rakontur blog

The Power Issue

Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman

The Moviemakers

For all the politicians and well-meaning philanthropists on this list, none has the audacity to reveal as much about the city as Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman.

The filmmakers and Miami natives sent shockwaves through the 305 last fall with their critically acclaimed documentary Cocaine Cowboys, which traced the drug trafficking in Miami in the 1970s and ’80s. But it wasn’t just the warring drug lords or the sheer glee with which they rolled around in their cocaine and cash that made the tightly paced film so intriguing.

It was also the revelations that (like it or not) many of the high-rise buildings that fill the Miami skyline were funded with drug money, and that so much blood was spilled during these so-called “Cocaine Wars” that Time magazine once called the city “Paradise Lost.” Corben (who directs) and Spellman (who produces) received the Florida Film Critics Circle’s Golden Orange award for their efforts on this and Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, about a 1999 alleged rape at the University of Florida. That film won the duo a Special Jury Award at the Miami International Film Festival in 2002.

For a world that’s just as cutthroat but not quite as illegal — the nightclub scene — Corben and Spellman recently completely Clubland, which chronicles the opening of the Mokaï Lounge in South Beach. The team is currently in production on Cocaine Cowboys II: The Godmother Returns.

Casting a mirror on Miami is undoubtedly a trying yet intrinsically fun enterprise, as a sordid past (and present) full of sex, drugs, back-stabbing and more drugs can’t help but reveal unpleasant truths. The fact that we enjoy the spoils of such chaotic riches on a daily basis makes the steamy nastiness of it all even more enticing.