Titanic

Wednesday, August 23 at 7:00 PM — Music Box Theatre — 3733 N. Southport Ave
Tickets: $11 at the door, or purchase in advance

TITANIC
Directed by James Cameron • 1997
Titanic was released a day after I turned 14. I saw it at my little local cinema, and then, lured back by unknowable forces beyond my control, I saw the three-hour-plus epic again, and again, and again. Deranged teens like me helped make Titanic the highest-grossing film of all time (it would be surpassed over a decade later by Cameron’s Avatar) and skyrocket co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into the stratosphere. Looking back on the film now, details of the production and release read like a rap sheet of unfathomable numbers and myth-making factoids of the following sort: that they built a 7/8ths scale replica of the actual Titanic; that it sat in a tank of 17 million gallons of water so huge Fox had to build a studio in Mexico big enough to hold it; that the film was 100 million dollars over budget; that James Cameron told studio execs they would have to “kill him” if they wanted to make cuts; that it won 11 Oscars; that it ran in some theaters continuously for nearly a year, the film prints becoming so worn out the studio had to send replacements; that Kate Winslet chipped her elbow bone and nearly drowned; that someone spiked the seafood chowder on set with actual PCP, sending quite a few people to the hospital, and so on. And because 26 years later we still cannot resist the lure of this extraordinary product of mind-boggling labor and hubris, we’re bringing it back. Not in high frame rate, or in 3D, but just the way those 14-year-old girls saw it, on unsinkable 35mm film, which looks especially beautiful when viewed through a curtain of tears.  (RL)
194 min • Paramount • 35mm from Chicago Film Society Collections, permission Paramount
Preceded by: “Sailboat” (Joyce Wieland, 1967) – 3 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema