Film interview - Cocaine Cowboys – Billy Corben Interview part two

Documentary filmmaker Billy Corben talks about the allure of Miami to filmmakers and games manufacturers and why it’s the new Chicago…

There have been a lot of films and computer games and even musicians who seem to have cashed in on Miami's drug history. Do you ever feel like Miami's bloody past has been exploited?
Billy Corben: We finally embarked upon this project in the wake of the 25th anniversary of the release of Scarface, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City having become – at that time – the most successful video game of all time. That took place completely in the Miami of the 1980s with all the appropriate sights and sounds. So, obviously the nostalgia was real and the interest of a new generation was real. It was in that environment and for that demographic that we did this movie.

It also influenced the way we structured the story – the smuggling, the money and then the murder. It was a basic three-act structure. It gets a little bit glamorous because these guys were very sophisticated and clever and people get a little bit of a kick from seeing them rub law enforcements' nose in s***, for lack of a better term. I mean the story of Mickey being picked up by the Coast Guard while he had a load and then being asked to tow them back inland is such a phenomenal story. The audience just love that.

But then by act three, even though we have this incredibly cool character in Rivi and this extraordinary character in [Godmother] Griselda Blanco, the reality sets in. The toll on the community and the public safety issue becomes very real. We even have people at the end of the movie saying: "Whatever benefits we received from the industry were not worth the cost on society and having this kind of public violence." Whether or not that's true is a matter of opinion but I think the very real moral of the story is that in this trade you either end up dead or in jail, so I think that's understood.

And yet Miami has benefited greatly from the drug trade…
Billy Corben: The unique, post-modern twist on the whole thing that we do mention in the epilogue is that during the 1980s we saw the advent of jet travel. Miami Beach was no longer the premiere seaside destination for Americans because they could now get to the Caribbean or Mexico, and they could do much more exotic things rather than taking the family down to Miami Beach as they did in the '50s and '60s. Tourism was still our biggest industry at the time but it had peaked and now it was on the decline. We now know that the cocaine industry rivalled the tourism industry at that time as the biggest industry in the state of Florida.

But then an interesting thing also happened post-cocaine wars in that art began to imitate life and we had the popularity of Scarface and Miami Vice. We had this world-renowned reputation of Miami and Miami Beach being this sexy, cool destination, which ultimately attracted the modelling industry, the European tourists chasing models and created this whole sort of Renaissance of South Beach in the 1990s as America's Riviera and the premiere nightclub destination of the world. This was all as a direct result of a reputation built in what was otherwise a very dark part of our history.

But what's interesting, too, is that the same thing has already happened in Chicago with its Prohibition-era tales of Al Capone and The Untouchables. If you go to that city, you can have gangster tours of Chicago, murder tours and visits to the St Valentine's Day Massacre site! They've really embraced their salacious and dangerous past. For Miami, it's a little bit of a younger city and the wounds are fresher... but there are a lot of young people who are now discovering this movie and saying: "I think it's f***ing cool that here's now this testament, this tribute, this love letter to Miami and our history." And I think we're going to start to see more of that.

Interview: Rob Carnevale
Photo: Slingshot Studios