Billy Zane Almost Totally Murdered Fabrizio In Titanic's Original Ending

(To celebrate "Titanic" and its impending 25th-anniversary re-release, we've put together a week of explorations, inquires, and deep dives into James Cameron's box office-smashing disaster epic.)

Among the impressive ensemble of characters in James Cameron's 1997 epic "Titanic," one of the most endearing is Fabrizio (Danny Nucci), bestie of Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack Dawson. The pair wins their tickets aboard the doomed America-bound ocean liner in a card game; standing at the ship's bow, Fabrizio claims to be able to see the Statue of Liberty already – "Very small, of course." 

Over the movie's six-month shoot, Nucci's character would have as full of an arc as you could get in a disaster picture: he gets a ticket to America, dances below decks, and tragically perishes along with scores of other passengers and crew. But the death scene in the final product — in which Fabrizio is crushed by one of the ship's four collapsed funnels — isn't the fate originally written for the doomed immigrant. Nucci tells Cosmo:

"The original death scene is I'm swimming in the water and I get past my hypothermia and I get over to a boat that Billy Zane's character [Cal Hockley] is on. I'm trying to get on and he's paranoid that it's going to sink and I go, 'No, no, you don't understand, I have to get to America' and he takes an oar and he smacks me in the head. And he says, 'It's that way!' Then I got a call from Jim probably a couple months after we finished filming and he said, 'You know, I've gotta change this. Remember when you were swimming away from the smokestack?' I said, 'Yeah.' He goes, 'Well, now you don't make it.'

A revisit of Fabrizio's funnel death scene contains hints of Cal's particular mix of desperation and callousness. As the wake from the fallen funnel threatens to tip the nearby lifeboat Cal is on, he shoves someone trying to climb aboard, screaming, "You'll swamp us!"

Cameron was under immense pressure while making "Titanic," one of the most expensive films to date. "We thought we were making 'Heaven's Gate,'" Nucci continues, referring to the notoriously expensive box-office bomb of 1980. Taking lessons learned from "The Abyss," Cameron strived to match the dazzling visual effects his films are known for with proportionate emotional resonance. Perhaps this included discipline on just how bad the bad guy could be.

There's no need to see Cal bop Fabrizio on the head when there's already a shot of him turning survivors away by force; it would just be a cherry on top of a long list of offenses for the heir to a Pittsburgh fortune. This is the same Cal who assaults Kate Winslet's Rose and tells her to honor him "the way a wife is required to honor a husband," the same Cal who frames Jack for theft, and the same Cal who poses as a random child's guardian to sneak onto a lifeboat. His callousness towards others trying to survive not only echoes that of the lifeboat passengers who later refuse to return for survivors, but it could be argued that his actions resulted in the deaths of those he pushed away from his own lifeboat — he was already a negligent killer. Billy Zane's performance would be recognized with a Best Villain nomination at the 1998 MTV Movie Awards, but perhaps his loss to Mike Myers' Dr. Evil for "Austin Powers" is an argument for Cameron to have kept the Killer Cal scene.