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Magnolia lines up “Cocaine”

7/11/2006

By Gregg Goldstein

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Magnolia Pictures has nabbed all English-language territory rights to Billy Corben’s “Cocaine Cowboys,” which chronicles the Miami-based drug trade explosion of the 1980s and its impact on society. The documentary hits theaters in the fall.

Jan Hammer, who composed the music for the “Miami Vice” TV series and the upcoming film version, scored “Cocaine,” which features interviews with top cops who sniffed out offenders, along with criminals up and down the cocaine food chain, from drug kingpins to dealers and killers.

“It’s ‘Miami Vice’ stripped of its cool pretension and peopled by characters that make Al Pacino’s Scarface look like a wimp,” Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles said. “‘Cocaine Cowboys’ is a visually imaginative, fantastically constructed and too-strange-not-to-be-true account of how the Miami of today was built.”

The film, not to be confused with the 1979 drug-smuggler drama of the same name featuring Andy Warhol, recently drew lines at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s one of several Tribeca premieres to garner theatrical distribution this year.

Corben’s last docu was 2001’s “Raw Deal: A Question of Consent,” which garnered controversy by documenting an alleged college campus date rape.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter