Description:
Paula Parisi, who spent a decade covering tech-heavy films for The Hollywood Reporter, is among the very, very few journalists whom the notoriously thin-skinned director James Cameron trusts. He granted her amazing access to Titanic, the costliest film ever made. Parisi puts you there on that fascinating, top-secret set, while Kate Winslet flirtatiously calls out from the dark, moody grotto of the 100-foot water tank to Leo DiCaprio, "Darling! Come join me on the debris!" We get privileged glimpses of Cameron shaping his star's performance, right down to his gait in his crucial entrance to the high-society dinner--"You're a little too funky chicken there, Leo ... don't nod to the waiter!" She has great details about the infamous incident in which some jerk poisoned the crew with the terrifying hallucinogen PCP, sending 56 people to the emergency room. PCP transformed Cameron into a replica of Schwarzenegger in his film Terminator. "Life imitates art," Cameron's pal Lewis Abernathy tells Parisi. "One eye was completely red, just like the Terminator eye. A pupil, no iris, beet red. The other eye looked like he'd been sniffing glue since he was four ... I'm thinking call an organ donor bank, next of kin ... And he puts on this big ol' grin and says, 'Finish the movie, Lewis, you know what to do!'" The set medic tamed panic with pop music, just like the Titanic orchestra--only Roy Orbison instead of ragtime. Star Bill Paxton made a daring escape from the hospital and got back to the set in time for the conga line. Cameron's ego is so damn can-do that he feels he could have saved the passengers of Titanic if he had been the captain. To save everybody, Cameron tells Parisi, the captain simply should have loaded everybody aboard the iceberg! "They would have been cold, but they would have lived." Parisi is the opposite of the typical scorpion-like showbiz reporter; she is pro-Cameron. To get to her unrivalled inside scoops, you have to wade through gushing sentences such as, "The symmetry and perfection of the room are as awesome as anything out of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or The Shining." She does not dwell on the script's weaknesses, as most of the press and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did. But if you have a scintilla of interest in how this infinitely difficult and technically innovative film was made, Parisi's is the book to buy. --Tim Appelo
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