Customer Reviews

Titanic and the Making of James Cameron

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book brought the movie into a new perspective. It made it very easy to explain certain scenes to our kids, so that they could truly understand the complexity of the movie and thus of the disaster. The actors/actresses speaking of the fear they felt on the set just trying to recreate the worst maritime disaster in history-gives us a small glimpse of what the passengers/crew faced that nite. Also, it gave us a new respect for all the hard work, long hours, difficulties that had to be overcome to delivery the greatest movie of all time to the public. Also, we get to see that James Cameron is human, he gets frustrated and upset just like everyone else, that in and of itself was reassuring, because he is so often portrayed as larger than life.

This book is the closest thing to actually being there whilethe film was made. Parisi's exclusive access to the set and Cameronpermits an over the shoulder view describing details and nuances that went into making a movie of epic proportions. Many facets of directing are not generally known and we are made aware of the struggle and persistence to get things done. Thus we have insight into the genius of Cameron and respect for the author's ability to translate the enormity of making this masterpiece. I enjoyed being a fly on the wall thanks to Parisi's book.

I'll buy anything to do with the Titanic, especially books, but I was really disappointed with this book. It's very technical, and not only takes into what happens during planning/filming Titanic, but goes into detail about the three years before it even begun filming. There's a lot of stuff about James Cameron's "Abyss", and there's really more detail than needed.

It's a long hard slog to get through this book, and I wouldn't recommend it for Titanic fans out there. I'd recommend it to people who are interested in Titanic AND who are interested in the film making business. You could learn a lot from James Cameron.

Excellent reporting on how this film was made and the details that made it such a facinating, successful movie. Author was right on, and had the ability to chronicle Cameron's intensive and demanding direction.

The story of an obsessed man who is driven to make a dream. Cameron steams through Hollywood, Baja and the world on the most Titanic ship ever, the blockbuster movie. This is how Hollywood movies are made today. The deals, the visions and the drive to overcome. Are you as obsessed? Well done!

Very well done; gives you a better idea for what it took than any of the articles published; gives you an idea of the fights and the struggles and it really gets a lot deeper and a lot more detailed than any of the articles ever have. There are a few glaring spelling errors, though.

Parisi bit off more than she could chew with this book. A truly insightful work would have no doubt been a hulking tome that would break bookshelves, but the whole thing comes off as a bit brief, and you worry when halfway through the book she's still going on about the subs exploring Titanic.

Parisi is a journalist and this book reads like an extended article, complete with all the grammatical and puntuation errors. There's even one highly obscure derogatory reference to herself! She also says she finds the technical stuff interesting, but it's very poorly reported wirth terms and jargon never being explained.

I'm not a huge fan of the film, but I am of James Cameron, and of Film-making, and this book came off as insightful to both, which I was happy with.

I'm glad to have been exposed to the minutiae of the mammoth undertaking of making this film, because it increased my appreciation for both Titanic and James Cameron; also, it was interesting. But I feel that the book could have been vastly improved by HAVING SOMEONE EDIT IT!!!!!!!! (Parisi thanks an editor in the afterword, but I have doubts such a person really exists). The same grammatical errors appear consistently (such as the use of the conjunction "it's" where "its" would be correct, the use of the word "premiere" where "premier" would be correct, commas used where semicolons should go - really basic errors which any high school teacher would catch). The author's frequent switches between past and present tense make for a somewhat disjointed reading experience. I undertand what she was trying to do, but I think it could have been achieved in a more seamless fashion. The above kept pulling me out of the narrative and jerking me back into reality, and that certainly interfered with my enjoyment of the work. Having said that, Parisi does provide an abundance of detail (for all but the very technologically advanced or production insiders, maybe a little too much - you find yourself reading for context) and some interesting insight into James Cameron. As well, and this is perhaps the single best reason to read this book, she does succeed in conveying the huge scope of this project - and the attention paid to every single detail that resulted in a superlative piece of work.

The first problem with Entertainment Weekly journalist Paula Parisi's first book is the title. It may have seemed clever from the writer's point of view, but from the point of view of the consumer, it's an embarrassing title to ask for. No doubt clerks who have not heard of the book will think that people have got the title back to front.

The book is a collection of interview quotes, documentation and commentary on he subject of, in conflict with the title's determination to be different, the making of "Titanic". It attempts to document how James Cameron was inspired to start off the project, get it completed despite the incredible challenges that it presented, and, of course, the film's phenomenal success.

Parisi's first section tells of Cameron and a Russian submersible crew trying to get good footage of the real Titanic wreck for the beginning of the movie. She spends far too much time on this, almost half the book, when not many people will care about ! the technical details she goes on and on about, despite obviously having no clue about them herself.

In comparison, the next hundred pages of this remarkably short book make the colossal production, media coverage and success of "Titanic" merely hinted at. And the book is not only disproportionate in depth, but lacking in continuity in terms of the writing style. Unlike Steven Bach's "Final Cut", which covered details with objectivity and the narrative with personality, Parisi is blindly objective for most of the book, then far too conversational towards the close, where I guess she just got lazier and lazier. The writing style we're left with is an off-putting mixture of encyclopedic clinicality and rather immature attempts at humour. Not as annoying as the Alamo "Drive Happy" tune maybe, but still annoying, since it would be so easy and so helpful if Parisi had made just a little more effort to put a polish on her work.

Maybe she's just too ! used to reading and writing articles. This also becomes app! arent in the amount of erroneous pieces of information she uses to make a point from, which are slightly forgivable in articles and completely irritating in books. There are also a number of typos and references to things which aren't quoted. Instead of thanking her editor, Parisi should have shot her for giving her false hope.

Still, this is somewhat of an interesting read, because Parisi can't change quotes(not much, anyway), and she's quoted a lot of interesting people, most notably Cameron himself, a fascinating man who, like, say, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, one could watch interviews of all day without getting bored. We also get to know about the behind-the-scenes attitudes towards different people, and it's interesting to find out how certain people got hired.

Am I putting this on my bookshelf? It's not so bad, I might look at it for reference, and it's got a cool cover. Well, no...I've only one space left on the shelf. Maybe when I get a bigger house.

It was well written and interesting, but it had alot of tecnical stuff. If you are a titanic and or James Cameron fan and like technical stuff this is a great book. If you are a titanic fan and get bored and confused by technical stuff, I suggest the book, James Cameron's Titanic.