called a bearded dragon.
That was the Cleveland Steamer. But I guess it's a

(01:29:25):
bearded dragon. Okay, as James friend of the pod Cleveland Steamer, well,
I keep that in. I don't know, As James Cameron
quite rightly said the Rolling Stone, if anybody else in
the world did that, they get slapped and the other
person would walk away and not talk to them for

(01:29:45):
a week. With Leo, Kate would just crack up. Actor
Billy Zane, who played cal said in the same interview
with Rolling Stone, grossing out Kate was purely Leo's job.
He was really good at it. Obviously, they were very
chummy on the set, striking up a brother at least
sisterly relationship. Um. Actually, I immediately regret that analogy given
this next anecdote. Kate and Leo passed the time between

(01:30:08):
takes swapping sex tips. Uh. Kate said in a Rolling
Stone profile that they would curl up under a blanket
in his trailer and discuss quote, very very personal things,
asking each other for advice, not necessarily comparing notes, but
sort of no, no, don't do it like that, do
it like this. He's very good at that. I have
to say a lot of those sexual tips he's given

(01:30:29):
me of work, and I know it's vice versa, so
that's that's something that's something in addition to their salary um.
Their relationship is very cute, though. When the production spent
weeks shooting Kate in these really dangerous water scenes, Leo
always kept an eye on her and was really quick
to swoop in and help if anything had gone awry.
Kate later said, when we did all the underwater footage

(01:30:51):
at the end, Leo was a certified scuba diver at
that point and I was not, and he really did
look after me. He was totally brilliant. He wouldn't leave
my side. And apparently they're still close and even quote
Titanic lines back and forth to one another in their
text threads, which I find adorable. Of course you do.
But despite this, Leo was not exactly thrilled with his

(01:31:13):
experience making this movie, notably skipping the Oscars ceremony even
though Titanic was up for Historic fourteen nominations. He told
Vanity Fair in the lead up to the film's release,
after the whole experience, I know it's not my cup
of tea, all respect the Jim and all the actors
who do that type of thing. M but he did

(01:31:35):
seem to warm to it. In later years, in the
hundredth anniversary of the Titanic sinking, James Cameron had the
movie reformatted into three D, which is craze that he
basically jumped started with Avatar. I invited Leo over to
watch some of it, and Cameron said, we had a
good reminiscence, and of course he was the following at
what a kiddie was in the movie. I think he

(01:31:55):
hadn't seen it in a while, and seeing it on
a big screen, he was literally just snorting into his
hand as at one point. So that's the image I
choose to keep in my heart of Leo and his
relationship to Titanic, just older, wiser sitting next to James
Cameron with a begrudging acceptance falling into his hands. Uh.
Speaking of Leonardo DiCaprio, there is a fascinating, if slightly

(01:32:17):
tragic profile of his body double in the film Vanity
Fair did this in pieces called Being Leo. For those
of you who don't know, body doubles are just essentially
stand ins while production is setting up shots and sort
of fine tuning camera movements and everything. They just stand
in the actor's places, so you don't have highly paid

(01:32:38):
and very delicate actors just you know, grinding their knees
away standing in place on sets. If there's a shot
in the film where you see Jack but not his face,
it is more than likely a gentleman named Brett Baker,
who is actually three inches shorter and a few years
older than Leo, but had similar hair and a similar build.
To quote the piece, these actors endure the boring parts

(01:32:59):
of a shoot so that the big names don't have to.
They're like stunt doubles, except that the stunt is to
just kind of stand there, and the only danger is
dying of crushing boredom. Uh. The article details Baker's non
relationship with Leo and Kate Uh. He first met Kate
on the famous Grand staircase by the Bronze Cherub. They
went weeks without being properly introduced before this poor guy,

(01:33:21):
I was like, can we just can I meet? Can
can you actually tell her my name? Things with Leo
weren't any tighter. Privately, I hoped Leo would invite me
out for a beer with some of his friends, again
poward narrative voice he did not. The piece hilariously and
tragically describes Baker as the film's most low tech special effect.

(01:33:45):
But if you're interested in the sad world of Hollywood
stand ins, go ahead and check that out. But it
also has some good stories from the set. But it
is sad because this guy wasn't even credited um and
no one knows who he is. As he says in
the piece, Baker said, to be honest, it's painful and humbling.
If art is created and no one sees it, was
it really creative? If a body double is done in

(01:34:08):
a reverse shot in a forest and no one's around. Uh.
The end of the article by writer Darren King said,
Baker doesn't want to come across as bitter or jaded.
He's never told the full story of his time on
Titanic before, preferring to focus his energies in the future.
He hasn't watched Titanic since the casting crew premiere in
l A, when what was meant to be a celebratory

(01:34:29):
occasion broke his heart all over again. As he scanned
the credits, he realized, with what can only be described
as a sinking feeling. Hey, that's not the piece. Uh
that his name was nowhere to be found, So that
is sad. But let's pour one out for body double
Brett Baker here and thank him for this work on
your beloved large boat. Brett Baker, you are now friend

(01:34:50):
of the pod, friend of the proud Brett Baker. What's
that guy up to? He's he moved a porn Brett
Baker IMDb he later played Jesus. Uh No, there's like
seventeen Bret Bakers. I mean apparently if he's not credited Entitanic,
he doesn't have an IMDb credit for it, so it's

(01:35:12):
kind of impossible trackdown. Yeah, they're oh no, Well, according
to his own IMDb bio, which he wrote, oh good,
he's one of five performers in the US to receive
an International Acting Scholarship to study at the Royal National
Theater and the Old VIC under the patronage of Anthony Hopkins.
Did he have to do it all with the back
of his head face in the audience. He's still working, okay,

(01:35:36):
you know, Bret Baker's doing okay maybe anyway? Uh, and
the rest, Billy Zane, you know who is supposed to
be great on the set. Billy Zane Another Canadian reference
name for James Cameron. The name Caldon Hockley derives from
the two small towns near Ontario where James Cameron's aunt

(01:35:58):
and uncle live. Roblow, Rupert Evert, Peter Green not the
Fleetwood Mac guitarist, and Pierce Brasen. Wait, Peter Green the
bad guy in the mask? I think so the Weasley guy. God,
that would have been chilling. He would have been stopped
being just a handsome jerk in like an outright sociopath. Uh.
Pierce Brasen all reportedly in the running to play cow

(01:36:20):
As again was Matthew McConaughey. You said he turned it down.
He was sad about not getting Jack, so he turned
down the role out of maybe maybe that was it.
I've seen multiple and James Cameron is not confirmed to
deny it, so tough to say. Who's to say. Bizarrely enough,
James Cameron apparently wanted to cast Billy's a because he
was impressed with his performance in the nine six superhero

(01:36:40):
movie The Phantom, in which is An is wearing a
purple skin tight body suit the entire time I remember
when that movie came out that was doing that weird
vogue in the nineties when you were doing like they would.
They're resurrecting all these Golden Age superhero properties to try
and cash in on the Batman stuff, like when we
got Alec Baldwin doing the Shadow. Yeah. Anyway, Um, Billy's

(01:37:03):
Ane wore a wig because he was bald You don't
really sell that that well, Bill, He's ain't wore a
wig because he was come on, um yeah. And and
from the well spring of Calden Hockley sprung Billy Zane's
entire later career of just kind of being a dick um.

(01:37:26):
He quoted James Bond author Ian Fleming saying, this is
a mink lined cell. Do. I wish I was playing
more white hat hero roles all the time, But I'm
actually making that happen by developing my own material. So
stay tuned for that, folks. Uh. I think that that
interviews from like five years ago, still waiting with bated

(01:37:52):
breath for Billy Zanes. I have nothing wrong with his bill.
It was wonderful and all the making up special it's
just the best. It's it's just my favorite line from Zoolander.
You should listen to your friend Philly Zay and he's
a cool dude. He's trying to help you. Um. Francis
Fisher was actually cast as Rose's mother, Ruth, but we

(01:38:14):
have to talk about Cathy Bates as the other mom.
Car is the mom character for for for Leo for Leo. Yes,
the unsinkable Molly Brown. No one called her that. She
was known as Margaret or Maggie to her friends at
the time. She didn't earn her nickname until after her death.
Apparently why her friends called her Margaret, I don't know

(01:38:37):
why they started calling her Molly after she died. No idea.
M uh. Molly Brown was also credited with inventing, or
at least popularizing, the buffet friend of the pod, the
buffet um, how do they've been that? Whatever? I'm gonna
look that up. I trust you, I trust you. That

(01:38:58):
part was originally offered to Reba McIntyre. Love Reba, I
just love a brassy country lady. She was gonna do
it until shooting delays meant that she wasn't needed on
the set until months later than initially planned, and unfortunately
she was on tour and had to back out. She
talked about that on an episode of Watch What Happens
Live with Andy Cohen, during which she admitted she was bummed,

(01:39:19):
but hasten to add, You've got to take care of
your people, m hm. So they turned to Kathy Bates.
Fox apparently bulked at her requested fee of five hundred grands,
so James Cameron shout out a hundred and fifty grand
of his own money to get Kathy Bates in the film.
Fox would pony up two million to send James Cameron
on death drives down to the Titanic with a bunch

(01:39:41):
of Russians, and they wouldn't give a hundred and fifty
grand to Kathy Bates oscar winning Kathy Bates oh disrespect
for the role of Captain Edward James Smith famously on
his final voyage before he intended to retire. Uh is
that where this trope comes from? Just one more big

(01:40:01):
one more Now, it's got to be a troope since
before that. Two more days to retirement, one last big
score before I retire, one large, one more large boat,
one more season. Cameron cast British character actor Bernard Hill
Bernard I assume Bernard Hill, who would later appear in
the Lord of the Rings movie is King theoden't, But shockingly,

(01:40:21):
Cameron initially approached Robert de Niro, which is hilarious. Just
imagine him be all squinty and tight lipped at the
big wheel of a ship. I have a theory. I
have a theory about this. Can I tell you my theory?
Please please? I think it was employed by James Cameron
to try to get Leo, who thought that this movie
didn't have any prestige, and just was like, Hey, de Niro,

(01:40:43):
can you like just say that you're going out for
this and maybe I'll get this guy like, don't worry,
I won't actually like make you do this. Showed up
in the trades or whatever, and that's where Leo was like, oh, suddenly, prestige. Interesting.
I love that, especially because Dinire the reason for turning
this down is so absurd. The stomach ache, Yeah, a

(01:41:05):
gastro intestinal infection, to quote the Mirror, but he ate
too much at Nobu. It's like, I can't do your
movie now I have a tummy ache, James, I can't
do your movie. Sorry. This is around the same time
that I was dressing up as Captain Smith. Yeah, and
It was also around this time that I was faking
stomach ailments to get out of stuff that I didn't
want to do so I could stay home and truth

(01:41:29):
be told. Read my Titanic books. Well, folks, it's time
to wrap it up for today. I think this episode
is probably the length of the full Titanic movie, just
part one. Yeah, Highchael, you're still with us. How do
you think does this I gotta ask, does this episode
give you a begrudging admiration for James Cameron. I have

(01:41:51):
nothing against James Cameron. I think he's just a I
think he's just an asshole, and I don't think Yeah,
I don't think he would. I don't can debate that. No,
you're right, you're right. All right, Well, we will pick
back up with the story in part two of our
t M I Titanic Epic. You truly have not seen

(01:42:11):
nothing yet when it comes to James Cameron's James Camerons.
You thought PCP was bad? Yeah, yeah, So please join
us for part two. I beg of you. Tell your
friends they'll love it, Tell your enemies they'll hate it.
This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and
I'm Jordan run Talk, We'll catch you next time for
part two of Everything You Didn't Know about James Cameron's Titanic.

(01:42:40):
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. The show
was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and
Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and a
Ghost Funk orchestra. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and

(01:43:01):
I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Titanic (Part 1): Everything You Didn't Know