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Did You Know James Cameron Was Slipped PCP While Shooting <em>Titanic</em>?
By
Jen Carlson
Published May 3, 2013
Modified May 6, 2013
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By
Jen Carlson
Published May 3, 2013
Modified May 6, 2013
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We've managed to escape this amazing fact about the filming of James Cameron's TItanic for sixteen full years, but today one Redditor saved us from going our entire lives without knowing about that time a disgruntled crew member put PCP in the lobster chowder. The story has appeared buried in other stories about the movie before, one report includes a bit of an oral history of those who experienced it:
"A brush with particularly potent lobster chowder very nearly upset the entire production. No one’s quite sure who spiked the post-shoot party main course with PCP, although fingers were pointed at two chefs Cameron had fired. The effect, however, was truly devastating: 'People started laughing out loud,' remembers Bill Paxton, aka explorer Brock Lovett. 'Others started crying. It was total Bedlam. Just as I was starting to wonder what was happening, I started feeling weird.' 'There were people rolling around, completely out of it,' continues Lewis Abernathy who played one of Lovett’s sidekicks. 'Some of them said they were seeing streaks and psychedelics. I thought it was food poisoning.' A dodgy crustacean couldn’t account for what James Cameron was experiencing, though. Bill Paxton: 'Jim had one eye completely red, like the Terminator’s eyes—no pupil, no iris, just red. The other eye looked like he’d been sniffing glue since the age of four.' Fortunately, 24 hours later, Cameron and the other 80 crew members affected were released from hospital."
At the time, Canadian police had announced: "Testing revealed some of the meal contained the drug phencyclidine [PCP]," but they never found out who was responsible.
Tagged
drugs
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pcp
titanic
Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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