What would Titanic have looked like if it had been made in the Golden Age of Hollywood? Or in the heyday of the 1970s disaster movie? What if James Cagney had starred in The Godfather instead of Al Pacino? How would Jane Fonda fare in an early 70s take on The Silence of the Lambs? How different would your favorite movie be if it had been made twenty years earlier? Fifty years earlier?
Preboot Culture is a series that seeks to answer these questions and more. Each entry will examine a Hollywood movie and speculate what it would have looked like, sounded like, felt like, and what kind of impact it would—or wouldn’t—have made if it had been released in another era.
TITANIC (1997/1939) Two passengers from different social classes, one a penniless artist and the other a socialite engaged to a wealthy steel heir, fall in love on the doomed ocean liner, RMS Titanic.
OVERTURE
Aside from the reconstruction of the ship itself, the most captivating images of James Cameron’s Titanic involve its stars: Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Their passionate embraces formed the backbone of the film’s marketing campaign, not only invoking other great lovers of American cinema history but cementing their place among them.
The grandeur of the ship and its wealthy passengers, its epic love story, its audacious large-scale disaster scenes, and the possibility for nostalgia and visual splendor make it a masterpiece of modern American myth-making.
One particular film with a similar mixture of romance, spectacle, history, and myth comes to mind.
For my first edition of Preboot Culture, I thought it appropriate to tackle not only one of the biggest movies of the past thirty years but also to hearken back to one of Hollywood’s most celebrated years.
What if Titanic had been made in 1939—Hollywood’s “greatest year”? And what if it had been made instead of that year’s crowning achievement—Gone With the Wind?
ONLY DAVID O. SELZNICK CAN DO THAT
[Italicized texts in brackets denote commentary or facts from the “real world.”]
It is 1936. David O. Selznick, the passionate, ambitious, impatient, and somewhat tyrannical film producer has finally achieved his dream of an independent production house—Selznick International Pictures.
After more than a decade of cutting his teeth as a story editor and eventually, as Head of Production at major studios like Paramount, RKO, and most notably, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (run by his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer), he is finally striking it out on his own. While his planned production schedule includes films such as The Prisoner of Zenda, the original A Star is Born, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he is intent on making an epic that will change Hollywood and the entire field of motion pictures forever.
He has two options. The first is a soon-to-be-published epic of Antebellum romance and historical revisionism by Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind. The second is an original tale, as yet unwritten, based on the very real 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. Although his story editor and business partner are pushing him to buy the film rights to Mitchell’s novel before Warner Bros., Paramount, and RKO finalize their offers, Selznick asks his friend and story editor, Val Lewton, for his opinion.
Lewton will later go on to head the horror unit at RKO, where he will produce such esteemed fright flicks as Cat People and The Body Snatcher, but at this moment, he is less than impressed with the Mitchell novel. Selznick would be a fool to try to make a film of such a “ponderous” novel, Lewton says.
In reality, Selznick does not heed Lewton’s advice.
In our timeline, Selznick decides that Titanic is the picture he will make instead.
When Gone With the Wind becomes the runaway hit of the publishing world, Selznick immediately questions his choice. But it’s too late. Jack Warner has secured the property for Bette Davis. But Selznick can't shake the dramatic possibilities of staging a romantic epic on the doomed decks of the lost ocean liner.
The ship’s grandeur, beauty, and many famous passengers—one of America’s wealthiest men, John Jacob Astor IV, died aboard the ship—magnified the mythic quality of the event. White Star Line’s constant boastings of the ship’s “unsinkable” nature punctuated the tragedy with an ironic exclamation point. Litigation and inquests were reported on for a few years afterward. To this day, historical societies are dedicated to sifting through the contents of the ship and its legacy.
Even more amazing is how much, in the late 30s anyway, we still don’t know about the night the Titanic went down. Although we now know that the ship had split apart upon its entry into the Atlantic, and scattered witness statements in the aftermath suggested as such, this wouldn’t be confirmed until the wreckage was found in the mid-1980s.
Only two decades removed from the disaster, the sinking of the Titanic is still somewhat fresh in the minds of the public. That presents a problem.
At the time of Selznick’s decision to undertake a filmed retelling, only three films have been specifically made about the disaster. The first, Saved from the Titanic, was released nearly a month after the ship went down. The ten-minute silent starred Dorothy Gibson, an actress who had actually survived the disaster. Then there was In Nacht und Eis, a 35-minute German silent film also released in 1912. Both were considered lost until the latter was found in the late Nineties.
1929’s Atlantic, produced by British International, was the first full-length talkie made about the disaster (although a silent version was also released). Urban legends about the film suggest Titanic’s mother company, White Star Line, blocked the use of the name, hence Atlantic. However, many of the facts are taken from the real sinking. Despite that, a New York Times review by Mordaunt Hall is particularly cutting about the film's unbelievable scenarios and “puerile” dialogue. The Variety review about the same showing was much kinder.
As proud as the British were of their movie, Atlantic did not do much to cement itself as the definitive version of the disaster for Americans.
“Only David O. Selznick can do that,” thinks David O. Selznick.
SECURING THE TALENT
But in the late Thirties, transatlantic travel is still a viable industry. White Star Line (part of Cunard-White Star Line since 1934) balks at Selznick’s announcement in early 1937 that the biggest disaster in their history will form the basis of his next production.
Selznick has more to worry about than litigation. Although he has made pages upon pages of notes and taken dozens of meetings with witnesses, historians, and engineers, he has no actual plot. He only knows he wants a love story.
He hires two dramatists, Ben Hecht and Sidney Howard, who have recently done uncredited rewrites on his productions of The Prisoner of Zenda and A Star is Born. Together, the trio flesh out the initial story about a well-to-do First Class socialite who falls in love with a Third Class rogue in the days before the Titanic sinks.
Howard is tasked with writing the treatment in September 1937 and when it arrives at Selznick International’s Culver City headquarters some two months later, Selznick has already lost his patience with the writer. What took him so long? The treatment is good, though. With some polishing, Selznick and company think it’s great.
During this time, David O. Selznick has entered into contract negotiations with British director Alfred Hitchcock. Because Titanic is, in many ways, a British story, it only makes sense that a British director should helm it. Hitchcock’s involvement with the project is announced in early 1938, just about the time Cunard-White Star Line has lodged a formal complaint with the State Department.
[This actually happened, by the way. Selznick and Hitchcock were actually going to make a film based on the Titanic disaster and the very idea became a thorn in Cunard-White Star Line’s ass. Per this article in the 22 November 1938 issue of Variety:
“Sentiment in the studios is that there is no further use of catering to the whims of foreign governments that have either completely banned American pictures or have imposed such stringent rules against Hollywood productions that there is no longer any profit in exporting them.”
“Understood the Cunard - White Star Line objected to "Titanic" and made formal complaint to the State Department in Washington, which turned it over to Will Hays.”
The project never came to fruition. Hitchcock and Selznick would make Rebecca together instead.]
However, Hitchcock’s involvement does not last long—and it’s all Clark Gable’s fault.
To play the part of Jack Dawson, the fictional rambling and gambling American who earns his ticket on the Titanic through a lucky hand at poker, Selznick cannot picture anyone but Clark Gable. Actors Errol Flynn, Jeffrey Lynn, and Ronald Colman are also in the running. Flynn is ruled out early, as the character’s penchant for art seemed completely outsized for the actor’s swashbuckling persona. It is decided that only Gable has the right balance of gravitas and charm for the part.
Selznick has another problem. Gable is the #1 actor on the MGM lot and Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, is notoriously stingy with his talent. Mayer has already turned down Jack Warner’s request that Gable play Rhett Butler in Warner Bros.’ troubled, ultimately aborted production of Gone With the Wind.
But as of early 1938, the production is still on, and Mayer is worried about its possible success. When Selznick portrays Titanic as a surefire competitor for Warner's Gone With the Wind, it works. Gable can be his Jack Dawson if MGM can co-produce and release the picture with a claim on half the box office returns.
Although Mayer has no real objection to Hitchcock, he would prefer an MGM director. Selznick realizes that this deal with his father-in-law puts him in danger of losing creative control over the picture. He opts for friend and confidant George Cukor to direct, hoping to have a director completely pliable to his demands. Thus, Hitchcock is reassigned to Rebecca.
Selznick is unsure of who should play Rose DeWitt Bukater, the 17-year-old Philadelphia socialite engaged to a possessive older man so she and her mother, Ruth, can maintain their social status after her father’s death leaves them in a precarious financial position. He screen-tests nearly a hundred actresses between March 1938 and January 1939. Among them are Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, Tallulah Bankhead, Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Joan Fontaine, and Miriam Hopkins.
Goddard and latecomer Vivien Leigh make the cut long enough to be tested in Technicolor sometime in the fall of 1938, while Joan Fontaine is instead given the lesser role of Trudy Bolt, Rose’s maid. After careful consideration, Leigh impresses enough with her ability to volley easily between vulnerability and imperiousness. [As a character, Rose seems to sit between, and also invoke, the standoffishness of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and the fragility of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Leigh’s two Oscar-winning roles]
As Rose’s arrogant and ultimately homicidal fiancé, Selznick wishes to cast 20th Century Fox leading man Tyrone Power, but Daryl F. Zanuck at Fox is still angry about their biggest star being cast in a supporting role in MGM’s Marie Antoinette earlier that year. There is no way they’ll loan him out to MGM again, this time for an even smaller and more villainous role. Rex Harrison, a punchable British actor who has previously co-starred with Vivien Leigh in Storm in a Teacup, is brought in to read for the part and is cast. Nat Pendleton, the solid character actor, is cast as Spicer Lovejoy, Hockley’s suspicious valet.
By this time, Warner Bros. has decided against its lavish production of Gone With the Wind and instead has made Jezebel, a star vehicle for Bette Davis directed by William Wyler. In it, Davis portrays a southern belle whose nose for controversy outweighs even that of Scarlett O’Hara. When Selznick sees the film, he decides Davis’ on-screen aunt, Fay Bainter, is perfect for the role of Ruth DeWitt Bukater, Rose’s stern and socially-ambitious mother. [In real life, Jezebel is seen by some as either Davis’ (1) audition for Scarlett O’Hara or (2) compensation for losing out on the role. Its southern setting and headstrong, Scarlett O’Hara-like heroine reportedly irritated Selznick.]
Production cannot start on the film until late 1938, as this was when Selznick International’s distribution deal with United Artists finally ended. Selznick uses this time to revise the script and cast the rest of the supporting roles.
For the film’s real-life passengers, Selznick plucks actors from previous productions at both Selznick International and MGM. As the salt-of-the-earth, New Money widow Margaret “Molly” Brown, Selznick casts Ona Munson [Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind]. Dignified British actor Leslie Howard [Ashley Wilkes] fills the role of the martyr Thomas Andrews, the Titanic’s chief designer. John Halliday takes on the role of the thick-headed J. Bruce Ismay, the onboard representative of the White Star Line.
In the script, the wealthy First Class passengers all carry a patina of stuffy detachment that comes across as callous at worst and comical at best. These roles require actors who can flesh out broad characters. The First Class cast is rounded out with Harry Davenport as John Jacob Astor IV, Frank Morgan as Colonel Archibald Gracie, Austin Trevor as Isidor Straus, Laura Hope Crews as Ida Straus, Charles Coburn as Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon. Phyllis Povah, who is just about to make her film debut in Cukor’s adaptation of The Women is cast in the role of Lady Duff-Gordon (opposite Coburn). She will make this film first, although it will come out after The Women.
For the largely fictional roster of Third Class passengers, William Bakewell is cast as Jack Dawson’s faithful Italian friend, Fabrizio De Rossi. George Reeves is cast as Irish hothead Tommy Ryan, MGM child star Virginia Weidler plays Cora, Barbara O’Neil is Cora’s mother, Ann Rutherford is Fabrizio’s love interest, with Victor Jory and Jane Darwell as her parents.
When principal photography officially starts on 14 November 1938, Selznick and Cukor begin with action scenes taking place at the time of the iceberg collision.
The first set to be constructed and photographed is the ship’s grimy, steam-filled engine room. This footage, tinged with vivid and evocative sepia and fiery yellows and oranges, is photographed by Lee Garmes.
The margin of error is slight. The scene requires nearly 8,000 gallons of water to be pumped onto the set. Water effects are carefully monitored and controlled. Selznick himself operates the controls that will unleash the water on the set and the extras playing doomed coal trimmers.
The scene's completion is almost too smooth to believe. But principal photography of David O. Selznick’s epic will soon face its first of several setbacks.
Read the next three installments over at Preboot Culture.
What I’m Watching: Right now, for reasons I still cannot fathom, I’m watching The Newsroom again. Yes, again. It’s like my fifth watch-through. And I gotta say… it sucks, I know, but it does get better as it goes on. Not much, but…
What I’m Reading: Rereading Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine. Despite its name, it’s a really well-researched, bitingly funny, and informative look at both women’s careers and lives that isn’t just a misogynistic rehash.
What I’m Listening To: This project has had me listening to Max Steiner’s score for Gone With the Wind and James Horner’s score for Titanic on repeat.
If you’re so inclined, buy me a cup of coffee at Kofi for a one-time donation of $3.
Or support my essays and fiction for as little as $1/month at Patreon!
The Red Sweater will be updated once per… let’s just say it’ll be updated once, periodically, until the end of time. It will cover developments in my life, work, and all the stupid little things I care about. More of my writing can be found at Medium and on my website.