The Titanic has been in the Public's eye since she rose up from the shipyards of Harland and Wolff nearly 100 years ago. Even though the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage on April 14/15 1912, the world and it's fascination with Titanic has never died. Not long after the sinking of the Titanic poetry, songs and story accounts have been written about its sinking and the players involved with what was one of the most famous marittime tragedies in history.
In 1912 there was "The Tragedy of the RMS Titanic" which was a poem based on the sinking of the Titanic. There was also "Of Ice and Night" a german film that dramatized the sinking of the Titanic. Thought lost in 1914, the film was rediscovered in 1998 and has been included in the documentary "Beyond Titanic" according to Wikipedia and the film "Saved from the Titanic" which was a film staring survivor Dorthy Gibson. In the years that followed the Titanic sinking would be dramatized, used as Nazi Propoganda and written about but would come back to life in all it's glory in a 1953 Barbara Stanwyck Movie called Titanic and in 1956 when Sir Walter Lord published his nonfiction version of the sinking of the Titanic called "A Night to Remember". This book would be made into a movie in 1958 under the same title with no additional dramatizations needed for one of the most dramatic sinkings in history. A few years after "A Night to Remember" rekindled the Titanic and its memory in the minds of people worldwide the world would meet the survivor who could undeinably be the most colorful character in all of Titanic lore. In 1964 a movie version of the Broadway Musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" starring Debbie Reynolds as the title character would ignite the world and help keep the titanic firmly implanted in the minds of the general public. Then in 1975 a fictional book would take one of modern fictions most beloved Adventures to the bottom of the Atlantic and set the stage for the second act of the Titanic's dramatic history.
In 1975, Clive Cussler decided it was time Dirk Pitt found the Titanic. Having always been interested in locating ships lost in history, he realized the Holy Grail status of the RMS Titanic. So he created the book "Raise the Titanic" where Dirk Pitt and usual ragaband crew help a secret agency locate the Titanic under the premise that national security depends on a rare element that was shipped on the Titanic. In 1980 this was made into a movie, which has faded into obscurity. Cussler did his best to try and accurately describe what the titanic might have looked like after so long on the bottom of the ocean. A Decade later we would see just how close he was.
In 1985, Dr. Robert Ballard was dreaming of locating the Titanic. While using Side scan sonar in the North Atlantic to help asses damage of a sunken US Naval Submarine, Dr. Ballard was given an opportunity to also search for the Holy Grail of all ship wrecks, the RMS Titanic. At 2 am on September 1st 1985, Dr. Ballard was awoken by his team with great news...They had found a boiler and they thought it was off the Titanic. Running to the moniter Dr.Ballard compared the image he was seeing on the screen using his new underwater camera sled to a picture of a known boiler from the titanic. A Cheer went up and then, as Dr.Ballard would later tell the world and the world would see on the National Geographic special dedictaed to his historic discovery, one of the crew members noted the time and said "It's 2 am the Titanic sinks in 20 minutes." From that moment on, as Dr. Ballard's cameras flew slowly over the debis field and eventually over the ship herself a reverred silence was only broken by the nosie of the research ship itself. He would return the following year for another National geographic documentery but this time he would have Alvin, his Deep Sea Submersible, and would no longer just view the Titanic thru a black and white lens but in full living color while hovering just a few feet over her once immaculate decks. The whole encounter was video taped for National geographic and the world was able to see the first color images of the Titanic as she lay on the ocean floor. It was this amazing discovery that would lead a film maker to make his own history just by making a film about this most famous ship.
In 1997 the film Titanic came out but while it was still in production James Cameron was having problems. He was over budget, to the point where Titanic stands as the most expensive film ever made. He 98 foot long replica of the ship built in a special water tank with a hydrolics system put on the stern so that he could film the sinking as we have come to know it to have happened, where the ship split between the 2nd and 3rd funnels and the stern rose into the water before it's final, gental plunge to the ocean floor. He gave up his Director's fee, he found a second movie studio that would foot the rest of the bill...and he made Movie history. His fictionalized love story aboard the Titanic made box office history, earning more than 400 million in domestic box office ticket sales and has the title of Highest Grossing film of all time, even beating Star Wars and ET. Bill Paxton even became enchanted by the Titanic, and in 2003 Paxton and Cameron went back aboard the Keldish and with special Imax cameras mounted to the Mir 1 and Mir 2 Submeribles and special robots named Jake and Elwood, showed us Titanic as we had never see her before. Ghosts of the Abyss was filmed for both regular and Imax screens as well as a few special releases which were in 3D. This film brought to a new generation, who's great grandparents would have remembered the sinking of the Titanic, a real sense of connection to something from the past. The ground breaking documentary also helped people to realize that we are losing our history and helped to boost preservation projects around the world.
The Titanic and her story have stayed in popular culture through out the years, sometimes as the latest thing and other times as a quite under current being discussed by scientists and archologists interested in preserving that history. Hollywood has made a fortune on movies based on her and her story either real or fictionalized and have used her story as a mold for other sea disaster movies. The Titanic has filled numerous pages of thousands of books and you can go into any book store and on the shelves find books about the ship, about the survivors and even book which the survivors wrote about their experiances. Every year, however, we lose just a little bit more of that history. There is only one survivor left and that survivor was so young that they don't even recall the night the ship sank. These books and films will stand in time to retell the story of this ship and those lives that were lost in 1912 and those who have since passed to rejoin their friends and loved ones lost so long ago.