Written By: Kostya Kennedy
The following is an excerpt from LIFE’s special issue Titanic: The Tragedy That Shook the World, available at newsstands and online:
Twenty-three years ago, at the 70th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, Sean Connery stood in his tuxedo before a microphone, the evening’s final note card in his hand, and read the news: The award for Best Picture “goes to Titanic.” That it was the movie’s record-tying 11th Oscar win—after a record-tying 14 nominations—and that it came before a television audience of 57.3 million, still the largest to watch an Academy Awards, seemed apt. From start to finish, this movie didn’t simply go big. It went huge. Colossal. Titanic all the way.
Director James Cameron (Best Director James Cameron, that is) spent $200 million to make Titanic, almost twice the original budget and the most expensive movie of the 20th century. He dressed 1,000 extras in period costume. He oversaw 90,000 gallons of water being flooded into the set during the film’s climactic scene, and he delivered Titanic at a longest-movie-of-the-year running time of three hours and 15 minutes.
And after those extravagances came these: Titanic spent 15 straight weeks as the number one movie in the country (another record), and it was still showing in first-run theaters nearly 10 months after it opened. Paramount had to send theaters replacement reels because the originals wore out. Throw in the take from the movie’s occasional rereleases, among them a 2017 limited run celebrating its 20th anniversary, and Titanic has brought in box-office receipts of $2.2 billion.
It’s a stunningly beautiful film, with startling effects. Cinematography, Production Design and Visual Effects were among its Oscar haul. More germane is that Titanic has at its heart an exquisitely drawn love story that’s as Hollywood and as Shakespearean as can be, one that slips bounds of class and circumstance as defiantly and heroically as a Capulet and a Montague trysting at the balcony by moonlight. Jack the penniless, romantic third-class passenger. Rose the betrothed-to-an-ogre aristocrat in diamonds. They spit together. They dance. He sketches her in the nude. Together, they rise. Who among us does not cherish the rare moments—lit by love or accomplishment—when we feel as if we are standing on the bow of our own ship, going somewhere, a king of the world?
Titanic touches on a fundamental question: How would you act and what would you do if you had just a short time to live? The boat takes a while to sink, and as it does the violinists famously play on, the bridge officer puts a gun to his head, Rose’s odious fiancé weasels onto a lifeboat meant for women and children, and an old couple spoons in their cabin bed. Then there’s Rose herself who, while being lowered to safety by lifeboat leaps back onto the sinking ship. Anything for a few more minutes with Jack. She’s nuts. She met the guy three days before. But we believe her. It’s a moment even the greatest storytellers might wait a lifetime to achieve.
There’s another crucial slant to Titanic: the fact that the audience, godlike, knows from the start that disaster is nigh. This puts all the actions and reactions of the characters into a kind of final, judgmental light, and it ties straight to the movie’s real power. From the opening sepia montage at the departing dock, to the genuine shots of the real, rusted hull 12,500 feet deep in the Atlantic, to the appropriation of language from post-wreck inquiry transcripts into movie dialogue, lies the understanding that the story is, at essence, true. Whatever license was taken to form Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson, Kate Winslet’s Rose Dewitt Bukater and Billy Zane’s Caledon Hockley, such characters and others like them surely existed and were on that boat.
At the Oscars ceremony in 1998, Cameron, who also wrote, coedited and coproduced the film, asked for a moment of silence for the 1,503 people who went down with the ship—acknowledging his debt to the human stories that were set against the audacity of the 52,000-ton luxury liner itself. Man in his hubris, flying too close to the sun. More than a century later, the voyage of the RMS Titanic remains one of history’s most astounding events, filled with intrigue, moxie and false steps, with majesty, with tragedy and with life. It’s this true story that spurred Titanic to such success, and this true story that unfolds so poignantly and dramatically in our remembrance of a moment that continues to captivate.
Below are images from LIFE’s special issue Titanic: The Tragedy That Shook the World, available at newsstands and online:
© Ken Marschall
The Olympic and the Titanic, both vessels of the White Star Line, under construction in Harland and Wolff’s shipyard, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1909-1911.
Universal History Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The first class lounge of the Titanic.
Universal Images Group/Getty Images
The Titanic only had enough lifeboats to hold a third of the ship’s passengers and crew.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The Titanic sailed away from her final landfall in Ireland on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic to New York in April 1912.
© Ralph White/Corbis/Getty Images
The April 16, 1912 front page of the New York Times announced the sinking of the Titanic.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
This image from 1912 showed the exact latitude and longitude where the Titanic sank.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
This early illustration depicted the sinking of the Titanic.
Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Scouts raised money in Stratford-on Avon, England after the sinking of the Titanic.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Dining plates, shown here as they were found, were among the artifacts recovered from the sunken Titanic.
Nils Jorgensen/Rex/Shutterstock
