It is amazing to learn that Cameron's version was…
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hobnob53 — 9 years ago(June 10, 2016 12:14 PM)
To be fair, and to state the obvious, since
every
version of the Titanic story is based on actual events, of course all of them will have a lot of things in common. When you clear away the theatricalities and plot embroidery, they're all telling the same basic story.
Most of them rely in some part on Walter Lord's book, and even Lord in his Acknowledgements thanks Helen Hernandez of Twentieth Century-Fox for providing him with leads for his interviews. Hernandez was the secretary to
Titanic
1953's producer Charles Brackett, and she had helped locate survivors to be interviewed for that movie, so she turned them over to Lord for his book. That's why so many of the things in Lord's book, published in 1955, that turn up in later films were also seen in some fashion in the 1953 movie. (Weirdly, Lord never stated why a woman at a movie studio was "a goldmine of useful leads" as he put it. You'd think he'd have explained about her connection to the 1953 film.)
That said, there's no doubt Cameron stole ideas from both
ANTR
and other Titanic films. When I first saw the '97 picture what struck me was that it was essentially just a more lavish reworking of the 1953 movie. Whatever his merits as a director, Cameron is a lousy screenwriter (despite its 14 Oscar nominations, it's significant that
Titanic
1997 did
not
receive one for its script). So it's not surprising he simply lifted other Titanic films' fictional dramatics (and falsified some actual history). He's not the only one who's done this, just the richest and most arrogant.