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The Titanic Film Legend
| Article
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20664 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,004 Words |
| Author
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Frank Thompson
Frank Thompson is the associate producer of Wild Bill
Wellman: A Hollywood Maverick, which airs this spring on
Turner Network Television. He is the author of Lost Films,
recently published by Citadel Press, and William A.
Wellman. |
It happened eighty years ago. The Titanic, the world's largest, most luxurious oceanliner, struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage. This glorious man-made wonder had been considered "unsinkable." However, in a shockingly short span of time-a little over two hours after impact--the experts were proved wrong. The Titanic carried more lifeboats than regulations called for, but not nearly enough for the twenty-two hundred passengers and crew on board. When she plummeted to the bottom of the sea, the great ship took over fifteen hundred souls with her.
As a fully engaged commercial vessel, the Titanic lived only about four days. However, the drama that surrounded the ship that fateful night in April 112 remains as riveting as ever. And now, two factors have increased public interest in the oceanliner: the recent discovery of its watery burial place and the resultant photographs of this ghostly wreak that had been hidden from human eyes these many years.
And paramount of all the photographic visitations to the fabled ship is Titanica, an IMAX presentation that premieres in October. So thoroughly has the idea of the Titanic superseded the three-dimensional reality of the ship itself that the towering IMAX images of Titanica are both fascinating and horrible. Here she sits, two and a half miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, up right, massive, and imperious even as her mangled body bleeds rivers of rust. In other Titanic movies, we last see her standing half out of the water like, as one survivor put it, "a black finger pointing as the sky." She hangs there for a moment and then, with increasing velocity, slips into the blackness of the sea, gone forever.
But here, captured on IMAX, the world's largest film format we see the aftermath of that plummet to the bottom. "The footage is eerie. At times you forget where you are," says Andre Picard, executive producer of Titanica and IMAX's vice president of film. "The water is so clear and the depth of field so good that you forget you're in submarine; you're just floating around the shipwreck. The colors are wonderful, extraordinary. It's like being a child and exploring a haunted house you've always heard of in the back of a forest."
The Titanic now lives in a world completely devoid of light. The two Russian submarines that took IMAX cameras to the wreck were equipped with revolutionary new HMI lights that can see some eighty feet into the darkness. Even so, says director/producer Stephen Low, "You're not going to see the ship. If it was sitting in thirty
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