On Valentine's Day, selected audiences returned to the Titanic, to preview the 3D re-release of the most popular movie romance of all time.
The attendees included Facebook fans of the movie, people who know the dialogue and soundtrack by heart. But in an informal poll, few knew that the movie wasn't filmed in the frigid North Atlantic or on a Hollywood soundtage but in Mexico, a few miles south of Tijuana.
In the mid '90s, producer and director James Cameron was determined to make a film about the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic. The story had been told before, in a fine 1958 film called A Night To Remember; but interest in the sinking was rekindled in 1985 when oceanographers discovered the site in the North Atlantic where 1,500 people perished.
Cameron, the director of the sci-fi flicks "Aliens" and "The Terminator," got his feet wet in aquatic cinema with "The Abyss" and he knew that making "Titanic" would be expensive.
Cameron scouted seaside locations around the world where he could make his movie without paying American wages. He settled upon a 35-acre site in Rosarito, Mexico, 18 miles south of the U.S. border.. In 100 days, 20th Century Fox built a complex there with the largest outdoor water tank in the world (17 million gallons) the largest indoor tank (5 million gallons), storage sheds for 2,000 wardrobes and a 900-foot-long facsimile of the fabled ocean liner.
Although most of the key personnel were Americans and many of them commuted across the border (in the days before a passport was mandatory), filming in Mexico reduced the budget to "only" $200 million.
Cameron's gamble paid off. Titanic, released in December 1997, became the highest grossing film of all time (not adjusted for inflation) and won a record-tying 11 Academy Awards.
For a few years, Fox maintained the Rosarito facility as a combination tourist attraction and production hub. Much of "Master and Commander," the first "X-Men" movie and Tim Burton's remake of "Planet of the Apes" were filmed there. But eventually Fox sold the property to Mexican entrepreneurs, who run it today as a rental facility called Baja Film Studios.
Tourists are still invited to visit and see how movies are made; but because of the new passport regulations, there are fewer day-trippers from the U.S. On the afternoon when my wife and I visited, we were literally the only tourists there, and the young tour guides were surprised to see us. We got hands-on demonstrations of green-screen backgrounds, makeup techniques, and the optical effects that can make a bathtub boat look like an ocean liner. Then we toured the restaurant where Rose (Kate Winslet) dined with her snooty relatives (complete with "H.M.S. Titanic" on the china) and the jail cell where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) was chained to the bars as the ship sank.
When we posed on the stand-alone bow where Jack and Rose gazed out to sea, we felt like the king and queen of the world.
"Titanic" in 3D opens in theaters on April 4.
