Titanic in Newsweek
BigJohn
I was just wondering if anyone out there has a copy of this week's Newsweek
magazine with the Titanic article in it. Someone told me about it, but I
haven't had time to go get one. I tried looking it up on the Newsweek web
site, but that won't be functional until this summer. If anyone out there
has AOL you can look it up at keyword "NEWSWEEK" I think. If anyone has it,
please post it.
Thanks,
John
--
"Promise me that you will never give up, no matter how hopeless..."
-Jack Dawson
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SleepyInNJ
OUR TITANIC LOVE AFFAIR
A chick-flick period piece with a tragic ending is rewriting the Hollywood
rules. It's about to become the first billion-dollar movie. Why are we all
sobbing with pleasure?
By David Ansen
Even James Cameron is, he says, "a little bit mystified" by the passionate
reaction to his movie. The director of "Titanic" has been tirelessly circling
the world to promote his film's opening. Audiences don't always laugh at the
same jokes, he's discovered. But whether it's Moscow or Tokyo or Rome, they all
cry at the same places. If the tears being shed over "Titanic" could be
collected in rain clouds, El Nino would have stiff competition.
The dimensions of the mania, as we well know, are extraordinary. They love
it in Slovenia. It's the most successful movie ever in Mexico and Hong Kong. In
some towns in France, cinema owners report that their admissions exceed the
local population, which means that the French are going to it three or four
times--something the French are not supposed to do. Last Saturday in the United
States, "Titanic" hit the $350 million mark after 58 days; it took "Jurassic
Park" 67 days to break the $300 million mark. What makes this number even more
remarkable is that, because of its three-and-a-quarter-hour length, it can show
only three times a day. On the Internet, the movie's Web site is averaging 4
million hits daily. By all estimates, before the end of next month "Titanic"
will be the first billion-dollar movie ever released.
Movies this popular are usually shunned by the Academy, but Cameron's epic
is breaking all the rules. The 14 Oscar nominations it received last
week--including bids for 22-year-old Kate Winslet and 87year-old Gloria
Stuart--ties the record set 47 years ago by "All About Eve," a movie it
couldn't resemble less. It's the odds-on favorite to win best picture.
In the executive suites of Twentieth Century Fox, panic has been replaced by
jubilation. Having hedged their bet on the most expensive movie ever made by
giving Paramount North American rights for a $65 million investment, Fox had
little hope of breaking even. Now both studios are looking at profits that
could well surpass $100 million apiece. (Once both studios recoup their
investments, all the revenues--including video, television and soundtrack--go
into a pot that is split 60-40 in Fox's favor.)
Like all megahits, the movie has become a kind of religion. And as with all
religions, you don't worship at the altar just once. Normally, films draw a 2
percent repeat audience; "Titanic" is drawing 20 percent. Consider these highly
unusual statistics: 45 percent of all the women under 25 who have seen the
movie have seen it twice. And 76 percent of all people who have seen the movie
at least twice plan to see it again. What's particularly surprised the studios
is that 37 percent of the audience is older than 25--a larger percentage of
adults than was expected. In Chicago, 28-year-old Maria Federici is on her way
to see it a fifth time with her boyfriend and his mother. "I don't normally see
movies twice. This is kind of weird for me," she confesses. "It's totally a
chick flick. You got everything you want--love and a little gore." Its appeal
to women is well known, but 40 percent of the audience is male. Federici's
boyfriend, Ken Lill, is on his third go-round. "I like action movies, but this
one touches you," Lill says. "Guys can try to blow it off and say they're
coming back just to learn about the Titanic--but that's bogus, it's a movie
that touches you." Sixteen-year-old William Rodriguez has a friend who's seen
the movie seven times. "He took seven different girls to see it. And he still
liked the movie after all those times," Rodriguez says. "I don't really like
history movies or love stories, but I saw 'Romeo and Juliet' and that was the
best. That's why I want to see this one."
Could the dizzying success of "Titanic" mark a sea change in popular
culture? It's not, on the face of it, anything a blockbuster Hollywood movie is
supposed to be. Look at a list of the 15 top-grossing domestic films in
history, from "Star Wars" and "E.T." down through "Independence Day," "Batman"
and "Twister." Every one before it has been primarily aimed at guys. Not one of
them is a love story. Most are set in the present or the future (only "Raiders
of the Lost Ark" is set in the past, but no one thought of it as a period
picture). There's nothing you could remotely think of as a tragic romance.
None, with the exception of "E.T." and "Forrest Gump," even tries to put a lump
in your throat. Nor was "Titanic" designed, as so many movies are today, to
generate merchandising tie-ins.
Here we are in the midst of a deeply cynical, pre-millennium age, where the
smirk of every hip TV host is dripping with irony and Madison Avenue sells its
products with edge and attitude, and the country is losing its heart to a movie
that's 100 percent cynicism-free. "Titanic's" archetypes of good and evil, its
star-crossed lovers, its handcuffed-to-the-post cliffhangers are as foursquare
and primal as anything from a D. W. Griffith silent movie. Wasn't this supposed
to be the age of Tarantino? It turns out that what young people were starved
for was a movie that could make them feel, a movie that could make them weep, a
huge, bigger-than-life romantic wallow. With its passionate love story framed
by the epic sweep of a true historical event, "Titanic" is the "Gone With the
Wind" of its generation. Its God's-eye vistas of human folly and human heroism
seem to answer a need to see the world in life-changing perspective.
Gina Latta, an 18-year-old freshman at Lewis & Clark College in Portland,
Ore., is more than a little embarrassed at how much she likes "Titanic." "I
think the dialogue was incredibly cheesy," she says, before admitting she's
seen it four times. Latta, who wears blue nail polish, has her ears triple
pierced and counts David Lynch's surreal "Lost Highway" among her favorite
movies, would not seem to be the sort who would let an Edwardian Age love story
get to her, yet she is powerless in its grip. "The first time I saw it, I got
out of the theater and I was having a cigarette with a friend and we couldn't
stop crying. I was so overwhelmed at how sad it was." Like many other Titanic
addicts, she has found herself haunting her local bookstore, surreptitiously
reading the many Titanic books on the market. She would have bought them if she
had had the money (the $20 paperback of "James Cameron's Titanic" is No. 1 on
The New York Times's best-seller list; even its $50 hardback version is a best
seller). This grunge-music aficionado has also bought the soundtrack--helping
to make it the fastest-selling soundtrack album in history (10 million units
have been shipped worldwide). "I'm not obsessed," she assures us. "OK, maybe a
little obsessed."
The pundits have been scratching their heads trying to figure out Latta's
predicament. The New York Times weighed in with an editorial attributing the
film's success to the return of "the dead hero." Says Camille Paglia, "People
are sick and tired of shallow postmodernist irony and cynicism, people are
ready for big passions, grand opera, big sweeping statements. No more of these
little independent movies, depressing, depressing, depressing." Pauline Kael
puts it another way: "It's square in ways people seem to have been longing for.
I'm not one of those people."
Mary Pipher, whose book "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent
Girls" has become a bible for mothers of young girls, addresses the movie's
appeal to teenagers. "It's not a common American script in the '90s because
it's really not about those two people having sex. It's really about his
helping her become an authentic whole person. There's this tremendously
personable, handsome man, whose main motivation is to save her life--both
literally and figuratively--in the sense of saying, you have a right to have
your own life. So the love story taps into the old myth of the damsel in
distress being rescued, but it has a very modern spin that's really cool."
(Cameron is not surprised that Pipher responded to his film: "She should like
the movie. I read her book before I wrote the script.")
For a movie painted in such big, bold, unambiguous brushstrokes, it's
surprising how differently it's perceived by its fans. "Titanic" seems to hold
an endlessly refracting mirror up to its audience. It doesn't just speak to
teenage girls grappling with issues of independence. For men like Naoshi
Kayashima, a 29-year-old magazine editor in Tokyo, it's a film about male
honor. "I was impressed by the way a great number of men on the ship decided to
stay on and go down with the ship. Remember those gentlemen who were fully
dressed and waiting for their death gracefully? I could not help but cry. To
me, it was a movie about how men choose their endings." For some teenage boys,
the thrill is cheaper: many slip in after an hour to catch Kate Winslet's nude
scene again. One of the movie's more unexpected fans is the theater director
Andre Gregory, 63, the star of a movie as tiny as "Titanic" is huge, "My Dinner
With Andre." He's seen it three times, accompanied by a roll of toilet paper to
staunch his sobs. "Most of my friends, I have to say, hate it. I thought the
movie was really about that old woman. I was moved that she could fight her way
out of a life that was imposed on her by her family, and by society."
In explaining "Titanic's" success, you cannot, of course, discount the
heartthrob factor. Coming off "Romeo and Juliet," Leonardo DiCaprio is every
adolescent girl's dream come true, his almost feminine beauty establishing him
in the great tradition of non-threatening teen pinups. "Even at an early age,
girls are looking for sensitive soul mates, a boy who's in some ways like a
girl," explains historian Joan Brumberg, author of "The Body Project: An
Intimate History of American Girls." "This has been going on for a long time,
even before modern media. In the 19th century the equivalent was the adolescent
female's infatuation with Lord Byron."
The thing about Jack Dawson--and what made him difficult to play for a child
of the '90s like DiCaprio--is that he doesn't have a dark side. DiCaprio had
never played a character without demons. "How do you do that?" DiCaprio says.
"I was asking Jim: 'Can't we add some dark things to this character?' And he
was like, 'No, Leo, you can't. You just have to accept that he is like a ray of
light. The character lights up the screen and lights up this girl's life'." "A
lot of people who don't know Leo thought he was just playing himself," says
Cameron. "Which is so far from the truth. Actors always gravitate to the guy
with the biggest problem. He had to mesmerize an audience without any tricks."
Cameron isn't surprised Leonardo didn't get an Oscar nomination, because of
his teen-idol image, and because he believes there's a "resentment of too much
stardom too fast." But he doesn't think DiCaprio is interested in being a star.
"He wants to be an actor's actor. His personal taste in roles is more
idiosyncratic." From his brilliant (and Oscar-nominated) turn in "What's Eating
Gilbert Grape" to his risky portrayal of the poet Rimbaud in the 1995 flop
"Total Eclipse," the resume bears Cameron out. He's a heartthrob in spite of
himself. But don't think it's only teenagers who are responding to DiCaprio's
sensitivity. For Linda Hodges, a 36-year-old housewife from Alameda, Calif.,
DiCaprio's ardent, free-spirited hero "embodies the American ideal of man. It's
important to know that all men are not total jerks. Love and sacrifice aren't
values we see on the screen nowadays."
If this year's Oscar nominations are any reflection, the movie industry
seems to share the public's newfound taste for the heartfelt, the straight and
the true. In "Good Will Hunting," the brilliant, emotionally wounded hero must
break through his protective shell to gain the capacity to love. Audiences
weep. In "As Good as It Gets," the brilliant, wounded Scrooge of a hero must
break through his neurotic shell to gain the capacity to love. Audiences laugh
and weep. The lovable working-class blokes in "The Full Monty" discover their
value as husbands, fathers and lovers through the traditionally feminine ritual
of the striptease. Audiences weep for joy. If the fifth nominated movie, "L.A.
Confidential," strikes darker and more complex chords, it is nonetheless, like
"Titanic," a return to classical Hollywood filmmaking, a genre movie whose
concerns are moral rather than sensational. You can read all this according to
your taste: as a welcome rejection of the cynical and tawdry, a salutary return
to romanticism and hope or, as some believe, as an esthetic regression, a
retreat to the simplicities and lies of old Hollywood.
Funny how things turn out. It wasn't that long ago that the vultures were
circling what many thought would be the biggest fiasco in movie history. When
it became clear that "Titanic" couldn't make its summer-release date and was
postponed until Christmas--a delay that added $3.5 million in interest to its
$200 million budget--the Hollywood oracles prophesied doom. But Cameron's ship
is as lucky as the real one wasn't. Christmas turned out to be a godsend. "It's
a time people are more interested in an emotional experience," Cameron says.
And by January and February, the movie had a clear field.
"I'm enjoying the ride," says a vindicated Cameron. "Realistically, I'll
probably never experience this again." He's not rushing into another movie
after this draining experience. He plans next to write and produce--but not
direct--a new version of "Planet of the Apes." DiCaprio is ready for a break,
too. He's done four movies in a row: "Romeo and Juliet," "Titanic," "The Man in
the Iron Mask" (opening March 20) and a cameo in the next Woody Allen movie,
"Celebrity." Winslet just finished a low-budget English film, "Hideous Kinky,"
in which she plays a hippie mom in the '60s, who takes her kids to live in
Marrakesh. She's getting used to the strange but not unpleasant realization
that "I'm suddenly very famous." Gloria Stuart is reveling in the belated glory
of an Oscar nomination. "Just imagine--all these years, since 1932, when I came
into film, and now it's 1998 and here I am!" Shirley MacLaine just called her
to see if she'd be interested in playing a part in the first movie MacLaine
will direct.
Still, there is one little thorn in Cameron's side. You might recall that in
his single-minded mania to get "Titanic" made exactly the way he wanted it, he
gave up not only his fees but his percentage of the profits to keep the studio
at bay when his movie went over budget and over schedule. This sacrifice, it's
recently been estimated, amounts to some $50 million. "I feel like a chump
every time I discuss waiving my deal," he confesses. But now it seems even this
misfortune will have a happy ending. Rolling in profits, Fox and Paramount are
preparing to "do the right thing." According to one studio insider, "We will do
something to make Jim happy. We all believe it is the just thing to do." Talks
have begun to reinstate his deal. And though they are not contractually
entitled to a bonus, DiCaprio and Winslet each may be the recipients of a
million-dollar show of gratitude. When they all stroll down the red carpet on
Oscar night, they should have more than enough to smile about.
With Corie Brown, Ray Sawhill and Yahlin Chang in New York, Hideko Takayama
in Tokyo and bureau reports
Newsweek 2/23/98 The Arts/Our Titanic Love Affair