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Plot Summary[]
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The world knows the historical story of the most famous and tragic maritime disaster of the 20th Century and the RMS Titanic has been immortalized into Screenplays since 1912 starring Titanic survivor Dorothy Gibson the Actress of the Silent Movie Era, A Night To Remember written by Walter Lord in 1955 which was turned into a film by William MacQuitty in 1958 starring Kenneth More as 2nd Officer Charles Lightoller, Laurence Naismith as Captain Smith, Tucker McGuire as Margaret Molly Brown, Honor Blackman as Liz Lucas and David MacCallum as Wireless Operator Harold Bride.
The RMS Titanic was built in Northern Ireland by the Harland and Wolff ship building company in Belfast in 1909 by Thomas Andrews for the White Star Line which was in direct competition with the Cunard Line. Joseph Bruce Ismay who was the Chairman of the company commissioned Andrews to build three Olympic Class type Ocean liners; the first to be built was RMS Olympic, also built in Belfast. The Maiden Voyage began at Southampton in England on the 10th of April 1912, stopping at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (Now Cobh) in Ireland then set off across the North Atlantic ocean to New York city in America. In three days time 1502 people including passengers and crew members will meet their fates.
In 1898 a struggling author named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any ship that had ever been built. Robertson loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg. This somehow shoed the futility of everything and in fact, the book was called Futility when it appeared that year, published by the firm of M. F. Mansfield. Fourteen years later a British shipping company named the White Star Line built a steamer remarkably like the one in Robertson's novel. The new liner was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson's was 70,000 tons. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24-5 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number. But then, this didn't seem to matter because both ships were labelled as 'unsinkable'. On the 10th of April 1912 the real ship left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York . Her cargo contained a priceless copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and a list of passengers collectively worth 250 million dollars. On her way she too struck and iceberg and went down on a cold April night. Robertson called his ship the Titan; the White Star Line called its ship the Titanic. This is the story of her last night.