The Controversial Television Special That Took Audiences Back to ‘Titanic’

The footage, set against ominous music, was arresting from the very beginning. Police motorcycles, with lights and sirens ablaze. Boxes marked “Top Secret.” A Paris night, with the Eiffel Tower all aglow.

Host Telly Savalas called it “the adventure of a lifetime.”

It was Return to the Titanic: Live!, a two-hour special that retold the story of the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage, and how the wreck had recently been accessed by underwater explorers. In fact, the climax of the special would feature the opening of a safe brought up from the Titanic on live television.

The special was an instance of “docutainment,” a 1980s TV trend for shows on topics with historic value and intrigue that weren’t necessarily particularly groundbreaking. Return to the Titanic: Live! aired on more than 150 television stations throughout the United States on October 28, 1987, the year of the 75th anniversary of the ship’s sinking in the North Atlantic—and just a year after the first successful crewed expedition to the wreckage on the ocean floor. And although millions tuned in, the special ultimately became a mostly forgotten part of the saga of what might be the most famous oceangoing vessel in world history.

1. Titanic on Film and TV
2. Finding Titanic
3. A Sunken Ship and a Gangster’s Secret Stash
4. Cracking Open the Safe

Titanic on Film and TV

Within a month of the Titanic’s sinking on April 15, 1912, one of its survivors, Dorothy Gibson, wrote and starred in a short film, Saved from the Titanic (which, like so many other movies from the silent film era, is now considered lost). Ever since then, the ship has retained an outsized place in pop culture. No one, it seems, can get enough of Titanic.

Noël Coward used it as the background for his 1931 play Cavalcade. In 1953, 20th Century Fox  released Titanic, a family melodrama set against the backdrop of the doomed ship. Two years later, Walter Lord wrote A Night To Remember, interviewing more than 60 survivors for what’s still regarded as the definitive history of the sinking; it was later adapted into an episode of Kraft Television Theatre and a British feature film.

In the 1960s, the story of Titanic survivor Molly Brown became a Broadway musical and a feature film starring Debbie Reynolds. Clive Cussler wrote a book titled Raise the Titanic!, published in 1976, that became the basis of a notoriously unsuccessful movie that hit theaters in 1980. (It prompted one of its producers, British impresario Lord Lew Grade, to say, “it would have been less costly to lower the Ocean.”) And in 1989, in Ghostbusters II, the spectral ship finally came in.

Finding Titanic

Raising the Titanic might not have actually been feasible (though people did consider trying), but by the 1980s, technological advances—including submersibles capable of going deeper than ever before and remotely operated vehicles equipped with cameras—made it possible to find the wreckage, and even visit it.

In 1985, a joint American-French mission led by Robert Ballard located the wreck on the ocean floor more than two miles deep and some 370 miles from Newfoundland, Canada. Ballard’s initial mission, funded by the U.S. Navy, was to find the Thresher and Scorpion, two nuclear submarines that had gone missing in the 1960s; once that was accomplished, he used the time and funds left over to search for Titanic.

The discovery led to further expeditions to the ship, for commercial reasons as well as research purposes. Although the United States passed a law in 1987 prohibiting salvage operations from sunken ships, the Titanic was in international waters and not subject to that law. (Ballard himself tried to keep the location of the wreck a secret for as long as possible—he was aghast at the idea that people would dive to the Titanic, which he considered a gravesite, to grab souvenirs.)

Another commercial possibility? Television. If the Titanic story had endured for generations, a new way to tell it had been demonstrated by a pair of recent television specials.

A Sunken Ship and a Gangster’s Secret Stash

In 1984, George Plimpton hosted The Andrea Doria: The Final Chapter, about an Italian ocean liner that sank in 1956 after colliding with another vessel. The special detailed dives to the ship off the coast of Nantucket (in far shallower waters than where Titanic came to rest) and opened a safe from the ship on television. The show was distributed by Television Program Enterprises, a company formed by Al Masini as an offshoot of “Operation Prime Time” to make high quality programming for independent television stations. (Among Operation Prime Time’s projects was the 1980 animated holiday classic Yogi’s First Christmas.)

Then, in 1986, came The Mysteries of Al Capone’s Vault, a live two-hour special with pre-taped segments hosted by Geraldo Rivera. It promised to open a hidden vault that had been found at a hotel formerly used as the Chicago gangster’s base of operations, and millions of viewers waited with bated breath to find out if the vault contained bodies, money, or any lurid mementos of Chicago in the Roaring Twenties.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t. But while the vault might have turned out to be not so mysterious, the special was a ratings success. And so Westgate Productions, the company founded by John Joslyn that made The Mysteries of Al Capone’s Vault, signed on for a special on the Titanic hosted by Telly Savalas—at that point probably better known for his Players Club commercials than for his star-making role as Kojak in the 1970s.

Cracking Open the Safe

After the special’s dramatic introduction, Savalas—standing on a set that looked like the deck of a ship in Paris’s Museum of Science and Industry—set the stage for the events to follow. He began with a description of what had happened on “the bitterly cold night” that the ship went down, leading to the deaths of 1502 people. The sinking of the Titanic, he intoned, “was the end of an era, and the beginning of a legend. Of the 705 survivors … most watched in horror as the enormous ship, lights ablaze almost to the end, plunged to the bottom. When the Titanic disappeared on that cold April night, no one dared to dream any trace of her would be seen again. Yet, you are passengers in today’s voyage, and will return to the Titanic.”

Like The Mysteries of Al Capone’s Vault, Return to the Titanic: Live! featured a variety of live and pre-taped segments. In one, Savalas detailed the cursed mummy allegedly on board the ship, a piece of dubious lore that has cemented itself in the Titanic story. Savalas called it “a fascinating yarn, but a lot closer to mystery than history,” before adding, “… or is it?”

The special also gave credence to the idea that a fire in one of the ship’s coal bunkers might have been a factor in the sinking, a theory that has gained popularity through the years. One person on the show even suggested that the fire led to an explosion that breached the hull, and the ship didn’t strike an iceberg at all—a spurious claim.

There was also a fair amount of footage from the recent French-American expedition down to the wreck. Though The New York Times would write afterward that “buried in last night’s program was a fine documentary,” the expedition, which used a submersible called Nautile, was controversial for its recovery of items from the wreckage—including the items to be opened in the special.

Finally, following a segment and interview about the process of preserving items from the ship, it was time for the special’s climax: The opening of a safe (which the Washington Post said “seemed to have collapsed during its recovery and then been partially reassembled”) and a satchel recovered from the wreck site. Given the Titanic’s reputation as the finest vessel of its time, with the passenger list reading like a who’s who of the rich and famous, expectations were high. As Savalas narrated the action, the salvaged items were open, revealing what appeared to be about $5000 in coins, along with some paper money and jewelry.

The discovery seemed anticlimactic—though it was not entirely unexpected. Joslyn had looked beforehand. “Clearly, he did not want a repeat with what had happened with Al Capone,” said The New York Times, which called the special “a combination of the sacred, the profane and sometimes the downright silly.” It was alleged that the items “were not found in the safe at all but were probably gathered up later from the shipwreck,” according to the Los Angeles Times, a claim disputed by the show’s producer.

But like The Mysteries of Al Capone’s Vault, Return to the Titanic: Live! was a ratings success. It was estimated that a third of the viewing audience that Thursday night tuned in—roughly 19.5 million viewers. Had it aired on one of the major networks, its 22 rating would have placed it in the top 10 in that week’s Nielsens.

Since then, dozens of expeditions have gone to the Titanic (including the 2023 Titan dive in which the submersible imploded, killing all aboard). Director James Cameron, who has been fascinated by deep-sea diving since he was a child watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries, has made 33 separate trips to the wreckage. In fact, that was what inspired him to make his 1997 blockbuster about the ship. “I made ‘Titanic’ because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck,” he told Playboy in 2009, “not because I particularly wanted to make the movie.”

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