Achi news desk-
Hollywood blockbuster tremendous Known for many things, including an emotionally charged film set, a shoestring budget, and nearly a dozen Oscar wins after its 1997 release.
But there is a story about the film that some may not be so familiar with. This is a behind-the-scenes mystery during filming in Nova Scotia involving lobster chowder and a hallucinogen.
“It was kind of like, very dreamlike, very surreal,” recalls Marilyn McAvoy, who is now a part-time faculty member at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
“Like a lot of things that happened in that movie, I think it just became this kind of theory.”
Back in August 1996, McAvoy was working on the set of the Halifax area tremendous as a painter. Only the film’s modern scenes were filmed in Nova Scotia, which meant that leading stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were not present.
McAvoy even had an unexpected cameo, during a scene where Bill Paxton’s character examines a painting recovered from the wreckage.
“It wasn’t part of the plan. As a landscape painter or a standby painter, normally, you don’t get those little pictures, but I ended up working with the painting that (director) James Cameron did of Kate Winslet,” she says.
“He didn’t want anyone else to touch it, so he asked me if I would be this lab technician for this day of filming here at Dartmouth.”
While that was memorable enough, an incident that sent her and about 80 staff to the hospital is even more memorable.
“People were behaving very strangely”
Allegedly, the crew and staff were served broth laced with a drug known as phencyclidine (PCP), or Angel Dust.
Rick Courtney was a production assistant at the time, and had a background role as a sailor. He also happened to run a safety training company and has experience as a paramedic.
He remembers the 21st, which was the last day scheduled for filming, when everyone broke into “noon” just after midnight.
“People started behaving strangely. I remember hearing through headphones that people were behaving very strangely in the lunch room,” he says.
“I was upstairs in the production office. James Cameron, came up to me. He said, ‘You’re a medic, aren’t you?’ I say, ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Well, fix me. There’s something wrong with me.'”
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Courtney says Cameron described “a whole range of things,” including hallucinations and feeling drunk.
As more and more people got sick, Courtney says he started mass casualty experiments, but quickly realized things were getting out of hand.
“We had a whole bunch of people acting extremely strange. So I decided there were too many people here. This is not an isolated incident. So we activated EMS and got a bunch of ambulances.”
He points out that not everyone ate the chowder – some had chicken, and some ordered instead to eat from Yisrael services.
“Gloria Stewart, who was old Rose, she asked out, luckily,” he says.
The set painter, McAvoy, did eat the stew.
“I was still functioning. I wasn’t nauseous or anything, but it seemed like it affected people in a lot of different ways,” says McAvoy.
She describes feeling like she “drank three beers and ate a joint,” but didn’t experience the flashbacks that others did.
“I didn’t have a lot of experience with a lot of psychedelic drugs… There were some people I knew who went through really bad, really hard times. I think it was kind of a flashback.”
The atmosphere in the emergency room was also a bit chaotic – as dozens of patients felt various effects of the drug.
“People were just really active and wanted to party and just wanted to have fun. And there are other people who just needed to be alone,” she said.
“There was a conga line. There was a wheelchair race. I remember in the morning when we all finally got off, they gave us this charcoal drink to drink so I guess it got the toxins out of our bodies.”
The police documents have been released
New details about the incident and subsequent investigation are revealed in a report released Monday, following the county’s privacy commissioner’s ruling.
The Halifax Regional Police report was first filed on August 9, 1996—with follow-up filings later that year and in 1999—and has redactions throughout.
He said officers arrived at Dartmouth General Hospital and “observed a large number of people both in the emergency area of ​​the hospital and outside the emergency doors.”
It took hours to triage and treat them all. It was an experience that the late actor, Bill Paxton, would describe years later in an interview with Larry King.
“You see some people freaking out, some people dancing the conga, some people euphoric,” Paxton said in June 2015. “I knew I was on to something pretty bad.”
All recovered, and filming in Nova Scotia was completed shortly thereafter. This meant that many of the victims were scattered and out of the country, which made the investigation difficult.
“The investigation into possible food contamination on the Titanic set was done by the Department of Health. By the time they discovered that the food, specifically the lobster chowder, was contaminated with PCP, the Titanic set had moved to Mexico,” a 1999 report said.
The newly released documents have no names and no clear culprit.
One witness told police that a food service worker was “kicked off the set for selling drugs a few days earlier” and was a potential suspect, but officers could not confirm the worker’s identity.
“Imagine the tabloid headlines”
The researchers also uncovered rumors and speculations. In the incident report, the investigator noted that the film was over budget – “a known fact” – and said the incident “may have provided a reason to continue shooting for an extra week with the funding coming from an insurance claim.”
“At this stage none of this can be proven as a (fact) and certainly nothing is suggested by the writer that the event was staged as a method to increase funding for the film.”
However, the researcher warned that publishing such information could be harmful.
“I suggest that this report remain confidential, as one could only imagine the tabloid headlines if they knew we had a source that even hinted at an insurance conspiracy behind the sabotage.”
In contrast to the dramatic and iconic ending to tremendous The movie, the conclusion of this mystery is not so satisfying. The investigators noted that unless the person responsible “knows the deed”, it seems unlikely that they will find them or convict them.
“One must also take into account the fact that PCP is not common in our area but is very common in the Hollywood area,” the report states.
“You also have to take into account that although (the film) is wonderful, there is a lot of information that things were anything but smooth on the set. There is a good probability that the culprit of this incident is a foreign resident and is currently outside the country.”
Courtney calls the incident a “blemish” in the local film industry, but believes the blemish has been healed.
He is grateful for the experience of being a part of it tremendous, However, all these years later, he is surprised that the mystery of the infected chowder has not been solved.
“I was shocked. I mean, who would have the nerve to do that?” He says. “PCPs are pretty bad. You can have flashbacks years later. So yeah, it’s criminal. Absolutely criminal.”
