Oh, you remember that big movie about the big ship. This is the real-life feedback from it.

	Movie stubs, Easter eggs and fake rabbit fur have been left at the grave as a sort of offering or memorial.	For 85 years we have heard the tragic story of the unsinkable Titanic, the largest steamer in the world with its seven decks, 882.5-foot length and 46,000-tonne displacement. In April 1912, the pride of the White Star Fleet collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank off the coast of Newfoundland. The band played Nearer, My God to thee to the shrieks of humans as the Titanic plunged to its icy grave 2,000 fathoms beneath the surface, ultimately claiming the lives of 1,601 of 2,200 on board. Now, with the release of the blockbuster movie, Titanic, there is renewed interest in the tragic sinking. It’s a sunny morning in the north end of Halifax. Dozens of people are milling around Fairview Lawn cemetery at the corner of Windsor and Connaught, where 121 victims from the world’s most famous ocean disaster are buried. Most interest is reserved for a simple burial plot bearing the number 227 and the name J. Dawson, believed to be the inspiration for Canadian director James Cameron’s hero Jack Dawson — played by teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie, Titanic. Movie stubs, Easter eggs and fake rabbit fur have been left at the grave as a sort of offering or memorial. For anyone who has visited the tombstone of Jim Morrison at the Pere LaChaise Cemetery in Paris, the Dawson grave at Fairview has a familiar feel. Tourist Noriko Yano saw the movie in her native Japan before she came to visit the cemetery. “Kanashikatta,” she said — so sad. Although she cried in the theatre, the story seemed fictitious until she saw the graves. Another traveller, Vinicius Romanini of Sao Paulo, Brazil, said seeing the graves brought the reality home. “It’s interesting to see something concrete,” said Romanini. “The movie was romanced fiction. Here you see how things really happened. Things were worse than in the movie. It really happened.” Still, Halifax is a long way from Paris, where backpackers used to swarm year-round with guitar and flowers under arm to share drugs, booze and cigarettes at the final resting place at “Morrison Hotel,” which was at one point spray-painted on the side of a nearby grave. Graffiti surrounded the Doors’ singer’s modest tomb until security clamped down a few years ago. When I was last there, we were frisked on our way in to make sure we had no spray paint or alcohol. “Pas de picnic,” the gruff security guard barked. The graffiti had been sandblasted off and the bust of Morrison which had adorned his grave was gone. It is doubtful the Halifax cemetery crew will ever have such worries. For starters, the man whose remains lie beneath tombstone No. 227 was not Jack Dawson but James Dawson, a trimmer from Southhampton, England, whose job it was to haul coal to the stokers. That fact seems to make no difference to those milling around who seem quite content to believe J. Dawson is the romantic American vagabond from the movie. The province of Nova Scotia, the municipality of Halifax and private industry are kicking in $600,000 for restoration and upkeep of the Titanic burial sites. Already new signs have been erected at Fairview and plans are in the making for marble walkways and interpretive signs. Some of the money will be used to expand the existing museum exhibit, and a design firm has already been contracted to come up with a logo depicting Halifax’s tie to the Titanic.
	"I think, without the film, nobody would’ve come. It’s good for the tourist industry here, but nobody seems interested in the fact people died"	Some $39,000 is earmarked for Titanic displays at the visitor centre on Barrington Street; $125,000 for marketing including Titanic brochures and $36,000 for project management and evaluation. Nova Scotia is hoping for upwards of 20 million new tourism dollars this year alone in direct Titanic spinoffs. There are Titanic hotel weekends and special two-hour trolley tours featuring, of course, a trip to Fairview cemetery. Of course, not everybody is happy with the commercialization of the disaster. Jochen Tack of Germany seemed a bit dubious as to whether people were actually visiting the plots out of respect for the dead. “I think, without the film, nobody would’ve come. It’s good for the tourist industry here, but nobody seems interested in the fact people died,” said Tack. Fairview is not the only cemetery to showcase Titanic graves. Because the shipping line charged families to have the bodies of their loved ones returned, many were unable to afford the fee. As a result, many unclaimed bodies were left to be buried in Halifax. Once the religion of the deceased was ascertained, a final resting place was chosen. It’s for that reason that 10 were buried in the Baron de Hirsch Jewish cemetery (adjacent to Fairview) and 19 in the Mount Olivet Catholic cemetery (Dutch Village and Mumford). In downtown Halifax, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic on Lower Water Street features a display of Titanic artifacts. Almost 60,000 people visited the permanent exhibit in the first five months of this year (up almost three per cent from the same period last year). The display, the opening of which coincided with Cameron’s movie release, features an intact Titanic deck chair (a gift to the minister who performed many burials at sea), a crib board carved out of Titanic flotsam, a fragment of a life-jacket and a log of wireless distress signals from the ill-fated ship, recorded minute by minute at Cape Race on the southeast corner of Newfoundland.
	There were three men on duty at Cape Race and one of them, Robert Hunston, began a minute-by-minute log of distress calls from the doomed liner.	Although Newfoundland has no Titanic graves, it does have its own tangible reminders of the doomed ship. The east coast of this province is known as Iceberg Alley and, for the first time this year, tours to the bergs are being billed as Titanic tours. Every year from late April to late July hundreds of the mammoth ice chunks drift by the province’s capital. Some higher than 15 stories, the bergs originated in Greenland several years ago and travelled up to 1,800 nautical miles to get to Newfoundland’s coast. But Newfoundland offers more than bergs. The Newfoundland Museum on Duckworth Street in St. John’s has a fully intact life-vest from the Titanic, as well as a small display of photos and other paper artifacts. And there’s the wireless station where the doomed ship’s messages were picked up, transferred and recorded. There were three men on duty at the Marconi Wireless Station at Cape Race and one of them, Robert Hunston, began a minute-by-minute log of distress calls from the doomed liner. Stephen Bruneau at the Centre for Cold Ocean Resources and Engineering in St. John’s has been fascinated with icebergs for years and has compiled a booklet with the most commonly asked questions about icebergs. Next door, at the Institute for Marine Dynamics, Brian Hill has compiled a list of more than 200 accidents involving icebergs in the North Atlantic. Neither the province of Newfoundland nor the city of St. John’s have put any money into promoting Titanic products this tourism season. It’s thus up to private enterprise to do their own promotion. A full-page ad in Atlantic Business magazine features a photo of the Titanic and a picture of an iceberg, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corp. is inviting readers to Newfoundland to “see what a real Titanic looks like.”
	Related Links Titanic: the lies Real Newfoundland Entertainment	A St. John’s dinner theatre has picked up on the keen interest in sampling Titanic dishes. There are also tours cashing in on both the Halifax and St. John’s connections, complete with visits to the Nova Scotia museum and cemetery and boat tours off Newfoundland to see wildlife and bergs. There’s also beer and vodka made with iceberg water, and you can even buy your own can of ‘Titanic’ water — sea water scooped up off Cape Spear and billed as “water from the closest landfall of the Titanic disaster.” For the average price of a small house, meanwhile, you can buy the ultimate Titanic experience. Two people at a time (providing they have adequate disposable income) can climb aboard a small submarine, called MIR, and along with professional scientists, film-makers and explorers journey almost four kilometres below the surface of the Atlantic to see the Titanic wreck up close. Elsewhere, the Bank of Montreal recently teamed up with the British Royal Mint to offer Titanic commemorative medals. Land-locked Winnipeg will soon be home to the world’s largest collection of Titanic artifacts, and a cookbook written by Canadians allows you to treat your friends to your own personal Titanic dinner — hoping you and they won’t suffer a fate similar to those who ate the original meal. Some ingredients have been slightly altered as things like sturgeon spinal cord are no longer available at your average supermarket.