How “I'm the King of the World!” Happened: Inside Titanic's Historic Oscar Haul

The king of the world’s court was sorely lacking a tailor. At the Oscar
ceremony in 1998, Titanic won 11 Academy Awards and tied Ben-Hur for the
most wins by a single film in history. Director James Cameron had a lot
on his mind that night at the Shrine Auditorium, an evening that was the
culmination of years of grueling, nonstop work. With a crew of
thousands, a cast of hundreds, and the backing of two studios, his film
was among the last honest-to-goodness Hollywood epics of the 20th
century. On a more personal front, Cameron’s tailor had failed to show
to take in the waistband of his tuxedo, so for each of the three times
he won—for his editing and directing, and for best picture—he had to
hoist his pants up as he took the stage. It was his next-to-last speech
that became one of the most memorable—and criticized—Oscar
acceptances of all time. After thanking his actors, his producer, Jon
Landau, his parents, and his then wife, Linda Hamilton, Cameron raised
his trophy over his head and shouted, “I’m the king of the world!,” a
re-purposed bit from a signature scene in his own film in which Leonardo
DiCaprio’s Jack jubilantly screams from the bow of the ship. (Cameron’s
critics might have found more levity in the moment had they been aware
of what he was risking to hold that Oscar aloft.)

“I now realize what was wrong with my choice to do that,” Cameron said
in November as Paramount prepared to re-release Titanic in theaters for
its 20th anniversary. “It wasn’t the exact content of the line as much
as the fact that I was quoting my own movie, and I didn’t realize how
that was wrong. . . . There’s a hubris in assuming that everybody in
the audience has seen your movie, even though you won. Or that they’re
actually all fans. It was all phrased pretty carefully, but the error
was that I was actually acting prideful about winning, and with a
reference to my own film.”

So much had led to that moment of audacity as Cameron took a victory lap
for his career passion project. He had crammed himself into a tiny
Russian submarine to personally view the wreckage of the real Titanic,
12,500 feet below the chilly North Atlantic. He’d built a 40-acre studio
in Baja, Mexico; designed a 10-story, 775-foot replica of the original
ship; pleaded with executives at Fox and Paramount for more money and
more time to finish the film; and surrendered his front-end fee to get
both. At one point during the turmoil, he had run into News Corporation
chairman and C.E.O. Rupert Murdoch on the Fox lot.

“I guess I’m not your favorite person,” Cameron said he told the media
mogul. “But the movie is going to be good.”

“It better be a damn sight better than good,” Murdoch said.

“Six months prior to release, it was pretty ugly,” said Bill Mechanic,
then the unfortunate Twentieth Century Fox executive charged with
reining in Cameron. “We were watching the dailies, so we actually
thought we had a movie. But the press was overwhelmingly negative. They
turned us into a $200 million underdog. It helped us tremendously with
the Oscars. We weren’t the gorilla we would have been. . . . We
weren’t the favorite. We were getting kicked.”

When the risk became too much for Fox to shoulder alone, Paramount came
aboard as a second backer and picked up the domestic rights to the film.
Eventually the budget would balloon to $200 million, at the time the
most expensive movie ever made. Sherry Lansing, then Paramount’s
chairman, was awestruck by Cameron’s footage and was delighted to share
the completed film with the doubters at Titanic’s premiere. “There was
so much Schadenfreude in the room because of the budget overruns, the
delays,” Lansing said. “Jim was under enormous pressure. But when
people finally saw it, they were just blown away. When the ship comes
into port, the audience applauded. We knew we had the goods.”

Mechanic recalled the premiere as “the most intense industry screening
I’ve ever seen. The heads of all the studios were there. I think
everybody came to see us get buried. It was completely the reverse.”

The reviews were mostly positive, save for a particularly scathing one
by influential Los Angeles Times senior critic Kenneth Turan. “What
really brings on the tears is Cameron’s insistence that writing this
kind of movie is within his abilities,” Turan wrote. “Not only isn’t
it, it isn’t even close.” After his initial negative review, Turan
wrote another piece slamming the film in the days before the Oscars,
inspiring Cameron to fax a reply to the paper’s newsroom. “Forget about
Clinton—how do we impeach Kenneth Turan?,” Cameron wrote.

Awards season was simpler 20 years ago—there weren’t awards bloggers
and obscure critics’ groups to woo. The strategy for Fox and Paramount
was just to get the film to Academy members, who rewarded it with
nominations in 14 categories, including for actress Kate Winslet,
supporting actress Gloria Stuart, composer James Horner, and
cinematographer Russell Carpenter. The other movies nominated for best
picture that year were As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will
Hunting, and L.A. Confidential, a strong mix of dramas and comedies with
sharp writing and engaging performances, but Titanic had something the
others didn’t, a scope that reminded the industry of the kind of movies
it used to make. “Titanic was the kind of big, epic, old-style
Hollywood film that created this town, and it employed tons of people,”
said Tony Angellotti, an awards strategist who was advising on Miramax’s
campaign for Good Will Hunting that year.

There was, however, one glaring omission in the film’s Oscar prospects:
DiCaprio, whose charm had been such a key part of attracting the film’s
avid female audience, was snubbed for a nomination. Hundreds of outraged
fans began calling the Academy, and Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel devoted
a segment of their show, At the Movies, to the oversight. DiCaprio, who
had been nominated at age 19 for 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,
would end up skipping the telecast.

By Oscar day, Titanic was in its 14th week of release, well on its way
to becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time before another
Cameron movie, 2009’s Avatar, ultimately eclipsed it. Audiences around
the world were still enjoying a good cry about Rose and Jack’s tragic
boat ride; “My Heart Will Go On,” the sappy Celine Dion song that ends
the film, was inescapable on the radio (and would go on to win an
original-song Oscar); and Cameron’s cinematic imagery had become so
synonymous with romance that cruise-ship lines were continually having
to remove passengers from the bows of their ships.

But Cameron still hadn’t exhaled. And on the floor of the Shrine during
the Oscar telecast he got into a screaming match with—of all the 1990s
Hollywood characters—Harvey Weinstein. The dispute was over how the
Miramax executive had mishandled Mimic, a film made by Cameron’s friend
Guillermo del Toro. “Harvey came up glad-handing me, talking about how
great [Miramax] was for the artist, and I just read him chapter and
verse about how great I thought he was for the artist based on my
friend’s experience, and that led to an altercation,” Cameron said.
“The music had started to play to get back in our seats. The people
around us were saying, ‘Not here! Not here!’ Like it was O.K. to fight
in the parking lot, but it was not O.K. there when the music was playing
and they were about to go live.”

By the time the best-picture Oscar was announced, Landau had his doubts.
“I remember thinking in my head, Oh boy, L.A. Confidential got more
applause in the room than we did,” he said. When Titanic won, it was
like a valve was opened. “Titanic was a movie wrought with pressure
throughout, from the production through the release. That night marked
the first time the pressure was lifted in two-plus years.”

Cameron’s best-director speech did not land the way he’d hoped—the
audience in the Shrine interpreted his exuberance as obnoxiousness,
which he realized as soon as he saw the look on presenter Warren
Beatty’s face. “His expression was like, ‘What the fuck were you
thinking?,’ ” Cameron recalled.

A few months after the Oscars, Mechanic had lunch with Cameron to see if
the director was ready to get back to work on his next film. During the
making of Titanic, the two had been under siege and often at odds as the
studio executive’s fiscal responsibilities and the director’s artistic
ambitions clashed. Cameron signed a Titanic poster for Mechanic, which
still hangs in the producer’s office today. “We survived,” Cameron
wrote.