There really are no words that can adequately describe the powerful chokehold the blockbuster film Titanic had on people who lived through the 90s.
We fell in love with the stunning and misunderstood Rose, with her fiery red locks and sharp wit.
The masses fell head over heels for the boyishly handsome Jack, with his weirdly hot suspenders and cheeky smile.
We all wanted a love like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet had in the 1997 hit. But do you know the grim truth behind the making of the film?
As it turns out, it wasn’t all romantic couch sketchings and steamy hands on windows.
On the very last day of filming the masterpiece, a whopping 80 people – including director James Cameron and actor Bill Paxton – had to be hospitalised after their food was poisoned.
An innocent chowder was the culprit, with a mystery person unscrupulously lacing it with the psychedelic drug PCP, otherwise known as angel dust.
The substance, officially known as phencyclidine, is a mind-altering drug that can lead to hallucinations and psychosis, but can also work as a stimulant, depressant and anaesthetic.
What actually happened?
It was the night of August 8, 1996, and was meant to be the crew’s last day of filming in Nova Scotia.
They had wrapped up all the ‘modern day’ scenes and the team were ready to move on to Mexico, where a gargantuan reproduction of the doomed ship was waiting for them on an outdoor soundstage in Baja.
Filming at strange hours, the crew had a break to eat their “lunch” at around midnight, where a local catering company had provided, amid other options, chowder.
The truth about the exact type of chowder served that fateful night has been lost over time.
Cameron himself says it was mussels, while Paxton was certain it was clam. Halifax Police at the time reported it to be lobster.
Whatever the case, it was potent. Cameron told Vanity Fair that he suddenly began feeling “distinctly woozy” and thought the soup may have contained a “paralytic shellfish neurotoxin, which is very dangerous”.
He immediately stepped away to vomit. When he returned, things began spiralling.
“I get back to the set and nobody’s there.” he recalled.
“I’m standing at the monitors, near the camera, and the room is empty. It was like the twilight zone.
“Some people were laughing, some people were crying, some people were throwing up.”
Around 80 crew members were sent to the nearby Dartmouth General Hospital, where the unbelievably chaotic scenes descended even further into madness.
“Eventually we all got put in these cubicles with the curtains around us, but no one wanted to stay in their cubicles,” set painter Marilyn McAvoy told Vice.
“Everyone was out in the aisles and jumping into other people’s cubicles. People had a lot of energy.
“Some were in wheelchairs, flying down the hallways. I mean, everyone was high!”
Cameron was even stabbed in the face with a pen by a crew member and recalls watching helplessly as his team fell apart.
In the middle of it all, a random conga line began to form.
“I was sitting there bleeding and laughing,” he said.
“People are moaning and crying, wailing, collapsed on tables and gurneys. The D.P., Caleb Deschanel, is leading a number of crew down the hall in a highly vocal conga line.
“You can’t make this stuff up.”
Still under the assumption that the team had an extreme case of food poisoning, the medical staff asked them to ingest liquid charcoal.
However, a toxicology report later revealed that PCP was to blame for the madness.
The whole incident has gone down in history as one of the most bizarre things to have ever occurred on a Hollywood movie set.
Over the years, some have even speculated that the tale was simply folklore, a fairytale conjured up by someone with a wild imagination.
But Cameron himself confirmed to Power that it was a “100 per cent true story.”
“You haven’t lived until you’ve been high on PCP,” he told the outlet on the 25th anniversary of Titanic.
“Which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone.”
Report to be released
After all these years, there is still one question that remains.
Who on earth spiked the Titanic crew’s chowder?
For a long time, it was unknown. The Halifax Police Department investigated the matter for two and a half years, even executing a warrant for Department of Health records and getting a list of every person who had worked on the set.
But with no leads, the case was officially closed on February 12, 1999. They never made their findings public.
However, this could all change after the information and privacy commissioner of the Halifax Police Department, Tricia Ralph, ordered that the unredacted report be released to the public earlier this month.
If Ralph succeeds, the 10 page report could be available in mid-May and might finally shed some light on the incident that’s baffled and intrigued movie lovers for nearly three decades.
Until then, we can only speculate, but there have however been theories floating around.
The catering company’s CEO Earle Scott, told Entertainment Weekly at the time that it was “the Hollywood crowd bringing in the psychedelics”.
“I don’t think it was purposefully done to hurt somebody,” Scott said.
“It was done like a party thing that got carried away.”
While Cameron has never named names, he has his suspicions.
“We had fired a crew member the day before because they were creating trouble with the caterers,” he told Vanity Fair.
“So we believe the poisoning was this idiot’s plan to get back at the caterers, whom of course we promptly fired the next day. So it worked.”
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were away at the time and did not eat the chowder, and thankfully Gloria Stuart, who played older Rose, was eating at a restaurant that night so was not harmed.
Despite the short hiccup, Titanic went on to be one of the most successful films of all time.
It was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won 11, including Best Picture and Best Director.
The film’s iconic soundtrack, which includes Celine Dion’s song My Heart Will Go On, further contributed to its enduring popularity.
With a budget of $200 million, it went on to make $2.264 billion at the box office.
It became the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide in 1998, beating Jurassic Park (1993).
The iconic remained at that spot for twelve years, until Avatar (2009), also written and directed by James Cameron, surpassed it in 2010.
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