MOVIE NEWS – The crew of the movie Titanic recalls a particularly memorable night when the drug PCP was smuggled into the clam chowder on the set.

Titanic recently turned 25 years old, prompting us to look back at the 1997 hit. In a recent flashback, the crew recalled an interesting incident in the film’s filming history: a night when the clam chowder was spiked with PCP, causing chaos on set.

Titanic was once the highest-grossing blockbuster of all time before another lesser-known James Cameron project, Avatar, dethroned it. The film’s focus was the sinking of the Titanic, which took place in 1912. The ocean liner RMS Titanic entered the icy waters on April 14, then hit an iceberg in the early morning hours of April 15 and sank completely. Of the total of 2,240 passengers, 1,500 died. The film used this tragedy to tell the love story of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet).

Looking back, Vulture revealed one of the most infamous nights in filmmaking. Some of the cast and crew were eating clam chowder when it was discovered that someone had mixed drugs into the food. Cameron suspected “red tide,” a naturally occurring toxin that makes shellfish dangerous before it was discovered that the food was actually contaminated with PCP.

Cameron himself seems to have been involved. Crew member Jake Clarke recalled, “We had a room for the grippers and the electricians, and one of the guys started talking really hyperactively. He was a big guy, about six or four inches tall, and he said, ‘Are you all right? guys? Because I don’t. I feel like I’m on to something, and believe me, I know.’ He was just babbling. And just as he was saying that, we saw James Cameron run through the door with an extra running behind him. He said, ‘There’s something in me! Get it out!'”

Although the culprit was never caught, the incident obviously had a big impact on the crew. Cameron’s shoot took longer than expected – the incident occurred on the last day of filming in Halifax, but with many of the crew and crew members unable to work, the studio gave Cameron an extra day to finish filming. Filming was scheduled to take place in Rosarito, Mexico, where both Winslet and DiCaprio would have filmed their scenes, so the two were not involved in the incident.

Cameron is known to be detail-oriented and a maximalist, so the extra shooting day reportedly really “boosted” him. The crew, meanwhile, seems to have found the situation humorous. Clarke recalled, “One of the guys in the art class made T-shirts and had soup on the corner of the T-shirt. He gave it out to the local team. It said ‘Good team, bad team’ underneath.”

Source: Vulture