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What to hear the Titanic's distress call?
A Titaniac's Rant (February 1998) Yeah, I was just as obsessed by this damn movie as you were. I have always been a Titanic nut. My favorite TV show when I was a kid was "Time Tunnel," and the first episode in 1967 concerned our stalwart heroes landing on the ship just prior to the iceberg. In one feverish period in 1978, after reading "Raise the Titanic!", I hunted down the Lord book, the Beasley book, the Gracie book, the Marcus book, and any other tome I could get my hands on. When I got my first VCR in 1983, my first rental was "A Night to Remember." When I got married in 1987, I pissed off my bride by appropriating the dining room for six months while I built the Minicraft model of the ship, complete with hand-drilled portholes, laboriously hand-painted window frames and many sleepless nights trying to get the Marconi aerial to look right. And when we bought a new car, I argued with her for months about getting vanity plates that said "CQD MGY." (I lost that one.) Of course, I watched the "Titanic" miniseries on CBS in 1996. It wasn't great (I mean, Marilu Henner as Molly Brown? Puh-leeze!), but one of the reviews noted that this would hold the Titanic nuts until James Cameron's version came out in 1997. James Cameron making a Titanic movie? Holy shit! I had the same rush I felt when I found out that Tom Wolfe was writing a book about the Mercury astronauts -- my favorite author and my favorite topic together. Cameron was exactly the right guy to do a Titanic movie. He was driven, egomaniacal and above all almost anal-retentive about getting things right. One of my absolute favorite scenes in any movie, from a purely technical point of view, was in Cameron's Terminator 2. It took place in a hallway in the Pescadero mental hospital, where Sarah Conner, trying to escape, runs into Schwartzeneggar's cyborg, who then fights the T-1000 all the way to the elevator. It was beautifully planned, perfectly paced, the hallway itself almost a character in the drama. Anyone who could put together a scene like that, I thought, had the cojones to do justice to the Titanic story. I immediately got on the Internet and found Tim Doyle's "Countdown to Titanic" page (which was the beginning of his current "Counting Down" page. Tim managed to get the info and pass it along brilliantly, including set photos, inside rumors, and updates from cast and crew, most notably the guy who played wireless operator Cyril Evans on the Californian (we're waiting to see you in the director's cut, Adam) and extras coordinator Tina Kerr. All of us Titaniacs are in debt to you, Tim. Three months before it opened, I ran across a copy of the Titanic script at Drew's Script-O-Rama. I had only once before read a script prior to seeing the movie (Star Trek 7) and found it a disconcerting experience to both know what was coming next, and being able to tell where the inevitable cuts were. I debated not reading the Titanic script . . . for about six nanoseconds. I loved it. A lot of the Hollywood crowd labeled it corny and old-fashioned, but while the Academy snubbed it for Best Screenplay, I think it's interesting that it was nominated by the Writers' Guild of America, who apparently don't have the same axes to grind as Hollywood. My thoughts on the film itself -- well, I can't do it. I wrote a review on the "Countdown to Titanic" page, but I find myself utterly unable to write anything readable about the experience of seeing this film. I am impressed by the attention to detail and the lengths that Cameron went to to "get it right." But I was most surprised by the intimate nature of the film. As Cameron said when talking about Kate Winslet's unhappiness during the filming, she looked around at the Rosarito mini-city and all the thousands of people spending millions of dollars on the endeavour, and in the end it all came down to what was going on in her eyes. They carry the film. I like to consider myself a bit of a Titanic expert, and I am appalled by some of the nit-picking going on by other "experts." It's fun, I imagine, for some types of people to look at a film like this and try to find as many errors as possible. (I guess they're the same people who do those "Can you find 10 things wrong with this picture?" puzzles.) Titanic is very similar, in this respect, to Apollo 13, another movie about an historical event that I fancy I know something about. There are a lot of things in Apollo 13 that are "wrong" in the literal sense. But the result is so powerful and such a compelling story that I can't imagine that I would even bring them up. I guess the type of person who would point out the minor errors in either movie just need the attention, or need to prove their superiority. Trekkies living in their parents' basement spring to mind. There's also the type who knock Cameron for feeling he had to insert fictional characters into what was already an interesting story. True enough, but you need some emotional focus, or the story is just plain boring, no matter how well you do it. The burning of Atlanta by itself would make a moderately interesting film, but you put Rhett and Scarlett into it . . . . The same thing applies to the Russian revolution, the plight of refugees stuck in Morocco in 1941, the rise and fall of a certain newspaper publisher, etc. All I did here was take the script in HTML, add pictures, do some proofreading and bold the scene numbers and the dialog. Hope you like it. What I'd like to do when the film comes out on tape is add the scenes that were added, delete the ones that were dropped, and come out with an annotated version -- redlines, strikeouts and all. Wish I'd had that back in Film 101 in college -- would have made a good topic for a paper. Go to Part One of the Script
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James
Cameron's Titanic