That Time the Cast and Crew of Titanic Got Drugged with PCP
It happened on August 9, 1996, after a late night shoot in Nova Scotia, Canada.
It was in fact the very last night of shooting in Nova Scotia, where the majority of the present-day scenes with old Rose take place.
At some point prior to the cast and crew taking a short meal break in between sessions, an obviously disgruntled, but as yet unknown member of the production’s catering staff spiked a pot of clam chowder with the hallucinogen phencyclidine, better known as PCP, or angel dust.
Here’s how the National Institute of Health describes PCP:
Phencyclidine (PCP, “angel dust”) is an infamous hallucinogenic sought for its ability to induce the illusion of euphoria, omnipotence, superhuman strength, and social and sexual prowess. The acronym PCP stems from its organic name 1-(1-phenylcyclohexyl) piperidine, which alludes to its relatively simple production from the arylcyclohexylamine piperidine.
PCP’s most unusual feature is that doses of 5 to 10 mg orally may induce acute schizophrenia, including agitation, psychosis, audiovisual hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and catatonia. Doses greater than 10 mg usually result in coma. In animal experimental studies PCP is used to investigate the neurochemical basis of schizophrenia. Low doses of phencyclidine have produced patterns of metabolic and neurochemical changes in rodent brains that resemble those in brains of schizophrenic patients.
So this could’ve ended up being really, really bad. But, thankfully, it wasn’t.
Within just 15 minutes of being drugged, the so-called ‘Bad Crew’ members, as opposed to the ‘Good’ ones who avoided being poisoned, started notice its effects, both on themselves and others. Their own words tell the story best:
In a 25th anniversary Titanic retrospective with Vulture, transportation coordinator Jake Clarke said: ‘We had a room for the grips and electricians, and one of the guys started talking really hyper… He’s a big guy, like six-four, and he says, ‘Do you guys feel okay? Because I don’t. I feel like I’m on something, and believe me, I would know.’ He was just chattering on like that. And just as he was saying this, we saw James Cameron run by the door and this extra running behind him. He said, ‘There’s something in me! Get it out!’
Standby painter Marilyn McAvoy to Vice in 2017: ‘By the time we got back from eating, after about 30 minutes, that’s when I started noticing something was wrong… Everyone seemed confused. Everyone was having trouble getting their work done. … En masse, we went through these hospital doors at 1 a.m. in the morning. They did not know what to do with us. It became pretty chaotic.’
In a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair, director James Cameron described what happened next: ‘People are moaning and crying, wailing, collapsed on tables and gurneys. The DP, Caleb Deschanel, is leading a number of crew down the hall in a highly vocal conga line. You can’t make this stuff up.’
Since the shoot didn’t include scenes with the main cast, none of the movie’s more billable stars were around to experience it, save for the late Bill Paxton, who was right there in the thick of it with everyone else.
Set decorator Claude Roussel, also to Vulture: ‘(Paxton) was sitting next to me in the hallway of the hospital, and he was kind of enjoying the buzz. Meanwhile, grips were going down the hallway doing wheelies in wheelchairs.’
Indeed, Paxton likely was less affected than most of the other ‘Bad Crew.’ He went through his part of the story with the LA Times in 2015:
‘I said, ‘Jim (James Cameron), I’m not gonna hang out here. This is bedlam… I’m gonna … wander back down to the set and just drink a case of beer,’ which is what I did. That seemed to help me.’
In the same Vulture interview, Jake Clarke, who was lucky enough to be one of the ‘Good Crew,’ added some more context:
’Around 4 a.m., Cameron and Paxton strolled in. Their eyes were beet-red, like unbelievably… Jim had a bottle of Scotch, and Bill Paxton had a bag of joints because he was a real stoner. I’m kind of laughing about it because I didn’t eat the chowder, and then I’m there in the trailer smoking a joint.’
Here’s the link to today’s Daily game:
Anywhere from 50-80 cast and crew ended up being affected in some way or another by the drug, but, lucky for them, the dose wasn’t big enough to cause any major brain damage, at least so far as we know. Most of them were ultimately released from the hospital the following morning, after a just few hours of treatment.
Despite a two-year investigation into the matter by the Halifax police department, no arrests were ever made, and even now, 28-ish years later, no one knows for sure who set the whole thing in motion. Cameron has his theories though. In a 2022 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Tom Power, he said:
‘We believe the story is that it was somebody who had a beef with the caterers because the first thing we did was fire the caterers.… And, you know, sure enough, we had some leads on that. Of course, the operating theory was that I was such a psycho maniac that [the perpetrator was] trying to get back at me, but I reject that theory out of hand for obvious reasons.’
Who knows, but it’s not like the aforementioned perp was a big name actor, so even if the truth does come out at some point in the near future, it’s probably not going to be front page news.
Later in that same interview, Cameron managed to perfectly sum up the whole episode in just one sentence, so we’ll just use that to wrap this one up:
‘You haven't lived until you've been high on PCP, which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone.’
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