Tuesday, Feb 23, 2021 ⢠14min
James Cameron's Titanic PCP Incident (Short)
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Titanic was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, and I would much rather have watched the events of today's episode.
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Simon Whistler
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Simon Whistler
00:31
Hello everybody. Welcome back to a brand new episode of The Casual Criminalist with me, your host Simon and in this one it's "The
Titanic
PCP
Incident" and I know nothing about this.Share
00:42
What happens on this show is Callum will write me a script, I will read it. I often have no idea about these other than, you know, the very big cases that we've all heard of. I've never heard of this. I'm thinking
PCP
, isn't that that hallucinogenic drug, and I kind of thought this was like, what's that one the other big famous one like acid or whatever, or LSD not PCP
or maybe PCP's
something entirely different and I'm very mistaken as we will soon find out. I'm going to read this, let's just jump in.Share
01:09
It's a short one today by the way, and I'm guessing I think there's probably not any major bits of murder because this is like a different criminal one. So, you know, I can see in the stats like, the shorter ones are less popular so I'm sure a lot of people are like tuning out right now. What else have I got to watch on YouTube or in my podcast app.
Share
01:26
Well, stay with me. Let's enjoy this together. Here we go.
Share
01:35
It's not easy being the internet's top true crime analyst (citation needed).
Share
01:44
It's like a wik-, you ever read those Wikipedia pages where it's like really talking up the person and at the top, it says like "This article may have its may have been contributed to by someone close to the source" and it's like, yeah, this person wrote of themselves and they talked themselves up big time or their agents or that people did or whoever.
Share
02:01
All those long hours spent dissecting cold cases but lifeâs not all about murders and disappearances. Sometime you have to just take a break from all that and, I dunno, go do drugs on a boat with
James Cameron
.Share
02:15
That image is gonna endure for a thousand years I think.
Share
Simon Whistler
02:18
And thatâs exactly what Iâm taking you today. In this Casual Criminalist short, weâll be examining one of the most peculiar unsolved mysteries in Hollywood history. Its victims, some of the biggest A-listers of the 1990s. This is the case of the Great
Titanic
PCP
Spiking of 1996.Share
02:34
Okay, so I have to say rather understandably, I guess. I thought this was about the original
Titanic
and some sort of PCP
incident, but I'm glad it's not because that makes a whole lot more sense with my knowledge of drugs and I'm pretty sure PCP
wasn't around. Were people like doing hallucinogenic drugs back in the day. Anyway.Share
02:60
On Set.
Share
03:03
In the late evening of August 8th, 1996, the cast and crew of
James Cameronâs
Titanic
were well into their final stint of filming in Nova Scotia
, Canada. After wrapping up this leg of the production, the plan was to travel down to the sunnier shores of Mexico
, where the main set awaited. A gigantic replica of the original ship
.Share
03:22
This last night was the culmination of five weeks of work, filming all those framing scenes where the elderly Rose goes hunting for the wreck of the titular ship. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were absent for this part of the filming, as theyâd only be needed for the period drama part, filmed in
Mexico
. Some big names who were in attendance included Bill Paxton
, Suzy Amis
, producer Jon Landau
, and of course James Cameron
himself.Share
03:46
Since much of the filming needed to be done at night, the crew had become temporarily nocturnal which meant stopping for lunch at midnight. A catering company brought in a nice spread, one of the perks of working on the most expensive movie ever made at the time. Reports of this fateful buffet mention Italian food, vegetarian dishes, and most importantly, great big pots of chowder.
Share
04:08
Some say it was lobster chowder, some clam, some mussel, but the one ingredient that everyone involved can agree upon, was the copious amounts of psychedelics, just like my granny used to make it. Thatâs right, somewhere out of frame someone had decided to spike one of the pots of chowder, inadvertently kickstarting one of the weirdest Hollywood parties of all time.
Share
04:27
Over sixty members of the cast and crew unwittingly ate from the pot including
Cameron
with some even going up for a second helping.Share
04:34
It's amazing. I mean, I don't want to be dark but it's kind of surprising this doesn't happen more often because it's got to be really easy to poison people right? Like thinking about it, like how you could just slip something in. Although you'd kind of expect like, this is a huge movie, that there'd be a bit more careful with security and stuff. But I mean, you're not feeding the president. It's not like every step is going to be watched and everyone's been background checked. It's just like a catering company, right? Anyway.
Share
05:02
Victim Testimony.
Share
05:05
As
Paxton
later reported, it only took about fifteen minutes after breaking bread for things to get all kinds of weird. After everyone got back to work, Cameron
disappeared to go make himself throw up. With his head spinning, he got completely disoriented along the way.Share
05:18
At first, he diagnosed himself with having something called paralytic shellfish neurotoxin. Thatâs a kind of natural poisoning caused when shellfish accumulate high quantities of neurotoxins from microscopic algae. Serious business, and not what you need to hear when youâre tripping balls.
Share
05:33
By the time the Academy Award-winning director finally found the toilet, threw up, then came back to set, the whole place was empty. As he put it in a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair: "I get back to the set and nobodyâs there. Iâm standing at the monitors, near the camera, and the room is empty. It was like the Twilight Zone."
Share
05:49
The reason they had all taken off, was because dozens of the crew had started exhibiting the same symptoms. Not only the nausea, but also alternating waves intense wellbeing, and intense anxiety, which will sound extremely familiar to anyone who had an experimental phase at uni.
Share
06:03
I have never done
PCP
and it doesn't sound very good. Like, yeah, wellbeing sounds great, intense anxiety sounds like "well I'm just paying for all that well being aren't I"? Doesn't really seem worth it.Share
06:18
As one of the on-set painters, Marilyn MacAvoy later told Vice: "it was kind of like a combination of being high on marijuana and being drunk. I was functioning, I was reading magazines. It was like a dream". That sounds pretty great though, like being high and drunk at the same time. That sounds like a good time. That sounds a lot better than intense anxiety.
Share
06:37
Cameron
found her and the rest of his cast and crew organising themselves into two lines. One for people who felt fine and one for anyone suffering from the giggles, a stomachache, or intense existential terror. Exactly it sounds like great you know. Yeah, yeah, I'm really happy, This is great! Oh no, I have intense existential terror. That sounds horrific.Share
06:56
More and more people starting leaving the okay line for the âyeah, Iâm probably very highâ line where half the people were weeping and the other half were in hysterics. This shouldn't be funny. These people got terribly drugged.
Share
07:09
Eventually it became clear that anyone who, like
Suzy Amis
, abstained from the chowder, was fine. Paxton
was not among them. He later told an interviewer: "One minute I felt OK, the next minute I felt so goddamn anxious I wanted to breathe in a paper bag".Share
07:22
With a good chunk of the crew potentially about to drop down dead from seafood poisoning, the sober ones decided it was time to get them to a hospital.
Share
07:30
The Hospital.
Share
07:35
They had the production companyâs drivers bring round the vans, and loaded five dozen tripping Hollywood folk into the back of them. Imagine being an ER nurse on that night, as this drugged up rabble burst through the doors all at once. Somebody call TMZ!
Share
07:50
By this point, the drugs had kicked in even more, with some of the affected going down the rabbit hole into flashback and freakout territory. The rest however, were impossible to contain. Each patient was given their own cubicle, separated by curtains but soon they started leaping out and running amok like a bunch of unruly toddlers.
Share
08:07
People were falling over. This is not funny. These people have been terribly drugged but it's also funny at the same time. People were falling over onto gurneys, racing down the hallways in wheelchairs.
Paxton
joined a conga line led by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel
, father to the slightly more famous Zooey.Share
08:23
I have no idea if I'm pronouncing his name right there. Deschanel. Zooey Deschanel. Is she the one from Bones? Even
Cameron
had chilled out by this point, lying in his hospital bed, blood running down his cheek, giggling away.Share
08:35
He had been stabbed in the face with a pen by one of his staff, but he was too buzzed to care. Stab wounds, conga lines, people weeping in the corners. Just sounds like a standard house party in the UK to be honest. So nostalgic.
Share
08:48
While the ER was being torn apart by drugged up film folk, the hospital staff were busy pursuing the food poisoning theory. They forced everyone to drink activated charcoal, a liquid variey which stops anything further being absorbed into the bloodstream. Over the next few hours things started to simmer down.
Share
09:03
The damage to the filming schedule was already done but at least nobody died. I mean, one of the cast members,
Gloria Stuart
, who played the elderly Rose was 76 at the time. That's got to be pretty intense. Being like a 76 year old just absolutely tripping balls on PCP
.Share
09:17
Unless she was a hardened ex-hippie the drugs could had hit her body hard, but thankfully she was eating out at a restaurant when the whole thing went down. She was eating out at a restaurant at midnight? I mean Rose, what are you up to?
Share
09:29
Paxton
had already bowed out by the time the cups of charcoal were being passed around too. He had told the director: "Jim
, Iâm not gonna hang out here, this is bedlam. Iâm gonna wander back down to the set and just drink a case of beer". Apparently that worked wonders but I should add that neither I nor Bill Paxton
is a doctor and the NHS website does not list Carlsberg as a remedy for a bad trip. Carlsberg is a remedy to nothing because it's awful, Callum!Share
09:51
As for the rest of the afflicted cast and crew, a nice cup of disgusting charcoal and some bed rest was all they needed. After that they were right back on set the very next night to continue shooting, which must have been one of the worst days at the office imaginable.
Share
10:06
I don't know does
PCP
give you a bad hangover? And just to comment there, charcoal is not that bad. I've had the charcoal in pill form rather than liquid form. It's really good, like if you've got upset tummy or something like that it quite helps. I guess it just absorbs stuff. I have no idea, I just take it, it makes me feel better. Could be placebo for all. I'm not using it to soak up PCP.
Share
10:29
Suspects.
Share
10:33
By this point the police had already been alerted to the incident. The toxicology reports soon came back to reveal that
PCP
was to blame. Also known as âangel dustâ this drug can cause hallucinations, sensory malfunctions, and even violent behaviour, like stabbing the director of Terminator 2 in the face with a biro, for instance.Share
10:50
Talk to the hand!
Share
Simon Whistler
10:51
Now, as funny as the idea of a film set descending into giggling madness is, indiscriminately spiking dozens of people is still a pretty serious crime. Yes, no doubt. Because like 76 year old Rose could have died or all of these, yeah, this is not a joke.
Share
11:07
The police launched a full investigation. They compiled lists of everyone on set at the time, who was affected, who wasnât affected, who held a grudge, etcetera. In the end they were unable to come up with any definite suspects, and closed the investigation after two and a half years.
Share
11:20
Thatâs not to say it was a total mystery, however. The fact that the particular pot of chowder chosen was nearest to
Cameronâs
table, led some to speculate it was an act of revenge against him. But who could it have been? Had Tom Cruise rappelled down from the ceiling as vengeance for missing out on the lead role?Share
11:37
Can you imagine Tom Cruise in
Titanic
instead of Leonardo Dicaprio? That'd be so weird. That'd be so weird but I can't imagine it. I can't, I can imagine it but it doesn't seem right and I don't know why!Share
11:51
Maybe, but actually thereâs a much more likely candidate.
Cameron
is pretty certain that a certain ex crew member was to blame. The unnamed suspect, some say a chef, was apparently fired just the day before over his unprofessional conduct with the catering company. A touch of PCP
in the chowder would have ben the perfect way to get back at both the production and the caterers all at once.Share
12:10
In the end, it worked. The film company fired the caterers the very next day, suspecting that one of their people may have been to blame. That suspicion probably led plenty of the crew to bring heir own ham sandwiches from there on out, but the caterers were adamant that the
PCP
was brought in by Hollywood folk.Share
12:25
Whatever the case, the show went on. It did'cause
Titanic
was made. Enormously successful movie. The Titanic
cast and crew went down to Mexico
, endured a host of other non-psychedelic setbacks, and scooped up eleven Oscars for their troubles. And nobody in Hollywood ever took drugs again, the end!Share
12:42
It's not really the end because there's a wrap up right here.
Share
12:45
That brings to a close our retelling of one of the most unfortunate incidents in blockbuster history, or fortunate, depending on your feelings about free
PCP
soup. I dont have a problem with drugs. Do all the PCP
you want. What I don't like is being drugged! When there were elderly people and children involved though, you really have to question the judgement of the culprit.Share
13:06
I for one will not be condoning the spiking of soups. Definitely not Callum! We are not condoning that. I'm not sure why you'd bring it up as a point? Nor the consumption of'angel dust'. However, I do have a pretty banging recipe for LSD chicken balti. I'll leave a link in the description. No, you won't Callum!
Share
13:22
This has been a short episode of The Casual Criminalist. I as always have been your host, Simon. Thank you to Callum for putting together this script and I never thank Jen. Jen does all the music and the graphics if you're watching this show, so thank you Jen as well.
Share
13:36
And well, thank you for listening or watching. If you are watching this show, smash the like button, make sure you're subscribed. If you're listening to it in it's podcast form. Well, this is also a video show. It's also an audio show. You can leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, although Spotify doesn't support reviews for podcasts, which is frustrating. But anyway, thank you for listening or watching.
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