by Rich Elias, Mar 22, 1998

"Titanic" is on its way to become the top-grossing film of all time. Stories out of Hollywood in the weeks before it sails into the Oscars have focused on what the "Titanic" phenomenon portends for the future of Hollywood filmmaking. Writers who deplored director James Cameron's $200 million budget (the largest in history) now concede, often with admiration, that he put every dollar on screen. The tremendous popular success of "Titanic" has producers dusting off scripts for spectaculars that would have seemed too expensive to produce until now. The word, then, is that "Titanic" is the first of the fleet.

Writers who speculate about how it will fare at the Oscars argue, on the one hand, that nothing can stop Cameron's movie from sweeping most major categories in which it's nominated, perhaps winning a record number of Oscars. On the other hand, some pundits anticipate a backlash against the movie. Academy voters, so the reasoning goes, will recoil against the Cameron film. It's just too big, too expensive, and, when you look at it closely, just too ordinary -- a "Romeo and Juliet" love story spliced onto a disaster movie. Those who like to think of Hollywood movie making as an art are weighing in for "L.A. Confidential," which is clearly the superior picture.

And they'll be wrong to pick the Curtis Hanson movie. I agree that it's better than "Titanic," but it's important to understand how Hollywood defines art this year. Like it or not, the 1997 Oscar nominations elevate art above all other considerations. It was the year of the Writer-Director as Hero. Cameron definitely fits into this category. To make his movie even more spectacular, he hired a minisub so he could personally shoot footage of the sunken wreck. Courage (or foolhardiness) on this scale elevates Cameron above the typical Hollywood hack director. But he also stood up to studio pressures to trim his budget when costs escalated so quickly that drugstores in Hollywood ran out of Maalox. Besides standing up to bean counters, Cameron postponed a planned summer release, reportedly in order to continue to work on editing his film.

Cameron is extremely shrewd. He could count on this pattern of macho defiance to get "Titanic" reams of free publicity. He's used the ploy before of seeding questions whether his big budget movie could ever win its production cost back. (That's what Cameron's publicists pulled before "Terminator 2".)

But Cameron is joined on the nominations list by other writer-directors who showed their courage too, albeit on a smaller scale. "The Apostle" is seemingly at the opposite pole from "Titanic", as small as "Titanic" is big, as personal and profound as its opposite is hackneyed and melodramatic. But producer-director-writer-star Robert Duvall shares with Cameron the will to defy the Hollywood system to see his vision on screen. Duvall worked on the script for decades, unsuccessfully shopped it to producers, and eventually green-lighted production himself when he had enough of his own money to make his own movie. Oddsmakers in recent weeks think Duvall's chances of taking Best Actor are getting better.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, writer-stars of "Good Will Hunting," also belong in this pantheon. They wrote the script off and on for a few years, said no to producers who were interested but not with them as stars, and finally got their way. Like Cameron, but several notches down the Hollywood food chain, they said no to studios who wouldn't let them make the movie they wanted. Like the Duvall movie, "Good Will Hunting" is enjoying unexpected box office success in venues beyond the art house circuit, although it has done well there too.

"As Good as It Gets" is a more typical Hollywood product, with a name star, a comic premise you can summarize in 25 words or less, and appeal to the TV crowd via Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear. But it too is the product of a writer-director, James L. Brooks (who shares the screenplay credit with Mark Andrus). Brooks has written and directed as many flops as hits. This one is a hit. But in the year of Cameron and Duvall, of Affleck and Damon, Brooks gets points for doing it his own way.

The Oscar ceremonies allow writers, directors, stars, and producers to pat themselves on the back for making a few quality films a year while releasing hundreds of bad ones. Celebrating the artistic achievement of writer-directors isn't new. Witness the Oscars and nominations won by Woody Allen over the last two decades. But this year's slate implies that Hollywood is redefining what it means by art, with the dollar gross of "Titanic" likely to bankroll this trend.

"Art" here means that a movie can be its creator's personal vision, so long as it has enough hooks in it to win an audience larger than that of most art films. The most important hook continues to be the right star, a Duvall, a Robin Williams (the studio's insurance policy in "Good Will Hunting"), a Nicholson. Another hook is a story the audience can relate to on a simple, emotional level but which also suggests ideas, even if they aren't followed through. "Titanic" tried to paint a teen love melodrama as a story of class injustice, for example.

This means that the studios are eager to connive with talents whose actions seemingly defy the power of the money men. And as long as the movie brings a handsome return and the occasional windfall, the studios couldn't care less who is spitting at them.

Thus, although one can read the nominations as pitting Hollywood art versus "Titanic" money, it's probably the other way around. Cameron has positioned himself as just as much an outsider "artist" as the writers and directors he's competing with on Monday. It's a no-brainer to conclude his movie will win big. But one reason is that its creator, bankrolled with $200 million of other people's money, made sure he did it his way.