James Cameron said the soup was mussel soup. Bill Paxton, for his part, claimed it was made from clams. Whatever it was, on the night of August 8, 1996, the team of Titanic was in Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada) on his last day of filming in the city. That day they were going to conclude the scenes set in the present (“84 years have passed…”, etc.) and, immediately, they would move to Baja California, in Mexico, where a monumental replica of the cursed ship awaited them in a huge studio. outdoor. They filmed at dusk, and around midnight, the crew took a break for some dinner. Among other options that the company catering local served them was seafood soup. “That soup was delicious. “People came back for more,” the artist Marilyn McAvoy, in charge of recreating the renowned works of art that appear in the film, revealed to the magazine in 2017. Vice; “And I think that was part of the problem: People ate a lot more than usual because it was delicious.” What happened next will surprise you.
At that time it was published that around 60 people were drugged. Today, the number has increased to more than 80. The director of the successful film revealed in an interview in Vanity Fair who noticed the effects almost immediately, because he had to leave the set to vomit, although at first he thought it was shellfish poisoning: “When I returned to the set there was no one there. There were the monitors, the cameras… but the place was empty. It was like being in The unknown dimension”, story. Actor Bill Paxton, who played treasure hunter Brock Lovett, with whom the film begins, told the magazine Entertainment Weekly who began to notice the effects 15 minutes after eating the soup: “The whole team was around there walking around. Some laughed, some cried, some vomited.” Believing, like Cameron, that he might be suffering from food poisoning, Paxton got into a van with other filming companions and went to Dartmouth General Hospital: “For a moment I felt good, and then after a while, I felt so anxious. that I had to breathe in a paper bag. “Cameron felt the same way.”
Little by little, the hospital waiting room filled with other members of the team. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were spared, since those days they were not summoned to the set. “We arrived en masse at the hospital around one in the morning. At the hospital they didn’t know what to do with us. Everything was very chaotic. “I had never tried drugs,” said painter Marilyn McAvoy, “but others said it was like the beginning of an acid trip.” James Cameron claimed that at one point he was stabbed with a pen by another member of the team: “I was there, bleeding and laughing at the same time, watching everything fall apart,” he said. Several of those present stated on various occasions that, at one point, a festive conga line formed in the hospital. “In the end, they put us all in those curtained cubicles in the hospitals, but no one wanted to stay in their cubicle,” the painter explained: “Everyone was in the hallways and jumping into other people’s cubicles. The people had a lot of energy. Some raced their wheelchairs down the halls. I mean…everyone was high!”
“These people were blind,” said Dr. Rob Roy, who treated several of the victims that night: “They had no idea what was happening.” At one point, Dartmouth General Hospital called Halifax police. That was uncontrollable. And it looked strange. A toxicology analysis was performed at the medical center and, on August 28, Halifax police issued a statement confirming what many already suspected: they had indeed been drugged. Someone had spiked the seafood soup with phencyclidine, popularly known as PCP or angel dust. According to the Ministry of Health, it is “a white, crystalline powder that dissolves easily in water or alcohol” that “was used in the 1950s as an intravenous anesthetic, but was discontinued due to the side effects it produced in the patients.” Angel dust is a member of the family of dissociative anesthetics, which includes ketamine. The effects of PCP range from euphoria to panic. At high doses, they say its effects resemble symptoms associated with schizophrenia, including delusions and paranoia. A good trip.
The evidence was irrefutable, but there was one question in the air: Who had sabotaged the punch? To this day, almost three decades later, it remains a mystery: the Halifax Police Department investigated the incident for more than two years, during which a search warrant was executed and a list of all the people who had been found was obtained. worked in the set. But the case was closed due to lack of evidence in 1999. Now, it could be close to resolution. As reported by several media outlets just a few days ago, a new ruling by Nova Scotia’s information and privacy commissioner has ordered Halifax police to release more details of the 10-page incident report they made that night, as well as to delete the censorship of some of the witness testimonies. If police meet their deadline, the records should be released by mid-May, and could offer new details about an incident that was never resolved.
Yes, there were, from the beginning, certain theories about it. “We have a strong suspicion of who he could have been, but it could never be proven,” said James Cameron himself in an interview in the podcast Q With Tom Power“we believe it was because someone on the team had a problem with the suppliers of the cateringbecause we say goodbye to the people of the catering. And, you know… we had some suspicions with all that.” In 1996, some articles were published that pointed to the same theory: one of the two companies that handled production had contaminated the soup. To silence these rumors, the director of the security service catering He flatly denied that any of his workers could have done anything like that, and insisted that “it was those Hollywood people who probably brought that psychedelic shit. I don’t think it was done with bad intentions. Surely it was a party that got out of hand.” In that same podcast, the filmmaker also faced another of the theories, one that did not exactly leave him in a good place: “And, of course, another of the theories was that I was such a psychopath that the perpetrator of that was trying to attack me… “But I discard that theory for obvious reasons.” It is hard to believe that 28 years after that night the matter will be resolved. Does not matter. The night of the soup Titanic It has already become part of the history of modern cinema.
