Titanic (Scriptment)

OPENING CARDS PLAY OVER THE FOLLOWING:

THE FIRST IMAGE is of a brush carefully cutting a line of gold paint onto black. A work-gnarled hand dips the brush into a tray of paint and continues with great care... edging a large gold figure.

WIDER, seeing the PAINTER, a weathered Irishman in dark wool workclothes. It is night and he is backlit by worklights, puffing on a pipe. A shower of sparks rain down orange behind him. We hear CLANGING, men shouting, and the sound of a HYDRAULIC RIVETER. He paints another stroke.

DOWN ANGLE, seeing the painter's black scaffold sway slightly as he shifts position. 80 feet below him, workers are like ants moving through the worklights. We see a cart being pulled by a team of twenty horses. On it, dwarfing the men, is a 15-ton ship's anchor.

THE PAINTER finishes his last stroke and ponders his work. He sets his brush down. Then, as if responding to some inexplicable feeling of dread, he slowly moves his hand in the sign of the cross over his chest.

WIDE SHOT, from behind him as he finishes crossing himself. In letters four feet high, FILLING FRAME from side to side is one word:

TITANIC:

FADE TO BLACK.

IN THE BLACKNESS we hear the lonely ping of a bottom sonar. Then two faint lights appear, close together... growing brighter.

They each resolve into clusters of lights, which are soon revealed to be two DEEP SUBMERSIBLES, falling toward us. We are somewhere in the ocean deep, looking up at two subs freefalling like express elevators.

One is ahead of the other, and passes close enough to fill frame, looking like a spacecraft blazing with lights, bristling with insectile manipulators and mechanisms we can only guess at.

TILTING DOWN to follow it as it descends away into the limitless blackness below. Soon they are fireflies, then stars.

Then gone.

(CREDITS CONTINUE OVER THESE ANGLES)

ANOTHER ANGLE, on one of the falling submersibles, called MIR ONE. PUSHING IN on its circular viewports to see the occupants.

INSIDE, it is a cramped seven-foot sphere, crammed with equipment and controls. NIKOLAI ANATOLAVICH, the sub's pilot, sits hunched over his guitar, strumming a simple melody and singing in Russian. The other occupant of the sphere is BROCK LOVETT.

LOVETT is in his late forties, deeply tanned, and likes to wear his Nomex suit unzipped to show the gold from famous shipwrecks covering his gray chest hair. He is a wily, fast-talking treasure hunter, a salvage superstar who is part historian, part adventurer and part vacuum cleaner salesman. Right now, he is propped against the CO2 scrubber, fast asleep and snoring almost in rhythm to Nikolai's song. Nikolai glances at the bottom sonar and sets his guitar down.

THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. A pale, dead-flat lunar landscape. It gets brighter, lit from above, as MIR ONE enters FRAME and drops to the seafloor in a downblast from its thrusters. It hits bottom after its two and a half mile fall with a loud BONK.

INSIDE THE SUB, Lovett jerks awake at the landing.

NIKOLAI:

(heavy Russian accent)

We are here.

Lovett looks out the port in time to see the other sub, MIR TWO drop down nearby, trimming out gracefully a few feet above the bottom.

INSIDE MIR TWO, another Russian pilot, the unflappable YURI SHTRODAHK, is at the controls. Next to him is a bearded wide-body named LEWIS BODINE, almost stuffed into the remaining space. Lewis is an R.O.V. (REMOTELY OPERATED VEHICLE) pilot and is the resident Titanic expert. He grabs the UQC mike.

BODINE:

Hey, Mir One, do you always have to land like a sack of cement?

MINUTES LATER:
THE TWO SUBS ON THE MOVE, skimming over the seafloor to the sound of sidescan sonar and the THRUM of big thrusters.

LOVETT:

Come left a little. She's right in front of us, thirty meters out.

NIKOLAI:

Do you see it? I don't see it... there!

Out of the darkness, like a ghostly apparition, the bow of ship appears. Its knife-edge prow is coming straight at us, seeming to plow the bottom sediment like ocean waves. It towers above the seafloor, standing just as it landed 83 years ago.

THE TITANIC. Or what is left of her.

Our POV rises and we pass over the bow railing, intact except for an overgrowth of "rusticles" draping it like mutated Spanish moss. Unrolling beneath us now is the seemingly endless forecastle deck, with its massive anchor chains still laid out in two neat rows, its bronze windlass caps gleaming.

REVERSE ANGLE, showing MIR ONE traveling a few feet above the deck. Its passage stirs an orange cloud of rusty silt behind it.

INSIDE, Nikolai lies face down with the controls in each hand, staring intently out the small viewport. Lovett, riding shotgun, peers out another port, gazing at the sad spectacle of the great wreck.

LOVETT:

It still gets me every time.

NIKOLAI:

Is just your guilt because of stealing from the dead.

MIR TWO motors along the massive hull of the Titanic nearby, moving along a seemingly endless wall of riveted steel plates, which disappears beyond its lights in all directions. The glass in the portholes reflects the sub's lights.

LOVETT (V.O.)

Right. Let's go to work.

(he hits a switch)

Lights on.

Brilliant REMOTE FLOODLIGHTS pop on, illuminating the hull. These high-tech floodlights are on stands, dotted around and even on the wreck itself. Clearly they have been placed there on previous dives. Combined with the lights from the subs, they reveal as much of the vast shape of Titanic as underwater visibility allows.

The great ocean liner sits upright on the bottom, two and a half miles under the surface of the North Atlantic. A place where there is no light, no warmth, no sound. And where she has rested since the night she dropped here unannounced April 15th, 1912.

The lights and machinery give the site the feeling of an archeological dig, and it is clear these guys have been here for a while. In fact this is dive number 12 in an exhaustive series of salvage dives designed to recover the most valuable artifacts from inside the ship.

The 22 foot subs are like bugs moving next to the great sad ruin. Its vast bulk goes on into the darkness, far beyond the limits of visibility.

In 1912 it was the largest moving object ever made... 882 feet long, and weighing 46,000 tons. Its sinking shocked the world like the Challenger explosion and the Kennedy assassination combined. It is hard for us to understand the psychological impact of this disaster in its time.

It signaled the end of the age of innocence, the gilded Edwardian age... where science would allow us to master the world, bringing only change for the better in an upward spiral of peace, prosperity and enlightenment. Within the previous decade the automobile, the airplane, electric light, wireless communication, telephones, motion pictures, and Kellogg's Cornflakes had gone from invention to commonplace. There seemed to be no limit to what the human mind could accomplish. Man had mastered the physical world, and civilized his own base nature.

Yet within another few short years the world would see eleven million deaths to a world war made vastly more savage by technological advancements, and another 17 million deaths to the great influenza epidemic... a demonstration of how easily the natural world could lash back against our supposed mastery.

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