Titanic was a made-for-TV movie that premiered in 1996. Titanic follows several characters on board the RMS Titanic when it sinks on its maiden voyage. The film's tagline is The story so few lived to tell.Main cast
Plot summary
The Titanic has three different storylines. Mrs. Isabella Paradine is traveling on the Titanic to see her husband. On the Titanic, she meets Wynn Park, her ex-husband. She falls in love with him again, sending her husband a telegram saying that they can't be together anymore. When the ship starts sinking Isabella has to leave Wynn reluctantly.
Also in first class are the Allison family, a real family who traveled on the actual ship, returning home to Montreal with their two small children and new nurse, Alice Cleaver. They notice something wrong with her, and a maid asks her if she had been in Cairo last month. She denies it, because when she lived there she killed her baby. When the Titanic starts sinking Alice Cleaver panics and leaves with the Allison's baby, Trevor, and gets into a lifeboat. The family doesn't know, and they refuse to leave the ship without their baby.
In third class, Jamie Pierce steals a ticket to get on board. He manages to become friends with the ship's purser Simon Doonan, who is a robber. Jamie falls in love with Osa Ludvigson and they spend time on board together. However, she is raped by Doohan, and she doesn't trust anybody anymore. When the ship hits the iceberg, Jamie can't convince Osa to go into a lifeboat, but in the end she does.
Produced in advance of the imminent James Cameron film on the same topic, the TV version, which was originally aired over two nights, manages to recreate faithfully some elements of the ship, but also included an overwhelmingly large number of historical inaccuracies. Some are as follows:
- Contains many elements shown in James Cameron's epic blockbuster. Rumor in Hollywood back then is that someone at CBS got ahold of Cameron's original script from Paramount Pictures and altered it into their miniseries. The original teleplay for the mini series conatins several fictional scenes that were clearly lifted from Cameron's vision.
- Intended as a remake of the 1979 television film S.O.S. Titanic.
- Alice Cleaver was not a mad, insane child murderer as portrayed. She was confused with another woman with the same name. The real Alice Cleaver went on to be a recluse rarely talking about the Titanic until she died in the 70s.
- Alice Cleaver and baby Trevor Allison boarded lifeboat number 11, quite late into the sinking; not lifeboat 7, the first one launched.
- First Officer William Murdoch did not commit suicide or shoot another passenger. (This is a longtime Titanic myth that also appeared in the Cameron film.)
- Thomas Andrews, a person of major historical importance, was deleted altogether, with parts of his involvement during the night fused on Captain Smith's character.
- J. Bruce Ismay would have never been allowed to participate in such practices as the final outfitting of the ship and simply could not have been in the boiler room because no passengers were permitted down there and most certainly the stokers would not have listened to his orders on lighting more boilers because, aside from the being the chairman of the White Star Line, he had no such authority.
- Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall did not go down with the ship. In fact he went on to have a successful career in the Royal Navy and the White Star Lines rival company. He then went onto be a technical advisor on A Night to Remember and to be one of the foremost authorities of the disaster.
- At one point Captain Smith complains that the rockets are white, when in fact they should be red for distress. Such conversation would never have take place because white is the right color for distress and Captain Smith, of all people, would have known that.
- The crew aboard the Californian are shown giving up trying to achieve contact with the Titanic after a short while and the ship's Captain, Stanley Lord, calmly going to sleep. That is far from the truth, the ship tried to achieve contact with the ailing Titanic throughout the night and Captain Lord never went off to bed.
- The Titanic, in reality, was not booked solid as indicated in the film. In fact, several of her cabins were empty during the voyage.
- The first class grand staircase is shown without the now infamous glass dome and with the addition of two light fixtures on either side of the central clock.
- During a sweeping crane shot of the port side of the ship, several mistakes in the design of the set are apparent, including but not limited to, an extra deck house on the poop-deck, the main mast facing the wrong direction, the absence of 'B' Deck and just any over all "wrongness".
- The first class dining room is shown to be on A deck, while in actuality it was on D deck. In reality, there was a large reception room at the base of the grand staircase in which you accessed the Dining room from two double doors on either side of a Funnel casing. In the film, this reception room and correct layout are substituted for 3 large arched openings. In anycase, the actual room was painted white, not peaches and creames like shown in the film.
- Several errors during the Southampton scenes.
- The Titanic was fitted-out in Belfast, not Southampton as shown in the film.
- Contrary to the popular beliefs, there was no organized dancing in first class, in fact, it would be considered borderline obscene to dance during dinner within the upper class. A dance floor was created on Titanic's sistership, the Olympic, in the late 1920's.
- Shortly after the ship collides with the iceberg with, first class passengers Molly Brown, John Jacob Astor and the fictional character of "Mr. Foley" (loosely based on Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, a real passenger) are shown emerging from the second class entrance at the aft port side of the boat deck and admire the passengers tossing around the pieces of ice that fell onto the deck after the collision, even though the ship hit the berg with its starboard side, at the bow and the iceberg never even fully reached A-deck, which was a level below the boat deck.
- The film was released to home video soon after the release of the Cameron film.
[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Titanic (TV miniseries) ]
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