Year after year the heads of the major studios, the people who spend all that money, throw up their hands in apparent alarm. "I'm horrified at these numbers," says Sherry Lansing, chairman of Paramount. "They don't make sense. We're killing ourselves."
"I'm nauseous," says another studio boss. "It's depressing and it's going to get worse." But this year, analysts agree, the day of reckoning is at hand. Staged horror will turn into real blood on the floor of executive suites.
Over the three prime summer months, the studios will release 47 big movies. At least 15 of these will, including marketing, cost more than $100m: they include Speed 2, starring Sandra Bullock; Batman and Robin, with George Clooney; Men in Black, a science-fiction comedy starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones; Air Force One, which stars Harrison Ford; and Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World.
"There's never been a marketplace in the history of the movie business to support all these big movies," says Peter Chernin, who oversees Twentieth Century Fox, in The New York Times last week. "Every studio is terrified."
One movie in particular is offering Hollywood a new paradigm in executive terror: James Cameron's Titanic. Cameron is skippering a vessel that is coming into port having cost as much as $200m, making it the most expensive movie ever made. Based on the 1912 sinking of the famous ocean liner on its maiden voyage, and originally planned to open in America in July, Titanic is still not finished. On the contrary, despite starting shooting last July, the film is now so far behind schedule that it will not be released in America until late summer at the earliest.
How reassuring can it be for anxious studio executives to know that their fates are in the hands of James Cameron, the 1990s incarnation of the famously autocratic directors of Hollywood's golden age, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B De Mille and John Ford? Tireless, impossible, relentless and brilliant, the 43-year-old Canadian delights in describing himself as a "total, obsessive-compulsive film-maker". For Cameron, film-making is the moral equivalent of war, only bloodier. "You sign on for a tour of duty," says the film editor Mark Goldblatt. "It was like working for General Patton," says one extra.
Imposing a distinct personal style that has been dubbed tech noir, Cameron's films; The Terminator and Terminator 2, Aliens, The Abyss and True Lies; have been among the biggest-grossing hits of the past two decades, taking more than $1 billion at the box office worldwide, plus as much again from video, television, satellite and other sales. They are redefining the technical boundaries of modern film-making through their use of innovative special effects such as the morphing in Terminator 2.
Getting his break (like Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich and others before him) with the cult B-movie producer Roger Corman, Cameron's first directing effort was Piranha II: The Spawning, for an Italian producer who fired him after two weeks. In a three-month period in the spring of 1984, Cameron lived in a small apartment in the Los Angeles suburbs with a bed and three desks. On one desk he wrote The Terminator, which he later directed; on another Rambo: First Blood Part II; on the third, Aliens. While writing, he listened to Holst's Mars: The Bringer of War.
Actors and crew invariably vow they will never work with him again, although some later relent. "When he's making a movie, he does not allow his good-naturedness to get in the way," says Michael Biehn, who starred in The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss."Jim has a motto: duck or bleed," says Jamie Lee Curtis, who worked with him on True Lies. "He's a perfectionist," says Frances Fisher, one of the stars of Titanic. "He's an adrenaline junkie," says the composer Brad Fiedel.
Cameron has been married to Terminator's producer, Gale Anne Hurd, to Kathryn Bigelow (director of Strange Days and Point Break, both of which Cameron co-wrote and co-produced), and has a child with Terminator actress Linda Hamilton. For relaxation he flies T-38 jets, scuba dives and takes weekend motorbike rides through the desert with Arnold Schwarzenegger. "He really does want us to risk our lives and limbs for the shot, but he doesn't mind risking his own," says Sigourney Weaver, Ripley in Cameron's Aliens. "What else could you expect from a guy who grabs the tails of sharks for sport?"
Fox, understandably anxious about Titanic before it started shooting, induced Paramount to take the American distribution rights to the film, while it would distribute everywhere else in the world. Paramount's contribution would be capped at $65m. Fox would make up the rest. That seemed like a reasonable deal when Cameron was insisting that the budget would never even hit $125m.
"I can safely say that I would never put together an enterprise of that scale," Cameron told Variety. "Basically there has only been one film on that scale that we know of, Waterworld, and that was a different kind of film. We are going to be shooting primarily on sound stages and we are not going to have any big stars. So I anticipate it being less expensive than my last two films."
Maybe he believed it. Maybe he convinced the studio. (Fox, with whom Cameron has had a relationship since 1985's Aliens, was happy to indulge him in the hope of persuading him to do Terminator 3, a sequel to True Lies, and Spiderman, all of which could earn hundreds of millions of dollars.) The studio must have been swayed by his passion.
Titanic, the "ship of dreams" that took 1,522 people to their deaths on the night of April 14, 1912, is an obsession for Cameron. "It's a metaphor about the inevitability of death," he says. "We're all on the Titanic." Cameron certainly is. He is writer, director and producer of the film.
He researched the subject for five years. In September 1995, he chartered the Keldysh, a Russian research ship equipped with twin-manned deep-water submersibles. Using a special camera modified so it could operate at pressures of more than 6,000lb per sq in, Cameron took 12 two-hour dives to the wreck of the great ship, which lies under 12,378ft of water 380 miles off Newfoundland.
"To see it sitting there on the ocean floor 83 years after it sank is quite awesome," said Cameron. He is using the film from those dives ("some incredible footage, things people have only dreamt about") for the wraparound section, a contemporary salvage operation that will open and close the film. According to those who have seen some of it, the salvagers discover a photograph amid the wreckage, which opens up the central story, a fictional love affair between a 17-year-old upper-class American, played by Kate Winslet, and a free-spirited artist travelling steerage, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
"The Titanic is a great symbol for human greed and arrogance and dependence on technology," says Cameron without apparent irony. "It's also a symbol for the end of an age of innocence, of that trust that we'd be constantly moving upward and improving life, and that technology would save us."
Almost from the start of the shoot, reports filtered back to Hollywood of nightmarish working conditions. Caleb Deschanel, the director of photography, was an early casualty who left following a row with Cameron after the end of the first part of the shoot in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Then, in another potentially disastrous incident, on the film's last night of shooting in Canada, someone spiked the lobster chowder with the hallucinogenic drug phencyclidine, known as PCP, or angel dust. About 80 people were affected, including Cameron and the star Bill Paxton.
"Some people were laughing, some people were crying, some people were throwing up," said Paxton. "One minute I felt okay, the next minute I felt so goddamn anxious I wanted to breathe in a paper bag. Cameron was feeling the same way."
Things got worse when the shoot moved to northern Mexico. Fox had built Cameron a completely new $20m studio in Rosarito because he hadn't been able to find a studio facility capable of housing the project. The enormous new 40-acre facility, which was built in just 100 days, included a six-acre, 17m-gallon seawater tank in which the 775ft scale model of the ship was built. The original Titanic, at 882ft, was only slightly larger.
"On one side it looks completely like the Titanic," says actress Frances Fisher. The starboard side. To represent the port side Cameron dressed the extras with the buttons and lettering on their uniforms reversed, then flipped the film. Cameron paid meticulous attention to detail (the female extras had to wear corsets at all times) and religiously re-created much of the ship, including the elegant first-class dining room and the three-storey grand staircase, which he later flooded with 5m gallons of sea water.
As pressure on Cameron increased, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) sent officials to the set to investigate claims of ill-treatment and dangerous conditions. Although SAG found the producers had "taken extraordinary measures to ensure the health and safety of cast and crew", the local SAG representatives continued to complain.
An internal production memo from the construction co-ordinator Les Collins to the producers complained about conditions for local Mexican workers, who were allegedly receiving only bread and milk in their morning break, and working 12-hour days in the burning heat. The producers maintain that everybody was treated well.
"These people are getting banged up horribly," Cameron admitted to a reporter as they watched one scene that resulted in two broken ribs and a sprained ankle. Extras had to be tied down to make sure they weren't washed away by the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. "I wish I could do that in every scene," Cameron was heard to mutter. "Tether them so they can't go to the bathroom."
Some extras complained they were working such long hours they could not stay awake. "I suddenly fell into a deep sleep in the middle of a sentence," said one, Dixie Dexter, who nodded off while standing up.
The stars, normally mollycoddled on a shoot, expressed shock at Cameron's behaviour. "If anything was the slightest bit wrong he would lose it," Kate Winslet told the Los Angeles Times. "It was hard to concentrate when he was losing it, shouting and screaming." Winslet complained that she had suffered hypothermia and nearly drowned twice. Cameron, who frequently dived into the water in a wet suit to shoot scenes himself, was unimpressed. "We're in combat mode here." Towards the end of the shoot even hardened crew members were nonplussed as they watched Cameron screaming through a megaphone, jabbing injections of B-12 vitamins into his legs and swigging back shots of livid green wheatgrass juice to sustain his unrelenting stamina.
Some of those who have seen footage from the film, including excited cinema owners, say Cameron's single-minded obsessiveness may have paid off. "It's an epic in the scope of Braveheart," says the composer James Horner. "The sinking is almost secondary to the romantic story, although when you see the ship sink you swear it's the real thing."
According to crew members, Cameron sees the film as his Doctor Zhivago, a "four-hanky tear-jerker" set against one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Cameron has high Oscar hopes for his film and won't be too troubled that its release has been delayed. At the very least, Titanic is unlikely to receive the critical drubbing that attended Waterworld. Hollywood may have to look elsewhere this summer for the blood debt with which to atone for its addiction to ever-burgeoning budgets.
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