Asked to settle Tombstone vs. Titanic by “best catering,” Billy Zane answered: “Well, let’s see. Best catering? Be Titanic. If you like PCP. As they do.”
He was talking about the night someone laced the chowder on the Titanic set with angel dust and sent more than 50 crew members to a Halifax hospital.
The case has been unsolved for 30 years.
Around the night of August 8, 1996, the Titanic production was wrapping its final hours of shooting in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Craft services put out a seafood chowder. The crew loved it. Many went back for seconds.
Within an hour, people were hallucinating. Grips were doing wheelies in wheelchairs. A conga line formed on the way to Dartmouth General Hospital. There was uncontrollable laughter, uncontrollable crying, vomiting, paranoia, and full-body panic.
James Cameron threw up and assumed it was bad shellfish. Bill Paxton later said he had a panic attack so severe he needed a paper bag to breathe. Somewhere between 50 and 80 cast and crew were dosed.
On August 27, 1996, the Nova Scotia Department of Health sent producer Jon Landau a letter confirming the lab results. The chowder was laced with PCP. Angel dust. Someone had spiked the food at the most expensive film production in history at the time.
Police opened an investigation. Theories circulated for years. A disgruntled crew member taking revenge on a brutal, over-budget shoot. A caterer who’d been fired. A prank meant to liven up the last night before production moved to Mexico.
None of it ever stuck to a suspect. The file was officially closed unsolved in February 1999. In 2024, Nova Scotia’s privacy commissioner reportedly ordered the release of additional unredacted police records. Thirty years on, no one knows who did it.
Billy Zane wasn’t there. He was filming the 1912 sequences on the Mexico set with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. The chowder incident hit the second unit shooting Brock Lovett’s modern-day expedition scenes, which is why Cameron and Paxton were among the dosed.
Bill Paxton died in February 2017 after complications from heart surgery. Jon Landau died in July 2024 of esophageal cancer. The person who put PCP in the soup has never been named.
