Titanic (TV miniseries)

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Titanic
Directed by	Robert Lieberman
Produced by	Rocky Lang
Written by	Ross LaManna Joyce Eliason
Starring	George C. Scott Marilu Henner Peter Gallagher Catherine Zeta-Jones Tim Curry Eva Marie Saint Roger Rees
Music by	Lennie Niehaus
Cinematography	David Hennings
Editing by	Tod Feuerman
Distributed by	RHI Entertainment
Release date(s)	November 17, 1996
Running time	173 min.
Country	Canada/United States
Language	English
IMDb profile

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.

Taglines:

• They all said she was unsinkable. When she sank, it was unthinkable.
• The story so few lived to tell.

Contents 1 Main cast 2 Plot summary 3 Historical inaccuracy 4 Trivia 5 External links

[edit] Main cast

• George C. Scott - Captain Edward J. Smith
• Marilu Henner - Mrs. Margaret "Molly" Brown
• Peter Gallagher - Wynn Park
• Catherine Zeta-Jones - Mrs. Isabella Paradine
• Tim Curry - Simon Doonan
• Eva Marie Saint - Hazel Foley
• Roger Rees - J. Bruce Ismay

[edit] 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, but soon realizes that she remembers her from the highly publicized trial where Alice was accused of throwing her baby off a train. When the Titanic starts sinking Alice Cleaver panics and leaves with the Allisons' baby, Trevor, and gets into a lifeboat. The family doesn't know, and they refuse to leave the ship without their baby, which in the end, costs them their lives.

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 Doonan, 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.

[edit] Historical inaccuracy

Produced in advance of the imminent James Cameron film on the same topic, this TV version was rushed into production and very hastily completed in order to cash in on the latter's pre-release hype. It premiered over two nights in late November 1996. The first part received high Nielsen ratings, but experienced a huge drop during the second part, because most viewers got turned off by the lackluster production. Since the film was so rushed, it included mistakes and historical inaccuracies which Titanic enthusiasts found inexcusable given the wealth of knowledge about the liner and its occupants available by the mid 1990s.

Some of the mistakes and historical inaccuracies include:

• Unlike the steerage bathroom seen during the rape scene, Titanic's 3rd class had only two bathtubs. There were no shower stalls as seen in the film. Shower stalls were almost unknown in the UK at the time.
• Alice Cleaver was not a psychotically insane child murderess as portrayed. She was confused with another woman of the same name, a common mistake when it comes discussing the Titanic survivors. The real Alice Cleaver went on to be a recluse rarely talking about the Titanic until she died in the 70s. Miss Cleaver either had a roommate in the form of another servant and did not sleep with the Allison children, or only slept with Trevor in a separate stateroom. The film shows her in the same cabin as Lorraine.
• Alice Cleaver and baby Trevor Allison boarded lifeboat number 11, quite late into the sinking; not lifeboat 7, the first one launched.
• The real Lorraine Allison was barely two at the time of the sinking.
• The Allisons were portrayed in the film as Americans. They were Canadians.
• It is not known whether First Officer William Murdoch actually committed suicide, though this can hardly be considered a historical inaccuracy due to the fact that there were no survival accounts which spoke of Murdoch's fate.
• Thomas Andrews, a person of major historical importance, was deleted altogether, with parts of his involvement during the night fused onto Captain Smith's and J. Bruce Ismay's characters.
• Ismay did not participate in the final outfitting of the ship and was not in the boiler room (a location forbidden to passengers) at any time during the voyage.
• Like most films on the subject, Ismay's role in the tragedy is greatly exaggerated for melodramatic purposes. In specific, he did not force the ship's crew to run the liner at breakneck speed. He testified at the Senate hearings on the sinking that had the ship been travelling at its maximum speed, it would have arrived in New York in the middle of the night and would have had to wait up to eight hours for both a pilot and customs clearance. Ismay may have wished to increase the ship's speed temporarily during the day on Monday in order to carry out a short series of sea trials, but he did not mention this in his testimony.
• 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 Cunard Line, White Star Line's 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. White is the correct color for distress and Captain Smith, of all people, would have known that.
• The Morse code lamp was located on top of the bridge, but in the film its location is bizarrely shifted onto the front of the first class promenade deck.
• 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. The actions of those aboard the Californian that night are a subject of great controversy in the Titanic community; most are agreed, however, that the Californian's wireless officer went to bed shortly before Titanic broadcast its distress call and did not power up his set until early the next morning.
• The real Captain Lord and wireless operator Cyril Evans (both of the Californian) were much younger than the actors chosen to portray them. Captain Lord was in his mid-thirties, while Evans was twenty.
• Margaret Tobin Brown was not referred to as "Molly" until the writers Gene Fowler and Carolyn Bancroft used her (beginning in the year after her death) as the subject of a number of highly imaginative fictional folk tales. Far from the raving, oversexed hillbilly portrayed by Marilu Henner, Margaret Brown was an intelligent, well-mannered social and political activist who spoke several foreign languages and contributed heavily to cultural and human rights causes. She was also much older and less attractive than portrayed in the film and she did not board the Titanic until Cherbourg.
• Margaret Brown did not spend any time gambling and drinking at the smoking room. The smoking room was a male-only preserve, and women would not have been allowed inside. At the time of the collision, she was most likely sound asleep in her cabin.
• The Titanic was not booked solid as indicated in the film. In fact, the majority of her first and second class cabins were empty during the voyage, and just under half of her steerage berths were empty.
• There was no gate between the steerage to first class on A deck. The entrance out of steerage around that area led to B deck.
• The hallways leading to the first class staterooms were not wood paneled. Their walls were actually painted white, with an array of paneling from ornate to simple.
• The first class grand staircase is shown without the glass dome, but with two unhistoric light fixtures on either side of the central clock and with much more darker, heavier oak paneling.
• The first class smoking room did not have a bar. The stewards served drinks and other beverages in a classic waiting fashion.
• Even though Titanic had a Ritz-inspired restaurant with an adjoining promenade cafe patterned after Parisian sidewalk establishments and two Palm Court Verandahs, there was no gigantic two story tea room with revolving doors and huge windows as depicted at one point in the film. In fact, one look at the superstructure at any point in the film would show that it was physically impossible for the ship to have room for such an establishment. This space could be a substitution for the first class lounge, which was not shown in the film.
• John Jacob Astor did not say, "I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous!" It is an urban legend.
• 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 and forecastle decks, the main mast facing the wrong direction, and the absence of 'B' Deck.
• The first class dining saloon is shown in different scenes as being on 'A' Deck and the Boat Deck. It was on 'D' Deck.
• Access to the dining saloon was gained through two sets of double doors leading from the reception room located at the bottom of the Grand Staircase. In the film, three large arched openings are shown.
• The actual first class dining room was painted white, not peaches-and-cream as shown in the film.
• There are several errors during the Southampton scenes, such as having Titanic docked by her starboard side. The deck houses on the docks also appear to be from New York City.
• The Titanic was built and fitted out in Belfast, not Southampton as shown in the film.
• There were no press conferences held aboard the ship on the day before her maiden voyage and the speech Captain Smith gives the reporters about the art of ship building was in reality delivered by him seven years earlier on another White Star liner, the Adriatic.
• Chief Officer Henry Wilde, Third Officer Herbert Pitman and Sixth Officer James Moody are omitted.
• Titanic's first class dining room was not fitted with a dance floor as shown in the film. However, Titanic's sister ship, Olympic, was fitted with a dance floor much later in her career.
• Contrary to the popular belief, there was no organized dancing in first class. In fact, it would have been considered bordering on the obscene to dance during dinner within the upper class.
• Moreover, the tango (which the characters are portrayed dancing) originated in the bordellos of Argentina and would have been completely beneath the notice of the upper classes. It was almost unknown as a ballroom dance until after World War One.
• The ship's lookouts did indeed have to work without the binoculars, but not because they had been taken to the bridge for use there. They had been misplaced back in Southampton.
• Shortly after the ship collides with the iceberg, 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. They are shown admiring 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 characters played by Catherine Zeta-Jones and Peter Gallagher both visit a service window to receive and send out wireless telegrams. Such a window did not exist on the Titanic; first class passengers sent and received telegrams via steward, rather than first-hand with the Marconi operators.
• The Carpathia's deck was not littered with corpses as the film shows. In fact, only one body was found by the rescue ship and buried at sea shortly afterwards. Some references state that one passenger also died after being rescued. The majority of the bodies recovered were found by the cable ship Mackay-Bennett which was chartered by the White Star Line for the recovery of the bodies.
• The davits seen on the film's Carpathia were actually first developed in 1926.
• At the very end of the film, a caption reads that "all the attempts to raise the Titanic had failed." No such attempt has ever been made. The wreckage is so fragile that experts believe it would be impossible to raise even a small section.

[edit] Trivia

• Originally intended as a remake of the 1979 television film S.O.S. Titanic.
• The original screenplay contains many historical characters and elements associated with S.O.S. Titanic, but the main storyline was heavily influenced by James Cameron's fictional love story that appears in his blockbuster.
• Contains many elements shown in James Cameron's epic blockbuster (which, in turn, liberally borrows from the 1943 version.) The rumor in Hollywood was that someone at CBS got ahold of Cameron's original script from 20th Century Fox and altered it into their own miniseries in order to cash in on the impending blockbuster's pre-release hype. The first draft of the teleplay for the mini-series contains several fictional scenes and subplots that were clearly lifted from Cameron's vision. It is alleged that the script was re-written at the last second in order to avoid lawsuits from 20th Century Fox and Paramount. Such a hasty re-write can explain numerous plot holes, mistakes and awkwardly written-in subplots.
• The film was released to home video soon after the release of the Cameron film.
• Billy Zane played Caledon Hockley in James Cameron's version of Titanic. Zane and Catherine Zeta-Jones starred in The Phantom; Zane as the legendary superhero and Zeta-Jones as an evil aviatrix.
• Steven Spielberg was inspired to hire Catherine Zeta-Jones after seeing her in this mini-series.

[edit] External links

• Titanic (TV miniseries) at the Internet Movie Database