Screenwriter and author Dana Schwartz confessed this week that her ‘Roman Empire’ is actually an incident that happened on the set of Titanic over 25 years ago.
Speaking on TikTok, she said, “one day when they were filming the movie Titanic, the entire cast and crew was drugged because someone slipped PCP into the seafood chowder that they were eating for lunch that day.”
Schwartz went on to confirm that when she says cast and crew, she means everyone, including director James Cameron and actor Bill Paxton who were both hospitalised.
She added that we can laugh about it now because nobody was seriously hurt but said it’s ‘insane’ that such a successful movie not only had that happen but to this day, “we don’t know who did it.”
Only a few people were spared the poisoning. As it took place on a day when present-day scenes were being filmed, actors Leonardo Dicaprio, Kate Winslet and Billy Zayn weren’t there.
Did the Titanic cast really get poisoned or is this a Hollywood myth?
For a long time, a lot of people were not sure if this story was true and even Snopes had to address it. This is possibly because of the severity of the drug. Drug experts Talk To Frank describe PCP as, “PCP is an anaesthetic and painkiller, which means that it can produce dreamlike and ‘floaty’ or numb feelings.”
It can also have effects like hallucinations, paranoid beliefs and even violent outbursts. Really, it’s a miracle that nobody was seriously hurt by this and a whole cast and crew being subjected to it is hard to imagine.
However, in an interview last year, director James Cameron confirmed that this did in fact happen.
James said: “This is a 100 percent true story. You haven’t lived until you’ve been high on PCP, which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone.”
The director went on to admit that he thought that they had consumed contaminated shellfish and rushed everybody to a local hospital only to find out that “basically, somebody had taken a pound of PCP and dumped it into the chowder.”
As for who did it, James admitted that he has his suspicions but they were never proven.
“We believe the story is that it was somebody who had a beef with the caterers because the first thing we did was fire the caterers.… And, you know, sure enough, we had some leads on that.”
He then addressed rumours that he was the sole target saying: “Of course, the operating theory was that I was such a psycho maniac that [the perpetrator was] trying to get back at me, but I reject that theory out of hand for obvious reasons.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever see Titanic the same way again.