Titanic is one of the most successful movies of all time, but beyond its epic love story set in the middle of a historic tragedy is another story that has stood the test of time. It’s the epic tale about how the cast and crew of the film, including James Cameron and Bill Paxton, got dosed with PCP. It’s been 25 years since that night and still nobody has any idea who did it.
It was the summer of 1996 when the cast and crew of Titanic sat down to a lunch of lobster chowder. The food was apparently quite good, with several people helping themselves to multiple bowls of the stuff. However, shortly after the meal began several people began to feel strange. Crew member Jake Clarke, who has a shellfish allergy, and thus avoided getting dosed, recently told Vulture about the night, and seeing James Cameron realizing something was wrong. He explained…
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!’
The incident sent several people to the hospital, some, who had eaten a lot of the chowder, spent several hours there and were apparently in pretty rough shape. Others, like Bill Paxton, who passed away in 2017, were reportedly pretty chill about the whole thing. He just relaxed and let the high wash over him according to Clarke. The event triggered an investigation by both the local police in Nova Scotia as well as 20th Century Fox. It was the studio that eventually confirmed that somebody had laced the chowder with PCP.
To this day nobody knows who put PCP in the chowder and there don’t appear to have ever been any leads. It’s suggested it could have been a disgruntled member of the crew or the catering staff. It’s also possible this was somebody’s idea of a joke that just went terribly wrong. The good news for whoever did is that in the end there was no long term harm done. Nobody was seriously hurt. In the end the crew went back to their rooms to sleep before returning for a final day of filming before changing locations.
The film’s stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, were lucky enough to avoid being part of this due to the scenes being filmed being part of the movie’s framing device, not the core Titanic story, so they were not on set at the time. At this point, unless somebody decides to confess, it seems unlikely we’ll ever know who drugged the chowder on the set of Titanic.