I was watching James Whale's The Old Dark House, from 1932, on Turner Classic Movies the other day, and during Ben Mankiewicz's outro segment, he mentioned an interesting bit of LD-related trivia. He said that James Cameron had watched The Old Dark House on LD during the late 90's, and was so impressed by Gloria Stuart's charisma in her commentary track, that he decided to cast her as "Old Rose". This is repeated on TCM's web site: "When director James Cameron watched a laserdisc release of The Old Dark House, he was so taken with Gloria Stuart's amusing audio commentary, he wound up casting her in a little film he was planning called Titanic (1997)." Curiously, the LDDB has the LD release for The Old Dark House as being 1998-05-27, which is quite a bit after the filming of Titanic. Maybe Cameron had a promotional/pre-release copy of the LD? I've seen this anecdote repeated elsewhere, but the dates thing has me wondering.
Great movie though! I guess it was long considered a "lost movie" until filmmaker Curtis Harrington went on a mission to find an extant print, and ultimately was successful. From what I've read, Harrington was a bit of a Thelemite or occultist and did some work with Kenneth Anger. Has any one else seen the film?
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