STORYTELLERAvatar producer Jon Landau, third from left, with, from left, Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington, James Horner, James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver at the Golden Globes ceremony in 2010. (Jeff Vespa/Wire Image)
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Jon Landau, the Oscar-winning Titanic producer who died on July 5, 2024,at the age of 63, spent the last year of his life recounting an epic career that spanned from his uncredited gofer work on Found Money, a 1983 television movie starring Dick Van Dyke and Sid Caesar, to his collaborations with James Cameron, including on the record breaking Avatar franchise. The result is The Bigger Picture(out today), Landau’s posthumous memoir that is filled with the kind of dishy, “only-in-Hollywood” stories someone who spent their entire career in the industry could accumulate.
“Always a great storyteller, Jon wanted to share, in his own words, the grand adventure that had been his life,” Landau’s wife of 40 years, Julie Landau, said in a statement. “His initial impulse came from his cancer diagnosis, and over the next year, he recorded his life story on video. At first, it was for the boys, for me, for our whole family. But as he began recounting his life and work, he realized he wanted to share his story, and what he had learned along the way, with more people in the hope they might take something from it.”
To most, Landau is probably best known for the nearly 30 years he spent as Cameron’s producing partner, helping bring a string of record-setting box office juggernauts — 1997’s Titanic ($2.2B in grosses), 2009’s Avatar ($2.9B, still the highest-grossing movie of all-time) and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water ($2.3B) — to the big screen. But Cameron was just one of the legends Landau worked with. He’s full of shocking anecdotes, from filmmaker MichaelMann almost killing people with live ammo on set to Warren Beatty goading him into approaching a stranger to star in Dick Tracy to the future Oscar winner who talked back to Cameron during a Titanic audition and lost the lead role. Here are eight of Landau’s craziest stories from his long producing career.
