TITANIC SECRET ORIGINS

This is a shot of a hallway set from Forbidden World (1982), Roger Corman's Alien ripoff.  Note that the walls are lined with takeout boxes below, and bulk egg cartons above.  According to Beverly Gray's biography of Corman this technique was developed by the art director for the 1980 Star Wars ripoff Battle Beyond the Stars (still one of my favorite SF movies - I used to watch it once a year).  "He had everyone collecting styrofoam containers from McDonald's hamburgers - when spraypainted silver, these looked impressive lining the walls of a spacecraft.  ...if the actor should turn around quickly and slam into the wall, the whole thing would crumble.  Then you had to go back and get more boxes."  That art director was 26 year old James Cameron, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people are watching his movie Titanic at the moment I am writing this.  That's how he got his start, gluing McDonald's boxes to the wall of a spaceship set.  Or so the story goes.