Titanic/not Titanic -- April 11, 2012

After the Titanic sank, movie producers rushed to roll out real and fictional films about the ill-fated vessel.  Visit the Bioscope to learn about the only known footage of the Titanic (http://thebioscope.net/2012/04/05/and-the-ship-sails-on/).  Titanic, the second ship of its class after the Olympic, suffered from a problem common to second children: very few people took film or photos of the Titanic. 

In the 27-April-1912 issue of Moving Picture World, Warner's Features, the Warner brothers' company before Warner Brothers, released a 400-foot film about the disaster. It featured "Positively the only negative in existence of the late Captain E. J. Smith, R.N.R., commander of the ill-fated S. S. Titanic that went down in mid-ocean."  In much smaller print it mentions that the footage was taken on the Olympic.