Twenty-eight years after authorities say someone on the set of “Titanic” laced the cast and crew’s chowder with PCP on the last day of shooting in Canada, the public might finally get some answers in one of the longest-running mysteries in movie history.
The Halifax police closed the case in 1999 but never made the findings public. Now, the information and privacy commissioner of the Halifax Police Department, Tricia Ralph, ordered that the unredacted report be released to the public, The Guardian reported.
If Ralph succeeds, the report could be available in mid-May and might finally shed some light on the incident that’s baffled and intrigued movie lovers for almost 30 years.
Here’s what we know about the incident, which temporarily shut down the set of what would become a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon.
On the last day of shooting in Canada, 80 people from the set of ‘Titanic’ were hospitalized after ingesting PCP
According to a 2017 oral history of the incident by Vanity Fair, it was the last day of shooting “Titanic” in Nova Scotia before the production moved to Mexico to shoot most of the ship-sinking scenes in water tanks.
Director James Cameron told Vanity Fair he felt “suddenly and very distinctly woozy” after eating chowder provided by a local caterer — though the exact type of chowder is unknown. A police report from the time describes lobster chowder, while Cameron claimed it contained mussels, and star Bill Paxton told Larry King in 2015 it was clam chowder.
After feeling sick, Cameron made himself vomit in case the shellfish contained what he called a “paralytic shellfish neurotoxin.”
He was wrong. Instead, the chowder had been laced with phencyclidine, a hallucinogenic also known as PCP or angel dust.
