The movie came out just before Christmas. Kenneth Turan, the film critic for the L.A. Times, gave Titanic a scathing review. Just as the hubris of headstrong shipbuilders who insisted that the Titanic was unsinkable led to an unparalleled maritime disaster, so Camerons overweening pride has come unnecessarily close to capsizing this project, he wrote, calling it a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances. Turan, who continued to write critically of the film even as it became a box-office phenomenon, was besieged with hate mail. One correspondent, a teen-age girl, sent him a letter to which shed stapled her multiple Titanic ticket stubs. In March, Cameron delivered his own rebuttal, which was published in the arts section of the L.A. Times. It was incisive, and maybe more revealing than he knew. Poor Kenny. He sees himself as the lone voice crying in the wilderness, righteous but not heeded by the blind and dumb great unwashed around him. It must be a great burden to be cursed with such clear vision when your misguided flock bray past you, like lemmings, unmindful. Even now, Cameron resents the medias treatment of the film. We were branded as the biggest idiots in movie history, he told me. They were just sharpening their knives so they could really take the film apart. Then they couldnt. So, fuck them. Fuck em all.
