I keep feeling guilty about what I write. I attacked poor James Cameron, just because of the fawning profile of him on 60 Minutes. It made me think of Mike Wallace's fawning profile of Leona Helmsley. Leona was able to get him on her side by bringing up her dead son. Wallace's son had died years earlier. He should have interviewed Saddam Hussein blubbing over Uday and Qusay.
Helmsley's son was a crook. He stayed out of prison by having enough sense to steal only from his stepfather. And as it happens, Mike Wallace's surviving son is scumbag Chris Wallace on Fox News. Chris Wallace made a name for himself on some network news magazine with an attack on federal funds for special education. Wallace targeted Black parents in the South, ambushed them with cameras and claimed the fact that they couldn't or wouldn't instantly explain why their children needed special education was proof that they were defrauding Uncle Sam. Republicans in Congress used the report to cut funding. I don't know what Mike Wallace's dead son was like, but if he was anything like his brother, good riddance to him.
But poor James Cameron---all he wants to do is entertain! Some people didn't like that he said that he was "king of the world" when he got his Oscar. He didn't mean it literally. He got poor Sigourney Weaver an Oscar for Aliens. And he deserves some credit for being Canadian, although he should do more for his people.
I've never seen Titanic, but it reportedly had a scene of Leonardo DiCaprio standing at the front of a ship flapping his arms shouting that he is king of the world. This scene had tragic consequences. Cruise ship operators have had to stop passengers from trying the same thing. I don't know if there are proven cases of people falling overboard while trying this, but there are reports of it.
James Cameron's success has come at a cost in human life.
There was the 1993 movie, The Program, which showed football player proving their courage by lying on the double yellow line on a busy street. This stunt didn't work in real life. Two people were killed when they tried to do the same thing, and more were injured.
People murder each other all the time, so it's hard to tell to what degree violent movies cause violent crime. But with The Program and Titanic, the cause and effect relationship is very clear. Nobody anywhere ever tested their courage by lying in the street before The Program, and nobody climbed onto the bow of a cruise ship yelling that they were king of the world before Titanic.
I know, the people who did this behaved unwisely, but if you make a movie costing over a hundred million dollars, you obviously expect a vast number of people to see it. If a tiny fraction of one percent of your audience was dumb enough to give it a shot, that would still be thousands of people. And, if you're going to say that the people in real life who climb out on the prow of a ship are idiots whose deaths are their own fault, weren't the characters in the movie idiots, too? Should James Cameron be admired for making a movie about a couple of abject morons?
What was the death toll was from Natural Born Killers? How about The Matrix? The Weekly World News reported that the movie The Deerhunter killed more people that the Hindenburg disaster. The number of Russian Roulette fatalities has no doubt risen since then.
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