Corrected entry: In the scene where Jack is sketching Rose, Rose's thumb position at her eyebrow changes from shot to shot. (01:22:50)
Corrected entry: When Jack and Rose enter the water and everyone is still splashing around, a speedboat and banana boat can be seen quite in the background.
Correction: No, they can't, because they don't exist. The scene was shot in a tank, indoors. The more distant swimmers are CGI, as is the rest of the background, which is pitch dark. There are no such boats.
Corrected entry: Titanic sank on its Maiden Voyage but where was it built? Right at the back of Titanic, there is something that says Liverpool which is in England but the flag it has belongs to either Australia or New Zealand.
Correction: Titanic was built at the legendary Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast. The 'Liverpool' notation has nothing to do with where she was built, it is her port of registry. The flag on the stern is the British Blue Ensign, flown by ships on British government service. In this case, Titanic had the right to fly this flag because Captain Smith was a member of the Royal Naval Reserve.
Corrected entry: On deck during the sinking Cal says about Jack's drawing 'Too bad I didn't keep it. It will be worth a lot more in the morning'. But he did keep it! He actually even put it back in the safe.
Correction: Cal meant to keep it with him when he gets off the ship. Since the ship is sinking, the safe will be at the bottom of the ocean very shortly. Besides, he was probably being sarcastic.
Corrected entry: At the end, Rose changes her name to Dawson, unofficially. First, doesn't anybody notice that there is a Rose Dawson arriving in New York who wasn't on the ship when it left? Second, Lewis Bodine says that he tracked Rose down all the way to the twenties. Shouldn't he have noticed that the first record of her was the day the Carpathia arrived in New York? Where she was already 17 or so? Even if she did manage to falsify a birth certificate, shouldn't there be any more records of her?
Correction: The short answer to the questions in this submission is "no". In 1912, passenger manifests were notoriously inaccurate, especially international transports like the Titanic. The ship made two stops before heading across the Atlantic (France and Ireland); people got on and off the ship in both places with poor record keeping. Accounts still today differ on the number of people lost in the accident, mainly because no accurate passenger manifest could be verified. International IDs were non-existent for most immigrant passengers, and many changed their names upon arrival in America. It would not have been unusual at all for someone with a new name to have "emerged" from the rescued passengers, and in the confusion and chaos surrounding the sinking, most immigrant passengers melted into the community. Rose could have reported her papers lost on the ship (a last minute passenger, much like Jack was in the movie) and gotten a new birth certificate in that era without much difficulty.
Corrected entry: Just before Jack and Rose return to Cal's room in the scene where Jack is framed for stealing the necklace, Cal says he wants the entire room photographed. Was someone forgetting that this movie is set in 1912, a time when photography was extremely low-key to what it is today?
Correction: What does that have to do with anything? Low-key or not, Cal was rich and if he wanted it all photographed, he could get his wish anytime.
Correction: Yes, and furthermore, I'm sure the police had cameras by this point in time. As you recall, at the end of the movie when old Rose was lying in her bed on the ship, they panned over photos from when she was much, much, much younger.
Corrected entry: The lifeboats have S.S. Titanic on them. It is pretty ironic James Cameron went through such trouble for authenticity when the real name would be R.M.S. Titanic.
Correction: The real Titanic's lifeboats were labelled "S.S. Titanic". An original nameplate from one of the lifeboats still survives to prove it.
Corrected entry: When the water breaks into the bridge, Captain Smith is standing next to the wheel. In the next shot he's been replaced by his stunt double. (02:25:55)
Correction: Once the windows are about to break Captain Smith turns his back to the camera and we don't see his face again. Therefore it is impossible to say if it's Bernard Hill or the stunt double we are seeing on screen.
Corrected entry: When Ruth and Molly are getting into the lifeboat, at one point you see someone passing a blanket for someone to put in the lifeboat. It is a plaid blanket. Later when Jack and Cal are trying to convince Rose to get into the lifeboat, before Cal puts his jacket on Rose, it is the same blanket. When she is in the lifeboat at the end of the movie, it is the same blanket. Also, after Jack saves Rose from jumping off the ship in the beginning, and Jack is about to be arrested, the same blanket is on Rose's shoulders.
Correction: How do you know it's the same blanket? It seems more likely this is just one "type" of blanket that White Star, the company that owns Titanic, would have supplied to its cruise ships. All the deck chairs would likely have blankets put on them or be placed nearby for passengers to use when they're sitting out on the deck. It would be logical that all of the blankets were the same color and design. Therefore, you'd see more than one person covered with the same plaid blanket.
Corrected entry: Why does Brock call Caledon a 'son of a bitch' during the dive? At that time he doesn't know he was a bad guy. He was just a wealthy man who lost some expensive jewelry at a ship disaster.
Corrected entry: Following the captain's instructions to the Marconi Radio operator, you see one of the lifeboats beginning its descent to the sea. The name stenciled on the front of the lifeboat says "S.S. Titanic", when the Titanic was a "R.M.S." vessel.
Correction: The lifeboats on the actual Titanic did say "S.S. Titanic."
Corrected entry: After running from Cal shooting at them, Rose and Jack run UP through the dining room, away from the flooded staircase. They go up and up, then down 1 flight of stairs. Yet when they look back up those stairs, there's water overflowing down to them at the base. There's also doors holding back a wall of water at the end of the corridor that they enter. Water isn't rising that fast. (02:16:05)
Correction: Actually it is. Jack and Rose go from the flooded stairs up through the 1st class dining room and then down some stairs at the end of the dining room. We then see a shot of the water filing the dining room from the direction they come from as expected as they are going from a flooded area to an unflooded area. Shortly after this we see the water start to trickle down the stairs. We then see a shot of the little boy in the corridor which floods as it's below the first class dining room as is prevented from flooding by the doors we see. Then we see the water gushing down the stairs. So the water is rising at an alarming rate.
Corrected entry: When Jack and his friend are standing on the bow, looking at the dolphins swimming ahead of the ship, the dolphins are clearly Pacific white-sides, not any Atlantic species. (00:30:45)
Correction: Those are striped dolphins which look very similar to pacific white-sided dolphins except for their dorsal fins. These dolphins had dorsal fins that were too dark to be pacific white-sided dolphins.
Corrected entry: At the end of the drawing scene, Jack dates his finished portrait of Rose as 1914, two years after the titanic sank.
Correction: Untrue. The drawing very clearly reads "April 14 1912".
Corrected entry: James Cameron became so obsessed with the Titanic, that he has actually spent more time with the ship than those who sailed on it.
Correction: Well of course he did, it's hardly trivia. The real Titanic only sailed for 4 days and it's not unreasonable to spend more than four days with the ship when you're studying it.
Corrected entry: When they send a distress call for help from any near-by ships, they send a CQD morse-code message in the film. However, in reality the CQD distress call was replaced by the SOS the same year that the Titanic went down. The Titanic was actually the first ship to ever use the SOS - not the CQD used in the film. Also, because the new distress call was only new, the near-by ship didn't recognise it for what it was, and didn't come to help.
Correction: CQD was a common distress signal used principally by the British until after the Titanic disaster. SOS was first adopted as an alternative signal in 1908. Contrary to popular myth, Titanic was NOT the first ship to send an SOS distress call. At least two American ships used the signal prior to that time. The S.S. Arapahoe sent an SOS in August 1909 after losing a propeller off the North Carolina coast in the USA. Later, the S.S. Arapahoe received an SOS from the S.S. Iroquois two years before the distress call was sent by Titanic. Titanic sent both distress calls, CQD and SOS. Captain Smith ordered only the CQD, but either signal was permitted at the time. Radio operator Harold Bride survived the sinking and later told that he and the other radioman, Jack Phillips, added the SOS on their own. One joked to the other, "Why don't you also send the new signal, SOS? It might be your only chance to use it." This item - well reported in other films and books about Titanic - might have been left on James Cameron's cutting room floor. The near-by ship was the Leyland liner Californian that had stopped for the night because of the ice. Californian was not confused by Titanic's SOS because she never heard it. Californian shut down her radio shortly before Titanic sent either the CQD or SOS. (24-hour radio operations were not required.) The nearest ship that actually heard the SOS was the little Cunard liner Carpathia some 58 miles away. She understood the distress call and immediately steamed at full speed to rescue Titanic's survivors, thereby earning herself an exalted place in maritime history. Carpathia, though, only had another six years to enjoy her newly found fame. Carpathia joined Titanic on the floor of the North Atlantic after being torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat in 1918 toward the end of the First World War. As a result of the Titanic disaster, the SOS became the sole uniform international distress call in late 1912.
Corrected entry: 100% of the audio in this movie was added in post production, including voices.
Correction: Not remotely true. Sound designer Gary Rydstrom said in an interview "I'd say that about 50% of the natural dialogue was used in the finished picture". It was mostly the third act with all the water on set that necessitated re-recording dialogue, but all the lighting generators caused some issues too. The dialogue heard in the film was pieced together by sound mixer Tom Johnson from a mix of sources. http://filmsound.org/studiosound/pp_titanic.html
Correction: This is NOT true. During the painting scene, Leo flubs the line "Over on the bed...the couch." The director even said so.
Correction: Yes, he flubbed the line, but then re-recorded it because the director liked it and decided to keep it in. So, the claim about the audio being added in post-production still stands.
Yes, but the original post said "100%." One line being added in post production doesn't constitute as 100%.
Corrected entry: One of the misconceptions about the upper class and steerage passengers is that they were separated solely due to class reasons. First and I believe second class passengers had medical certificates that say they were free of disease, so they didn't have to pass through any kind of port check when they landed. One way of guaranteeing this was to keep them totally separated. This was common practice on the ocean liners of the time. Jack's being able to get into first class wasn't just improbable it was potentially dangerous.
Correction: They were also under the impression that American's didn't bring any disease, which is how Jack was able to get onto the ship with out going through inspection in the first place. (hint: he told that guy he was American and they let him through) Since Jack has an American accent all he would have to do was talk and they'd let him straight through.
Corrected entry: The whole manner in which upper class people speak has been dumbed down for the audience. High society people in the early part of the 20th century had a very refined manner of speaking; whatever they truly meant was masked with something more socially appropriate. For instance, when Rose's mother says something to the effect of: "Here comes that vulgar Brown woman. Let's move before she sits with us," she would have been considered extremely ill-mannered. In reality, she would have given some knowing glances, and said something more like: "It's getting very warm in here. Perhaps we should take a turn on the deck." Her friends, seeing Molly Brown approaching, would know exactly what she really meant. (00:50:40)
Correction: This is a generalisation about a large section of society. It is not possible to say that all high-society people would act in the same way. It's not a movie mistake to make it easier for the audience to understand, it's not different from having foreigners speak English in their own country to avoid subtitles.
Corrected entry: When the kids are "making out" in the car below decks, numerous cars are visible. I used to subscribe to a magazine published by the Vintage Car Collectors' Association. One contributor estimated that, in light of the number of wealthy people on board, there could be as many as about three dozen cars sitting down there (with the wood, fabric, and tires gone, of course). He was refuted by a Titanic history buff who pointed out that two copies of the manifest existed. One went down with the boat and the other survived at the destination. Apparently the only car on board was the Peugeot that drove to the dock as the boat was ready to depart. Added error: that car would have been loaded days or weeks earlier. (01:29:40)
Correction: There is no other car visible in any scenes in the cargo hold. It's crates, suitcases, etc.
Correction: As an artist, I've done hundreds of hours of life drawing. Models constantly move around a bit while they're posing. Their muscles get stiff and cramped, they get tired, they're bored, they move an appendage without realizing it, they get cold, and so on. It would be unrealistic if Rose held the pose without any variation whatsoever.
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