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When Cameron was done yakking, he returned to the set to find everyone gone “like The Twilight Zone.” A grip herded him to the dining area where an assistant director was separating those crew members unaffected by the chowder from those who were about to take a magic carpet ride straight to Tripsville. That night much of the crew was taken to Dartmouth General Hospital where things somehow got even weirder. People were “moaning and crying, wailing.” With few cases of nausea, it became apparent that this wasn’t simply a case of food poisoning. Everyone was so friggin’ high that they started racing wheelchairs down the hallway and formed a spirited conga line led by legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.
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As documented in the Cameron biography The Futurist, the director used his walkie talkie to radio his AD while she was standing directly in front of him. She then leapt at Cameron and stabbed him in the face with a pen before being dragged away by hospital staff all while Cameron sat “bleeding and laughing.” Paxton, freaked out by the “bedlam,” quietly ducked out of the ER with a teamster and went back to the set where he drank an entire case of beer which he later said “seemed to help.” The mania at the hospital eventually died down, and devolved into a game of hacky sack as the collective high mellowed.
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The next day the police were called in. Thankfully, one of the producers had saved samples of all the food, and a toxicology report determined that, yup, the chowder was spiked with P.C.P. Why would anyone sneak angel dust into the Titanic crew’s food? Well no one knows for sure and, not unlike the film career of Rob Schneider, it remains one of Hollywood’s great mysteries.
The local police worked on the case for two and a half years, but eventually came up with nothing. Some wrote it off as a prank by “locals who wanted to have a party on the last night of Hollywood in Halifax.” The catering company’s CEO claimed that it “was the Hollywood crowd bringing in the psychedelic shit” adding that “it was done like a party thing that got carried away.” Others were convinced something more sinister was going on. “It had to be an inside job,” Bill Paxton told the Calgary Herald in 1998. “It couldn’t have been somebody from the outside. Somebody had a grievance.”
Calgary Herald
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Could it have been one of the caterers themselves? Cameron reportedly freaked out at one of the servers earlier in the shoot when he was given a hot cup of soup, which he suddenly threw away, screaming: “Don’t you ever serve me boiling soup again!” Of course, solving a mystery where the suspects are disgruntled employees of James Cameron would discourage even Hercule Poirot. One theory, suggested by Cameron, was that it was a former crew member, who had recently been fired for “creating trouble with the caterers.” Cameron added that, since he promptly fired the caterers, the mysterious culprit’s plan ultimately worked.
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While this may all be funny in retrospect, it certainly could have ended in tragedy. 87-year-old Gloria Stuart was present that night, but thankfully didn’t ingest the chowder. Still, it serves as a good reminder that it took the indefensible actions of an unidentified criminal for people to actually have a fun time while making a James Cameron movie.
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Top Image: Paramount Pictures
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