She could carry nearly 3,000 people but had only 20 lifeboats with a capacity for 1178 passengers.  On April 10, 1912, she set sail from Southampton, England for New York on her maiden voyage, carrying 2207 passengers.  Four days later on April 14, at 11:40 p.m., she struck an iceberg near the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland and sank on the 15th without a trace.  More then 1500 lives were lost.

     We're talking about the largest sea disaster the world has ever known.  Many facts and myths surround the bizarre tragedy, but the stark reality remains at the bottom of the North Atlantic, somewhere in the area of latitude 47 degrees N., longitude, 50 degrees 14 feet W.  There lies the wreck of the Titanic, the luxury liner built for the White Star Line by Harland & Wolff Ltd. of Belfast.

     An ITC Film/Marble Arch Production based on the Clive Cussler best-selling novel, "Raise The Titanic," will be released this month.  It is a fictional thriller set in the present day with the sunken Titanic as crux of the story line.  It centers on the incredible and fictitious rare mineral ore that is vital to the success of the U.S. national defense.  The ore lies hidden within the lost ship.  Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are trying to get this ore and, in the process, the U.S. begins to raise the ship to the surface.

The film cost $35 million and took three-and-a-half years to make.  In terms of pre-production, production and post-production.  Marble Arch is entering its fourth year.  "Raise The Titanic" presented logistical maneuvers that would awe the most proficient production company.  There were several starts, stops, writers and shuffling of key personnel.  Dick O'Connor, vice president in charge of production, had a thankless job, filled with detailed horror stories that boggle the mind.  Yet, somehow, it all was brought together.

     "Yes, I would say this was the most complex scheduling operation that I've been involved with because it encompassed so many geographical locations," says O'Connor, "and the timing; if you fell two or three days behind schedule, suddenly your housing would all change, you could no longer secure hotels here or there, and you'd have to be out at a certain time.  Plus the airline schedules --- it was all very complex."

Model Mire

     Stanley Kramer was on the film at the time of pre-production.  Then he left as producer/director and there was an interim period, after which Jerry Jameson was hired as director.  But in the meantime, the model work had to begin.  They needed a large enough Titanic model to give an audience a feeling of reality from the submersibles, which was quite a bit smaller.  The actual Titanic was about 900 feet in length.  The film company built a 55 ½-foot long model with scaled down submersibles.  (They also built a 10-foot model, which was used only momentarily on screen.)

     With that die cast, they had to look around for a place to house the model Titanic in water.  They definitely wanted to shoot the scenes in the water.  But there didn't exist a tank large enough.  The old 20th Century Fox tank in the back lot was taken over by the state and it didn't give the vista that was needed.

     The island of Malta is 60 miles south of Sicily and about 150 miles north of Tunisia, right in the middle of the Mediterranean.  On Malta there exists a surface tank four feet deep that was used in the film "Orca."  It overlooks the Mediterranean and gives a nice horizon line, with clear skies and all the things Marble Arch needed.

     "Well," says O'Connor, "that was fine for our surface salvage Armada when on screen they locate the Titanic with Navy ships.  But we needed a place where the Titanic would be on the ocean floor.  When we first went to Malta, there was just a little farmers valley adjacent to the existing tank.  After a number of negotiations, the Maltese government acquired this land for us and we went into a relationship where we financed the building of a deep water tank."

     The tank alone cost in excess of $3 million.  It is the largest tank in the world (it will be in the Guinness Book of Records) and can be filled in a 24 hour period.  There is a 90-foot turntable on the 'ocean floor' on which the Titanic is set.  When the tank is filled it holds more than nine million gallons of water.  The tank is 39 feet deep from the top to the bottom and about 35 feet where the "ocean floor" rests.

     The tank was constructed by a Maltese architect and builder, with Marble Arch supervising.  However the Maltese government really owns it.  Marble Arch has a working relationship with the Maltese government for the usage of the tank over a 10-year period.  "We want to encourage people to use it, to maintain the tank," says O'Connor.

     The seepage on this tank was 135,000 gallons in a 24-hour period, so Marble Arch had engineers come over and put a special coating on it, the same kind used on landing fields.  The coating is on the sides of the tank and when the tank is filled, the asphalt rubber base is able to give and the sides are protected.

Real Ships

     "We started the surface work here in California," says O'Connor.  "First we shot in San Diego with real naval ships, LPDs, LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks), aircraft carriers, and helicopters.  The telephone company has a huge cable ship that goes around the world laying cable.  It was the first time anyone has allowed to use that and we used it as the Russian ship.  We then had a 'Russian' helicopter take off and head toward the Titanic, once it was raised.  Now we cut and we pick up that continuing shot for real in Piraeus (a Greek port a few miles from Athens).  Then we had to find another helicopter , paint it to match the one in San Diego, match the weather conditions to San Diego and also match the effects and weather with the models in Malta."

     They had to tie all three elements together.  "So it all got a little complicated.  The logistical problems were complex because you started out shooting here (in L.A.) while a unit was getting ready to shoot in San Diego.  The special effects team was getting all the submersibles together.  We had to match a Lockheed submersible, which is a real submersible.  We built a mock-up (it weighs 40 tons).  As a matter of fact, we gave it to Lockheed as a gift afterwards.

     "So, while people were preparing for that, we moved to Washington D.C., and along with that, production people were preparing St. Ives in Cornwall, England, where we had sequences with Alec Guinness.  Then when we moved out of Washington D.C. and completed that body of work which covered a number of locations, we moved back to Studio Center Studio City, (CA) for a day.  We needed that time to shoot an interior.  Then we moved to San Diego where we stayed two weeks.  Basically, we were there the whole time on a Navy ship."

     They hauled down all their lights; their big work lights, their search lights, those that could be dropped into the ocean.  This was the scene where the ship is being prepared to be raised and they used a huge 65-foot hydrogen tank, which was part of the story line; how it gets caught in the empty stack of the Titanic.  Continues O'Connor, "When we finished that, we moved to Cornwall.  We already had a partial United Kingdom crew set up there.  We flew from there to London, then to St. Ives, Cornwall."

Grave Site

     They found a site which was next to an 800-year-old church, that's on the bluff at St. Ives.  It is right next to the Atlantic and is cold and windy; and that is the feeling they wanted.  They were going to lay out an artificial graveyard with headstones that were brought down from Pinewood Studios.

     When they arrived, they had the worst weather that the town had suffered in 135 years.  Continues O'Connor, "I mean the gales, they had the shakes blowing off all the roofs, it ripped off the roof of the church.  Now here's a church that is 800 ears old and the day we arrive the roof is torn off.  We had our workers trying to repair this and you literally could not stand up, it was blowing so bad.

     "Then it started to calm down a little.  Well, out of desperation, we looked around and there was another church nearby.  But it was hallowed ground and they didn't want us there.  We tried to convince the city fathers to get us a plot there.  There was a funeral scheduled for the following day.  And that was very rare because it's and old cemetery and nearly all the plots are filled up.  But, fortunately, we had permission from the family of the deceased to come in the day before the funeral and shoot our scene using their gravesite, we lowered our coffin into the newly dug grave.  And I said, 'Fellas, we'd better do it right today, because tomorrow it's going to have its scheduled occupant.' "

     Marble Arch helped to pay for the actual funeral but there is a real irony at this church site in St. Ives:  The cemetery has two people buried in it who drowned on the Titanic, their bodies being plucked fro the sea in 1912.

Titanic Search

     From England they move to Athens and began filming on the ship that they finally found to duplicate the Titanic once raised.  The search for that ship, the Athinai, took several years.  Says O'Connor, "We looked all over the world because of the architecture of the Titanic; they don't make ships like that anymore.  We found in the harbor of Piraeus literally hundreds of ships . . . it's a burial ground for ships."

     "We came across a cruise ship that was built in the 1930s.  It was bout 550 in length and it had been just sitting there, just rotting away for about 15 years.  And the story behind it was that it had been impounded and taken over by the courts because its sister ship (which was also a cruise ship) had sunk in the Mediterranean with 150 people drowning."

     The owners were two Greek brothers who were found negligent and the courts had impounded all their ships.  They had had about 12 ships and the courts sold them all . . . all except this last one.  And when we first went on it, I remember we had flashlights and it was really kind of eerie.  What had happened was the crew had just abandoned ship.  There were still playing cards and tables set up.  There were still pillows and bedding in the bunks.  The ship was held by the banks and the courts and the remaining brother (who was in his nineties), was protesting our wanting it, so we negotiated.  But then we were getting desperate, "Do we have it, don't we have it?'

     "After a year-and-a-half of negotiating, we still didn't have a ship.  So, we heard about a ship in Hong Kong.  We flew there and climbed aboard the old President Cleveland.  But it didn't work for us because we couldn't figure out how to pull it out of Hong Kong harbor onto the open sea for the open expanse shots that we needed.

     "At the last minute, we went to the courts in Greece (using Greek attorneys) and got the Athinai.  Then we had to send for all our artisans from Rome, London and the U.S. to come and convert the ship to look like the Titanic once it's been raised.

     "They duplicated the pier in Piraeus to look like New York Harbor, as if the Titanic were coming back to the U.S.  We then had matte works and paintings made so you see the New York skyline in the background," says O'Connor.  In Athens they made a call to the Armed Forces Radio and contacted all the military personnel and invited them down with their families to participate in the film.  They had a successful response.  They fixed up a few cars to look like New York police department cars and they supplemented the people on the docks so they had as many American-looking types as possible.

     Now the stock footage used when the boats come out to meet the Titanic had been filmed three years prior, when Stanley Kramer was still on the film.  They had used a camera crew during the Great Boats Parade.  On the spur of the moment, the crew ran out and set up prepositions and photographed all of it with the Goodyear blimp and all the sailboats going by.  Then later they laid in the Titanic and the matte work.  They shot the life size and the model size and incorporated those together.

"Raising" The Ship

     Matt Leonetti was the director of photography for the first unit (with actors) sequences throughout the picture.  But for the model work in Malta they used other camera men.  They had one second unit director for the San Diego portion and one for the underwater shoot in Malta.  They shot the first unit Armada scenes in San Diego but in Malta spent most of the time in 30 feet of water, photographing the salvage operation of raising the Titanic.

     Comments O'Connor, "In the raising of the ship sequence in Malta, I credit John Richardson, who is a British special effects man.  He designed a track which the Titanic rests on.  I don't think that there has ever been captured a ship the size of this being raised, coming right out of the water.  When you add all the sound effects and things creaking . . . it really is quite spectacular."

     In the deep sea tank they raised the model 28 times before they got all the shots required.  there were three things that raised the Titanic technically, which was done in miniature and in full size.  First they used a hydrozine tank.  This was used for the full size ship (a navy boat in San Diego).  Miniature tanks were also put on the models.  The tanks were lowered and bolted on the sides of the Titanic.  They expand to lighter-than-air and that gives the ship the lift it needs.  The second thing used was syntactic foam.  The foam was pumped to the ocean floor via hoses, inside it expands on contact, then it fills up and forces water out.  The third thing used were explosives which helped the ship to finally free itself from all the ocean sediment.

North To Alaska

     Shooting in Alaska, for the Russian island scenes, they ran into some interesting episodes.  They flew into Anchorage and then to Valdez.  But it was snowing and they couldn't get through by normal plane charter so they took a few helicopters and flew for three-and-a-half hours to Valdez.  Their original estimate of cost for helicopters was $10,000 and by the time they got through after five days of being snowed in and stranded with the helicopters, it ended up costing $75,000.

     "It is so spectacular, with the big chunks of ice, bluish ice, you almost think you're on a sound stage, it's so eerie, and then you pull back (with the camera) and you see that you're really in this wilderness with this real bluish glacier," said O'Connor.

     The film used Technivision lenses, which come from a London-based company.  The cameras were Ultracam 35s and for the underwater photography they designed and used their own special housing.  Enline Camera systems developed a special housing for the Technivision lenses.  Kodak Rochester stock was used and the film was recorded in Dolby Stereo.

Lighting

     The underwater lighting was a series of experimentation.  There was a unique problem.  They had three submersibles searching at 12,000 feet for the Titanic on the ocean floor.  So the density down there and what the submersibles could do was limited.  They started out with no light source at all, other then the lights that were generated by the submersibles.  And no one has ever photographed this kind of a situation before.  They went through a trial and error kind of period until they hit upon just the right light source to illuminate some of the reality of seeing the submersibles from an audience point of view and knowing that that's the light source you're seeing.

     Once they had the Titanic lit, they look a little theatrical license because the reality is that you can really only see down to 50 feet, and the Titanic is a 900-foot vessel.  So, in the picture, you never really see the entire Titanic until you get it to the surface.  Other than the frog men on the surface they didn't have any human beings swimming around on screen because they would need to be in a pressurized protective sphere to go down to 12,000 feet and, of course, at that depth, it's pitch black.  But in the tank at 35 they had men operating down there with cameras, special effects, setting the explosives charges and photographing all of it.

     The submersibles were operated by remote control and, though they were tiny, you could see their little lights go on and their little propellers going around.  These submersibles are in proportion to a real submersible (as compared to the real Titanic) and they match the real submersibles that were shot in San Diego.  According to O'Connor, "The matching is done so well that you can't tell the difference between the real ships and the models."

     "Raise the Titanic" is a Lord Grade Presentation of a Martin Starger Production, produced by William Frye and directed by Jerry Jameson, starring Jason Robards, Richard Jordan, David Selby, Anne Archer and Alec Guinness.•

Liner Buff Surfaces Rare Titanic Photos

 "The night the Titanic hit an iceberg, its sailing position was for rough weather.  It was speeding ahead as if in choppy waters.  But that night there wasn't any wind; the ocean was like a sheet of glass.  There wasn't any moon and it was terribly cold.  If there had been a wind, the waves would have broken up the base of the iceberg and the crew would have seen a phosphorus line snowing.  And if the moon had been out, the white of the iceberg would have been reflected.  The iceberg that the Titanic actually hit was only a small one, 65 or 70 feet high.

     "The morning of the disaster when the survivors were picked up by the Carpathia there were 30 or 40 icebergs in the area that were huge:  200 feet high, and the Carpathia itself missed several icebergs in the process."

     Information like the above could only come from people who have been involved with the Titanic's history for a long time.  In this case, it's from Charles Ira Sachs, sounder and president of the Oceanic Navigation Research Society, Inc., credited in "Raise The Titanic" for supplying technical and historic detail about the ill-fated liner.  Study of the ship has been Sachs' personal hobby many years.  He has secured exclusive rights to the rare Titanic construction photos and plans of shipbuilders Harland & Wolff, Belfast, Ireland.

     Marble Arch began building its models for "Raise The Titanic," but had to stop when it came to the stern area of the ship because there wasn't enough information.

     Fortunately for Marble Arch, Sachs had become known for his Titanic expertise on "SOS Titanic," EMI's ABC-TV movie airing last Sept 23 and released theatrically worldwide.  Sachs had been involved in the show's development with producer Lou Morheim.  However, following a production dispute with EMI, Sachs held a news conference pointing out what he claims were historical inaccuracies in EMI's film. (On Location, Sept./Oct 1979).

     Marble Arch negotiated with Sachs and received pictures so that model work could proceed.

     "It was basically of the whole stern area with propellers," explains Sachs, "and the rudder area.  They didn't know what the props looked like and I had 15 to 20 photographs.  So, I gave them photos and information on the ship's building.  There were other views that showed the riveting details along the hull of the ship, which they couldn't see, and the prints that I have are so much sharper that we were gluing rivets on the models as small as the head of a pin.  They were willing to go to that much detail."

     Sachs also provided most of 24 rare photographs used by Gene Kraft in the opening title sequence.  Marble Arch realized that today's younger movie-going audience knows little, if anything, about the Titanic or what it looked like.  So, Kraft incorporated the photos into the opening to visually educate and set up the audience, according to Sachs.

     More information on that fateful night involves the fact that mostly third class passengers died, due to barriers within the ship, and that 705 people were saved.  "But," says Sachs, "it was from the Titanic disaster that a lot of changes came about.  The Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, were important in the development of ocean liners that came after them.

     "Out of the disaster came these changes:  (1) all ships now have to have a 24-hour wireless operation; (2) the construction of the ships' inside was changed with greater bulkheads for safety; (3) the sea lanes were shifted further south in the spring time to avoid icebergs and (4) the international ice patrol was formed to chart icebergs."