Scandalous Titanic On-Set Incident That Landed Entire Crew in Hospital
One "joke" sparked a police investigation that lasted several years.
Most movie sets are associated with celebrities and the glamorous life of Hollywood. However, during filming, actors and crew sometimes happen to be in hazardous situations.
On the set of Titanic, an extremely strange incident occurred that put the lives of dozens of people in danger.
Almost everyone knows how Kate Winslet refused to wear a wetsuit during a scene in the water, almost drowned, and then got pneumonia.
In addition, several extras suffered fractures and injuries to internal organs. But for some reason, one particular situation did not go viral, even though it was a blatant example of a bad (very bad) joke.
During the filming of Titanic, several dozen extras and crew members ate seafood soup laced with phencyclidine, also known as PCP or angel dust, an intravenous anesthetic that is illegal in some countries.
It was banned for a reason – one of the side effects is hallucinations, which are extremely dangerous to the life of a person who has taken too much PCP.
Everyone ate the soup, including director James Cameron and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Some people were more affected by the drug, some less, but everyone experienced unpleasant symptoms.
"Some people were laughing, some people were crying, some people were throwing up. One minute I felt O.K., the next minute I felt so goddamn anxious I wanted to breathe in a paper bag. Cameron was feeling the same way," Bill Paxton, who played Brock Lovett, shared in his interview with Entertainment Weekly.
While the lead actors escaped with only mild symptoms and a scare, it was James Cameron who suffered the most.
Other actors said the director just looked terrible, with incredibly red eyes like a Terminator. The entire team had to be taken to the hospital for medical attention, some even had to be hospitalized.
The perpetrator was never found, but James Cameron had an idea who it might be:
"We had fired a crew member the day before because they were creating trouble with the caterers. 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."
The police dropped the case two and a half years later for lack of suspects, and the actors and director simply moved on.
Such a sabotage didn't hurt the movie's success, but it's debatable which story happened to be more gripping – the one of Titanic or the one that happened on the set.