Bill Paxton:
"Hey! That's good chowder!"

Paxton says he immediately began to feel woozy, and was taken to a nearby hospital with about eighty other members of the production, including Cameron. "By now it's like total bedlam," says the actor, wild-eyed with the memory of the scene. "People are coming on to this P.C.P., and there's all kinds of bizarre behavior. People started line dancing, some people were kind of doing this kind of stuff [slaps himself in the head repeatedly], some people had crap coming out of their nose, and I'm just like, 'Get me out of here!'"

Paxton is so riled up that he's shouting as he tells the story--a pretty good indicator of just how wild things got. "Everybody was just freaking out, and it just sort of starts getting to me," he says. "You know, you gotta go get mellow, man." Paxton returned to his trailer, where he was quarantined for fourteen hours, before being sent home. Two weeks later, still feeling listless from the incident, he received a memo on his fax machine reporting that a high concentration of angel dust--not a neurotoxin, or red tide, as had been feared--was the culprit.

Paxton denied a rumor from the set that the malicious pranksters were a couple of cooks who had been fired by Cameron the day before (remember, the food had been awful). But he did admit that the filmmaker didn't make many friends on the set. "There were a lot of disgruntled people on that film," says Paxton. "Jim is not one of those guys who has the time to win the hearts and minds of the people. He is a driven, passionate, uncompromising, defiant, independent filmmaker and artist and visionary. You gotta keep up with Jim; he's not going to keep up with you. I don't think they were ready for this guy."...

The biggest irony of the whole experience is the fact that the food, for one night at least, wasn't bad. Paxton says his first impression of the meal was, "Hey, that's pretty good chowder!"