Last Of A Kind:
The Sinking Of Lew Grade

 Book written by Quentin Falk & Dominic Prince.
Published by QUARTET BOOKS (UK)
ISBN 0-7043-2498-9
 First published in 1987

“The film production schedule has never been stronger. Choice is invidious but if I were to single out one film for personal mention I would choose Raise The Titanic. This was a very costly film which took three years to make and I am hopeful of a very great success.”                                                                                                        -Lew Grade

     If a film empire had to founder on the fortunes of a single movie, how ironic it is that it should have been one as relentlessly mundane as Raise The Titanic. Cleopatra, which almost perplexed Twentieth Century-Fox nearly twenty years earlier, had been, at least, a consistently spectacular beast of a film that even some critics has finally to concede was patchily rather admirable. Some revisionists consider the film a masterpiece. Raise The Titanic will be remembered for three reasons, none of  them remotely artistic: its unfortunate nautical connotations, its moment in corporate history and , principally, its cost, the cost of production and the cost to Lord Grade as the company he had helped found was swept inexorably away from him.

     To attribute the collapse of a film company’s fortunes to a mere six reels of indifferent celluloid is, of course, absurdly simplistic. As the ultimate example of product nurtured within that self-destructive framework, Raise The Titanic was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. At $36 million – nearly £17 million in the sterling equivalent of that day – it was some straw. The world first heard about the plans to make Clive Cussler’s best-selling novel in May 1977 at Grade’s annual Film Festival party for the industry and press, leavened, as ever, by the merest sprinkling of “stars”, in this case the lugubrious Charles Bronson and his wife and Jill Ireland, who was hobbling around on diamond-encrusted crutches.

     A year later, the main focus was Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch for his Muppet Movie, and Messrs Savalas, Lancaster and Coburn for Legend Of The Lone Ranger – none of which casting never incidentally ever actually transpired – before Grade got round to detailing that “six million dollars have already been spent on model work for Raise The Titanic” . Later he again intoned “I’m not going to be browbeaten by the major distributors. If  they push me to far, you’ll soon see an ITC distribution set-up in the States. And I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t get a lot of Oscar nominations  this year!”.

Above: Lord Lew Grade

     Grade announced an actual start-date on Raise The Titanic “next month in Malta” (it would be October) “and costing between £18 and £20 million”, there was by now more a sense of déjà vu about some vaguely familiar blockbuster than the eager anticipatory buzz of anything even remotely new. What most guests at that huge lunch party on 17 May 1979 could never have guessed  was just how much of an expensive, troublesome millstone Raise The Titanic has already become to the Grade coffers, following the fateful decision to take on the project more than two years earlier.

     How different history might have been had Grade trusted his original instinct when he turned down an initial approach from authors Clive Cussler’s agent – even if it had been for the wrong reason, believing the book to be yet another yarn about the liner’s sinking. Then Martin Stager, Grade’s number one man in America, told him Stanley Kramer (producer-director of films like The Defiant Ones and Judgement At Nuremberg) had recommended the book, and Richard Smith, chairman of General Cinema, gave him a thick box and told him he’d enjoy the pages crammed inside. Finally reading the novel, Lord Grade was on to Clive Cussler’s agent early next day, a Friday. Grade described what followed to the New York Times:

“I said, I’ve read The Titanic; I want it. I’ve got several offers. I’m coming to New York Monday, you be at my hotel”…He comes in the afternoon about four o’clock…”I want to do a deal, you wont leave this room until we do a deal. I don’t want bidding. You are either people in a position to do a dear, or else I forget it”…He said he would have to go back to Clive Cussler. I said “Do it now, or I withdraw my offer, here’s the telephone”… And he telephoned Clive, and he said “OK, provided I have a walk-on part and one sentence”.

Above: Martin Starger

      In fact, it turned out that Grade had been beaten by Kramer to the property and so he had to pay a reported $400,000 for the transfer of rights with Kramer also attached as director. According to Bernard Kingham, Grade’s deputy at ITC, the British arm of the film empire, the first major problems were with the script.

     While embroiled in the long process of trying to lick the script into shape, there was also the matter of making elaborate pre-production models and finding a suitable tank in which filming of those models could most effectively be undertaken – some eight models in all: the Titanic itself, four United States warships, two tugs and a New York Harbour fire ship. Bernard Kingham recalls going to the States and, during a visit to the CBS studios, being taken to a workroom and shown “these fantastic models”, the principal one being the Titanic – fifty-five feet long, twelve feet high and weighing 10 tons. It really was remarkable. They said “the intention was to build a tank in the grounds of the studio”, which never actually came to fruition. There were various reasons why the tank could not be built at the studios: first, whenever they started to dig, the hole would fill with water; second it was never fully appreciated at the outset just how large a tank it would have to be to house a fifty-five-feet-long model under the Atlantic. Any CBS studio plans were abandoned and Kingham was charged with hunting down an appropriate facility.

Above: The 55½ foot Titanic model

“The only tank I knew about was in Malta, but the Maltese tank was a surface one – that is, for models operated by people standing in the water, so obviously that was of no value at all. Anyway I went there for discussions with the authorities but didn’t get a friendly reception. You have to remember this was at the height of some political problems with Mintoff and they were generally pretty unreceptive to my idea of acquiring some land and building another tank next to the existing one”.

     The Maltese melted and gave Kingham the go-ahead to build a brand-new tank so long as he used Maltese labour and the expertise of a Maltese engineer. Kingham found the latter in a talented young man called John Gambina, who had qualifications from Liverpool (England) University. The specifications were crucial: the tank would have to be at least thirty-five feet deep, saucer-shaped because of water pressure, 240 feet across in order to accommodate the model on the bottom at sufficient depth, and capable of being filled and filtered overnight so as to be ready for a crew to shoot the following morning. There would be a fantastic 9,000,000 gallons of water in that tank, so that meant pumping it in at a rate of more than a million gallons an hour which in turn meant, apart from anything else – and there were quite a lot else – the necessity of having a super-efficient pumping system. Kingham recalled:

“I had been out in Malta quite a while and noticed the local electricals were very unreliable. You’d be sitting in your hotel room at eight o’clock in the evening when all the lights would go out and that would be it for the night. So we went to Holland and managed to find four great diesel pumps that had been setting concrete on the seashore. We got them each pumping a quarter of a million gallons an hour. The trouble was, although we had these fantastic pumps, we had terrible trouble with the pipes. They kept bursting because of the pressure of the water and we kept having to replace them”.

Above: The model begins its descent to the bottom of the tank.

     Building the tank was an epic itself. The first sod was dug in the November of 1978 and it wasn’t completed until the following September. Constructed from earth, delivered month after month to the site by a fleet of trucks, it had to be impacted by the biggest bulldozers that could be found in Europe, seven days a week, regularly watered, them faced with tar and finally covered in a sort of tarmacadam material to make it waterproof as possible. So the costs began to spiral, not eased by some extraordinarily wasteful diversions: one being the huge metal gantry, to be suspended over the tank so that the main model could be hauled in and out while the tank was emptying. The gantry was submitted for stress tests, the upshot being that it was declared that not only would the gantry be unable to pick anything up but that it was also likely to collapse under its own weight. The original gantry duly arrived, forty feet short. It was never used, and subsequently lay mouldering by the side of the tank – an estimated $200,000 blooper.

     Then there was to be the turntable said to be needed to be able to urn the model while it lay at the foot of the tank. The turntable was built to the specification, which entailed being suspended on wheels and being given a sandy seabed-type covering.  Kingham recalls:

“First of all, a lot of sand fell off the turntable and down into the tracks so the bloody thing wouldn’t turn. Second, the weight of the water in the tank was so great the wheels collapsed. And third, once you’re underwater, you’re weightless anyway, and if you’re a cameraman you don’t need to turn the boat, you just drift round with the camera. But there we are, they would insist on these things”.

Above: Bernard Kingham

     Away from the tank, the project was undergoing endless bouts of chiselling and chipping to the creative elements. As the script rebounded into constant rewrite, so the great manes of Hollywood were variously touted for leading roles. Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and even Robert Redford were all, at different times, bruited to play the absurdly-named Dirk Pitt, the yarn’s hero, a sort of secret agent-come-marine biologist. Not surprisingly, they all declined the privilege. The eventual line-up was along way from the superstar promise implicit in such a big budget enterprise:  Richard Jordan, David Selby, Anne Archer, Jason Robards and Sir Alec Guinness, who was given a silly hat and a delighted location near St Ives (Cornwall, England) to reproduce John Bigalow, eighty-seven-year-old survivor of the original sinking, in what perhaps was an idea by the producers for Guinness to lend an Obi-Wan-Kenobi, spectral-like presence to the proceedings.

     While filming in Washington DC, on a large glacier in Alaska, in San Diego and in England helped trace in the story’s labyrinthine governmental, navel and human sub-plots, the key to the whole shoot would eventually be, first, its Greek phase and, climactically, the model shoot in Malta. It was, initially at the Faliron near Athens, around the turn of the year (1980), that the derelict passenger liner S.S Athinai was dressed to appear as if it had been raised following sixty-eight years under the Atlantic, with clever duplication of the Titanic’s grand ballroom, main passenger lounge and section of exterior deck. The S.S Athinai did stout service in the circumstances but may never have got its film break had an altogether more grandiose plan been enacted. Veteran production designer John De Cuir – who knew a thing or two about escalating budgets, having survived the rigours of Cleopatra – had scouted far and wide trying to find a vessel that conformed to Titanic’s basic configuration. In frustration, but presumably with authorization, he approached the city of Long Beach, California, and offered the equivalent of £2 million to buy the Queen Mary. The long Beach authorities swiftly rejected the notion “It sounds crazy”, De Cuir later said, “but you have to be crazy in this business”. In stead, the film company spent $3 million on the two-week Athens phrase, injecting all the money into the Greek economy, as an executive put it to the visiting press, without so much as a flicker of irony. It’s likely that even before a foot of film had been turned, around $11 million had already been spent on Raise The Titanic. Just 46 million in, before the tank had been started, Kingham remembers getting very short shrift indeed from Grade when he hazard the suggestion that it might be wiser to abort at this comparatively premature stage: “ I was told to mind my own business and go away!”. Grade clearly had more sympathy with the philosophy, as postulated by the films producer William Frye: “There is a mystique about the Titanic that will draw people into the theatre. The name alone is so potent”.

     So how was the $36 million movie’s most memorable moment executed?. (for memorable, it has to be admitted, it undoubtedly is, particularly set against the overall turgidity of the rest).  Said Kingham:

     Which is just what happened, the remarkable result then captured for posterity on a high-speed camera, showing 350 frames per second, fifteen times the normal ratio. “A water logged mass of unresolved subplots, insufficiently identified characters and a complexity of technical jargon”, was how critic Marjorie Bilbow would later describe Raise The Titanic in the London-based trade paper Screen International. Shortly after the US premiere, Grade allowed himself a rare hint of pessimism when described the opening box-office figures as “disappointing”. The truth is that for the most costly film yet in an already costly line-up serviced in the States by Grade and his brother, Lord Delfont’s joint distribution organization, the grosses were a disaster.

Above: Lew Grades Brother- Lord Delfont

     Meanwhile, back in Malta, Mr Narcy Calamatta, managing director of Mediterranean Film Facilities, landlord of what had proved to be a watery grave, was left to ruminate on what might have been:

      “It was a gamble that nobody could know would fail. The plan was to use the models again, modified in a series of three epic sea films which would more than justify their original cost, But it all depended on the success of Raise The Titanic which, of course, never happened”.    

“Give me an idea typed on one page and, if I like it, I can make someone a very rich man”                        -Lew Grade