From dominating the 70th Academy Awards with 11 wins to turning Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into household names, Titanic has gone down in history as a pop culture phenomenon for many reasons. Even before hitting theaters, James Cameron’s 1997 epic became the stuff of legends thanks to a tense and unwieldy production that went notoriously over-budget and over-schedule, making its record-breaking performance at the box office all the more impressive. But perhaps a lesser-known bit of trivia surrounding Titanic is a bizarre behind-the-scenes debacle that took place in the summer of 1996 on one of the film’s Canadian sets. So scandalous was the incident that local authorities conducted a thorough investigation of what transpired, but decades after the fact, inquiring minds and many of the players involved continue to scratch their heads.
Dozens of ‘Titanic’ Crew Members Unknowingly Ingested PCP
Phencyclidine, or PCP, is a hell of a drug. A mashup of anesthetics, depressants, hallucinogens, and stimulants, the drug induces a wide variety of effects and sensations ranging from euphoria and delusions to anxiety and paranoia. Such effects were on full display on the night of August 8, 1996, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. According to Vulture, while busily shooting one of Titanic’s contemporary sequences in the Canadian province, James Cameron, along with a handful of actors and a crew of filmmakers, were unknowingly treated to a dose of PCP after their catering had been spiked with the notorious substance. According to Vanity Fair, the tainted food was some kind of chowder, but whether it was clam or seafood or lobster remains a topic of dispute.
Shortly after taking their meal break near midnight, the film’s cast and crew began to sense that something wasn’t right. “By the time we got back from eating, about 30 minutes, that’s when I started noticing something was wrong,” crew member Marilyn McAvoy remembers. According to Vulture, another crew member suddenly asked his co-workers, “Do you guys feel okay? Because I don’t. I feel like I’m on something, and believe me, I would know.” Moments later, James Cameron and a Titanic extra could be heard addressing the same concern, with Cameron reportedly saying, “There’s something in me! Get it out!” Fearing he’d ingested a shellfish toxin, Cameron immediately forced himself to vomit, but others who didn’t act as fast wouldn’t be so fortunate.
An Estimated 50 to 80 People Were Taken to a Local Hospital
The mysterious situation quickly devolved into chaos, and dozens of people were admitted to Halifax’s Dartmouth General Hospital in the wee hours of the morning. While some of the ailing cast and crew reportedly enjoyed the experience of being high, others panicked while nurses, thinking food poisoning was the culprit, administered liquid charcoal to their patients. “People are moaning and crying, wailing, collapsed on tables and gurneys,” Cameron remembers. Per set decorator Claude Roussel, “grips were going down the hallway doing wheelies in wheelchairs” while cinematographer Caleb Deschanel was leading crew members in what Cameron has described as “a highly vocal conga line.” Bill Paxton, on the other hand, fled the chaotic scene and returned to the film’s set to drink a case of beer. “That seemed to help me,” he revealed to Los Angeles Times.
As the hours passed at Dartmouth General Hospital, Titanic’s PCP-stricken victims had no choice but to, for better or worse, ride out their highs. As Marilyn McAvoy recalls, people were sectioned off in “cubicles with the curtains around us, but no one wanted to stay in their cubicles. People had a lot of energy.” But as the sun rose and people began coming down amid playing hacky sack, crew members began trickling out of the hospital and returning to Titanic’s set to sleep. Per Jake Clarke, one of the few crew members fortunate enough to have skipped out on the PCP-laden catering, James Cameron and Bill Paxton were spotted on set at four in the morning. “Their eyes were beet-red, like unbelievably,” he recalls. “Jim had a bottle of scotch, and Bill Paxton had bag of joints because he was a real stoner.” For his part, Cameron emerged from the chaos happy about being given one more day to film the sequence that was interrupted. As the company finally wrapped the Canadian leg of Titanic’s production, local authorities launched an investigation into the incident, but those searching for the responsible party would ultimately be left disappointed.
