Going Back in Time to Save the Titanic

It was a massive movie set. A pool of rolling water the size of a football field with a giant fake ship stuck in it. A replica of the Titanic. It was surrounded with tennis-ball-green walls. A fake horizon was to be copied and pasted in post.

On the deck of the ship, PAs of all sorts rushed around talking into their headsets to seemingly nobody, shouting out calls and cues into the void. Amongst all the rush and noise, nothing, in particular, was getting done. It was one of those directionless moments on set when higher-ups couldn’t be found, or leads were in the toilet for hours and all film time for the day was wasted.

Three particularly unimportant extras clutched coffee cups in a vice on the deck of the fake Titanic, sweating off their makeup and tugging on the collars of their tight period costumes.

“Are these even, you know, appropriate to the, uh, what was it? The roaring twenties?” the Gentleman Extra said.

“No, no, no, the ship sank after World War II,” a Top-Hatted Fellow said.

“I’m pretty sure it was before,” the Lady Extra said.

The Gentleman Extra took a big gulp of his coffee. “It’s all the same cut, I suppose. I saw the costume guy pull these offa the Django Unchained rack.”

They looked down at their costumes – a salmon poofy dress and bright, filigreed suits.

“That definitely can’t be right.”

There was some crash and commotion then. Gyan Rosling, the world’s biggest movie star, rushed into their peripherals. He held another man, Deonardo Licaprio, the world’s second biggest movie star, at gunpoint.

“This maniac,” Deonardo said, looking ruffled in his maître d' costume, “believes that he can save the Titanic from sinking!”

Gyan’s face, at being called a maniac, gave a turn of genuine hurt. Not even his fine, tailored tuxedo could mask the pathetic chip on his shoulder.

“I simply am aware of an imminent disaster and how to stop it,” Gyan said. “Allow me to explain – I hail from the future, where we have studied broadly of this ship’s demise. Somehow, I have traveled back in time…”

He was reciting the logline of the movie they were shooting, almost word for word.

The three extras looked to each other for explanations.

“Chuck the cups, I think we’re rolling!” said the Top-Hatted Fellow. And all three of them silently and covertly dumped their coffees into the water.

“Improv?” the Lady Extra said.

“Improv,” the Gentleman Extra agreed.

“...and that’s why I need you!” Gyan continued, “specifically, you, the Top-Hatted Fellow! You, the Lady! And you, the Gentleman!”

“Sir, yes, sir!” the Lady Extra said, saluting.

“We are gladly at your service, sir,” the Top-Hatted Fellow agreed.

“But service demands trust, sir,” the Gentleman Extra said, nodding at the gun Gyan ground into Deonardo’s forehead.

Gyan’s internal struggle on the matter of the gun showed itself in the twisting of his face - like a petulant child who lost at a game - but, in the end, he relented.

“Okay,” Gyan said, putting the gun into his waist and shoving Deonardo into the three extras' arms. “Follow me. We need to find the captain and throw him overboard. It’s mutiny time.”

That was his catchphrase in the screenplay, “It’s mutiny time.” Appropriately, he glared off into the sunset for a prolonged beat, then led them into the underbelly of the ship.

Had the extras taken a moment to become aware of their surroundings, they might have noticed the disturbed look on the PAs faces around them, the distraught trail of bruised extras Gyan left in his wake, and the distinct lack of cameras following them.

Instead, they were led into the twisty, massive set, which for the most part was an actual, functioning ship. Only, it was designed by a production team, so it made no sense how it was laid out, with giant, labyrinthine hallways, poorly placed exits and a complete lack of direction or sense of time. Perfect for cinematography, terrible for traversing. This made for a long trip to the captain, time which afforded Deonardo the opportunity to speak to the extras. He was, however, promptly pistol-whipped silent by a frothing Gyan.

“Jesus Christ,” the Lady Extra said. “This is what I’m talking about. They take their craft seriously.”

“Absolute commitment,” the Top-Hatted Fellow agreed.

“We need to be more like them,” the Gentleman said. “This is why we don’t get major roles. Bold, brave choices.”

They nodded solemnly as Deonardo bled all over their costumes, staggering in delirium. As the halls unwound before them, they thought about their careers, lamenting the pitiful royalties they collected for playing fake cancer patients in drug commercials, pathetically naked dead bodies in two-bit spinoffs of CSI, and the ever-grand role of ‘rapist #6’ on Criminal Minds. Like that, with the lowercase ‘r’.

Enough, the Lady Extra thought, contemplating how she could change the trajectory of her career. She decided then to take her chance, to make her bold, brave choices.

“For god’s sake, man,” the Lady Extra said, shoving Gyan, “you need to let up on the maître d'!”

For a moment, Gyan was shaken. He was not used to having his leadership contested, especially not in such an important moment as this.

“Don’t you get it?” the Lady Extra continued, “we need him to convince the captain to give up control.” She searched her brain for a brilliant twist, a clever turn of phrase to drive the story forward. “This man is, after all, the captain’s brother!”

Deonardo, through a fat lip and a swollen eye, mumbled out what sounded like slurred lyrics from a drunken night of karaoke. What he intended to say, of course, was something along the lines of: you’re all crazy, and we’re all dead.

As Gyan processed the Lady’s words, the other two extras pondered their next move – what was best for the narrative? More ultraviolence, of course.

The Top-Hatted Fellow let a loose palm down on the Lady Extra.

“You’ve known this all along?” he belted.

The Gentleman Extra grabbed her by the neck, frothed, “A wench that can’t be trusted.”

The Lady Extra whimpered, her eyes welling up, her choked sobs dying on her lips for lack of breath.

“Nice work,” the Top-Hatted Fellow whispered to her, acknowledging her prime performance.

“An artisan,” the Gentleman Extra agreed.

The Lady Extra nodded ‘thank you’ through her tears.

Gyan gun-whipped the Gentleman and the Top-Hatted Fellow. He also let a slightly delayed one loose on Deonardo for posterity’s sake. “Enough,” he said. “Focus on the task at hand, people.” He checked his watch. “We’re already late. Save the theatrics for him.”

He stuck his thumb out into the hall ahead of them, at the captain, who disappeared into one of the metal doorways with a female PA.

Gyan disappeared after him. The three extras followed, dragging a limp Deonardo along with them.

–

“Look, baby,” the captain said, “you meet me in my trailer later, I got cigarettes, a bottle of wine and a couple of my demo reels. The couch in there is crazy broken in, it feels nice to sink into. What do you think?”

His breath was mustard gas, his 300-pound frame a tipped-over vending machine pinning her to the fake control board.

“I think this has nothing to do with where Mr. Hopkins is and can you please move, please,” the PA said. She attempted to shimmy past the captain, but he didn’t budge. She was very much the image of a trapped animal, helpless against the hunter.

“At your age,” the captain said, “it’s not cute to play hard to get.”

Gyan and crew burst in, and the PA took her chance to yell for help.

Gyan, ever the hero (from the future!) jumped in on the action – he grappled the Captain down to the ground, where the ensuing struggle had all the awkwardness expected of an unchoreographed fight between two very rich men.

It was over in 30 seconds, the captain huffing and puffing, his knee pinning Gyan to the ground, Gyan flailing wildly, acutely embarrassed of the situation he found himself in.

“Villain!” the Top-Hatted Fellow said, springing into action.

“It’s no wonder you sank this ship!” the Gentleman Extra said, stepping in front of the Top-Hatted Fellow.

“Tell us how to stop this thing!” the Lady Extra said, pushing the PA aside, attempting to make sense of the control board, and whispering to the PA that she needed to get out of the shot.

The shot? Tears streamed down the confused and traumatized PA’s face. Years later, scholars would note that this barely-foiled sexual assault was the only disaster averted that day.

The PA rushed out of the fake cockpit, stepping over Deonardo’s limp body at the entryway to the cockpit. His hand shot up and grabbed her ankle and she was startled by the gore and viscera Gyan had made of his face.

“What happened to you?” she said.

Deonardo put up a crooked finger, pointing at Gyan.

The PA looked up, saw the captain being overtaken by the Top-Hatted Fellow and the Gentleman Extra, the Lady Extra furiously mashing at fake keys on the control panel behind them, Gyan reaching for something in the back of his pants.

Deonardo pulled the PA close to his face, and splattered bloodlets on her as he spoke.

“He went too deep,” Deonardo said. “He went too method…,” and his words trailed off as he slipped into a coma.

The PA, not quite processing the moment, spit out the blood that landed in her mouth and stumbled out into the hallway. She caught a quick glimpse of Gyan raising a gun to the captain’s face, the other two extras still struggling with him. She didn’t see the shot, but she heard it. Beyond the leveled pop of the gun, she swore she heard the squishy crack of the skull, the slosh of brains sliding around where they didn’t belong.

–

The three extras were very much stunned by the way their ears cracked.

Despite the shock and gore of the scene, each continued their act, improvising lines that screenwriters only dreamed of writing, the three extras drooling for their ascent to stardom, into viral videos titled Top Ten Best Method Actors, their names forever etched into the pantheon next to those of Gyan and Deonardo. In reality, they flailed around and scream-mumbled and were not able to communicate at all. Much like Deonardo.

Deonardo…

Deonardo, laying across the floor, convulsing with the violence of an overdose, foam trailing out of his mouth.

And the coppery taste in their own mouths… the bits of flesh stuck in the back of their throat… bits of brain drowning the dead thoughts of the captain on their tongues.

It suddenly became real for the three, a prickle of nerves shooting down their neck, down their spine, a sinking feeling that maybe they just aided and abetted a murder, that maybe there’s no cameraman in the room, and has there even been one this whole time?

Gyan got himself up, a look of ferocity on his face like a rabid animal, and he wailed around about something they couldn’t quite catch - Gyan angry that the three extras’ ears were still pulsing and deaf from the gunshot - Gyan taking the Top-Hatted Fellow with him as his next hostage, the Top-Hatted Fellow glancing at Deonardo’s unsettling figure and fearing that his face will be the next to become hamburger meat - the two, so suddenly, gone.

The Lady and the Gentleman shook in fear, fear of prison, fear of mortality, fear of god. The Lady Extra looked around, found the PA’s clipboard. She scribbled hard onto the pad of paper. She handed it to the Gentleman Extra.

We’re not from the future, it said. But we’ve got to save this ship from sinking.

And even though they both knew it was a bad idea, they nodded their heads and followed Gyan into the void.

–

Gyan’s head was full of acid. He was a singularity, a man with one goal: to save the goddamn titanic. He had images thrashing around him of Greek gods soaked and slippery in baby oil; of battle-hardened veterans crawling through the trenches, a buck-knife clenched between pearly whites; of the President declaring death to the enemy, crowds erupting in cheer.

This was everything his coach had taught him – the motivation comes first and all else follows. A character is a motivation, a solid goal, period.

And Gyan was from the future, damn all else who said otherwise. He’d sunken himself into the research – into the tech behind flying cars, into textbooks on string theory, into predictions of the economy, of the government, of the world’s demise. He began writing papers, theories of the future of the future in journals; he’d written so much that the piles of journals touched the ceiling in his trailer.

Later, a paper published by scholars on the content of the journals titled “A Titanic Quixote,” concluded that they were the incoherent ramblings of a madman. It wasn’t so far off to describe Gyan this way, the descent into his character displaying all the signs of a psychotic break. And yet, far in the back of his mind, he knew all along that he was just acting, just playing a part, a character.

–

Gyan burst into the control room. This was where a production team - a dozen men and women dressed in all black, who startled up when the crazed Gyan forced his way in - controlled the hydraulics attached to the bottom of the ship set, able to rock the set up-and-down or side-to-side with varying degrees of violence. It was a single joystick that could do it all.

“Dr. Chrysis’ cronies,” Gyan muttered.

Dr. Chrysis was an anti-time-meddling rebellion leader - and Gyan was convinced that he had sent a roomful of rebels to the year 1912 to stop him. In the future, not everyone believed that the past should change - and it was Dr. Chrysis who ensured that historic tragedies happened exactly like they were supposed to.

At least, that’s what the screenplay said.

We do not need to detail any more the viscera that Gyan left behind of the production crew in the control room. Despite the fact that Gyan had killed all witnesses, he continued to tightly grip the Top-Hatted Fellow (like a stress ball more than anything), almost unaware that the extra was still there.

Gyan jerked the joystick to and fro, figuring out how exactly the thing worked, the ship lurching and tossing all aboard onto their knees, or grabbing for anything steady.

He pulled a compass out of his pocket, good old vintage technology, and steered the ship Westward, away from harm, away from the iceberg.

He slumped over, finally finished with his long and arduous mission. He panted like a movie star does in the third act of a thriller, though he was feeling decidedly anti-climactic. Decidedly un-motivated. Decidedly de-goaled. He was Gyan again. Gyan at the end of a long take, a particularly hard day at work. He had terrorized his co-workers, terrorized some of them to death. Holy ship, he thought, not quite understanding why he did what he did, but understanding now that he did it.

The Top-Hatted Fellow did not move, uncertain of his own fate, afraid to make any sudden movement. Gyan began sobbing into his hands, however, and the Top-Hatted Fellow inched away, bit by bit. Sufficiently close to the doorway, the Top-Hatted Fellow ran off into the halls, only to collide with the other two extras, who were much too slow and inept and late to be heroes.

“We should go,” the Top-Hatted Fellow said, all the light gone from his eyes.

They nodded solemnly and walked off together, each thinking to themselves that some people, like them, are just meant to be the footstools of greatness.

Back in the control room, Gyan, having spiraled into the weight of all his actions, began trashing the controls. One well-placed kick broke the joystick, which made the ship lurch with violence.

It felt like it hit an iceberg.

The machinery of the hydraulics, put under the stress of the broken controls, screeched like a mechanical banshee. The sound reverberated throughout the ship’s interior.

Outside, police were barely arriving on the set. No one had been evacuated yet, but news helicopters were circling the scene. They captured shocking footage of the ship, a giant mini-titanic, sinking into the pool of water. Dozens of people jumped off the deck in panic, the scene quickly devolving into chaos as fires erupted underneath the hull of the ship, the ship just as quickly disappearing into the water.

–

30 years later. The future.

If one were to google “The Titanic Disaster,” no longer would the 1912 sinking of the British passenger liner be the first hit. It would not even be on the first page.

What would be a hit (dozens of hits, even) is the aforementioned story of one Gyan Rosling, survivor of the new Titanic Disaster, the sinking of a fake ship.

Using a sharp wit, three dead extras and dozens of dead witnesses, Rosling twisted his story into a tragic one, one in which he was a victim and a hero. There was no one left to testify otherwise.

The three extras - the Gentleman, the Lady, and the Top-Hatted Fellow - found their names next to Deonardo’s after all: in the posthumous indictment pinning them as guilty of the murder of the dozens of cast and crew members who lost their lives that day.

Gyan used his traumatized survivor act to convince executives to finish the film as a sort of therapy. On top of that, he convinced them to use footage of actually-dead cast and crew in the final cut, in order to “honor the dead.”

While the film received so-so reviews from critics, it was a hit among audiences. Among some circles, this was referred to as the ‘Snuff Effect,’ and set a dangerous trend among studios for a few years.

Now, thirty years later, a film is being produced about the tragedy. Buzz has been building around the production, and many of Hollywood’s top stars and starlets have cannibalized themselves for a part in the film - the role of a lifetime, they say.

The film is being directed and produced by none other than an aging Gyan Rosling.

“Proceeds from the film,” Gyan promised at a junket last year, “are going entirely toward my new fund - a coalition tasked with creating a time machine.”

And at this part of his speech he glazed off into an imaginary horizon, pausing for a heroic beat, then looked straight into the cameras and said, “That’s right, folks. I’m going back in time to stop this tragedy from ever happening.”

Considering the shit-eating grin with which Gyan said this, it seemed he hadn’t yet considered the suicidal nature of his promise.