The ill-fated passengers who paid $250,000 apiece to visit the wreck of the Titanic recently, but were killed before they reached it, were part of a long line of people fascinated by the tragedy — and companies looking to make money on it.
First in line after the April 1912 tragedy were businesses that made and distributed newsreels to be screened in movie theaters. Within days of the ship’s sinking, short films claiming to show the great ship before its fateful voyage began playing in packed movie houses and theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. The only problem? Almost no footage of the ship existed.
No matter! Some of the newsreel companies got their hands on footage of the Titanic’s twin, the Olympic, in New York City. They scratched out the names of other ships in the footage as well as any other clues that might betray the ship’s true identity. They also repurposed footage of the Titanic’s Captain Edward Smith taken on a different ship, passing it off as if he was piloting the Titanic.
This dubious mix of fact and fiction, typically accompanied by melodramatic music and audience singalongs, proved quite lucrative for these companies. Warner’s Features, which marketed one of these misleading films, claimed to have sold 100 copies in 48 hours.
The actual film industry took things even further. Less than a month after the ship sank, “Saved from the Titanic” hit theaters. It featured Dorothy Gibson, an American silent-film star who just happened to have been on the Titanic’s fateful voyage. The film, built around a series of flashbacks, showed Gibson reenacting her experience, all while wearing the very dress she had worn on that fateful evening.
Meanwhile, te first instant book came out within a month of the sinking, followed by several others. These typically claimed to have some kind of official imprimatur — “the only authoritative book,” one claimed.
Printed on cheap paper and padded with passages taken from newspapers, these books reached a market through armies of salesmen, who went door to door collecting advance orders for the works, which typically sold for a dollar each, or about $30 in today’s money.
The music industry also jumped on the bandwagon. At the time, most of the money lay in publishing sheet music, not records. And while some of the compositions were written with the idea of raising money for the families of the victims, plenty were in it to turn a profit. The offerings varied in quality. Some had maudlin lyrics: “My Sweetheart Went Down With the Ship” was typical of the genre.
While World War I put a temporary end to the fondness for all things Titanic, this was hardly the end of the line. As one historian of this pop culture phenomenon has noted, “interest in the disaster was dormant, not extinct,” reviving in 1929 with a smash theatrical hit: “The Berg.” This became the basis of another film, “The Atlantic,” which was breathlessly billed as “a thunderbolt of drama impossible to describe.”
For the most part, critics of commercialization hailed from British and American shipping lines. These magnates feared that all the films, plays and radio dramas about the Titanic might deter people from traveling by boat. For example, when the BBC proposed making a highly realistic radio play about the Titanic in the 1930s, complete with sound effects, members of the press sympathetic to the liners warned that listeners would experience “a night of horror which, in gruesome realism, is likely to surpass anything given before.” But they rarely won these censorship campaigns.
The postwar era experienced renewed commercial interest in the tragedy. Walter Lord’s 1955 bestselling book, “A Night to Remember,” became a critically acclaimed film. Others proved less successful. In 1980, “Raise the Titanic,” based on Clive Cussler’s book of the same name, proved a spectacular failure. It took $40 million to make and only brought in $7 million.
Many predicted that James Cameron’s “Titanic” would suffer the same fate. It did not, eventually grossing more than any other movie made up until that time. But even though Cameron more money off the Titanic than anyone in history, he was by no means the first.
Whatever other reasons for the doomed ship’s appeal across the ages, one thing seems certain: It always was, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future, a source of profit as much as anything else.
Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia and a columnist at Bloomberg, where a longer version of this piece originally appeared, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.” Twitter: @SMihm.
