Ridin' With Cocaine Cowboys - INTERVIEW Coming Soon.net

Ridin' With Cocaine Cowboys
Source: Edward Douglas
October 25, 2006

You wouldn't think that two 28-year-old filmmakers from Miami would know much about the cocaine wars that took place in the city during the late '70s and early '80s. After all, they both were way too young to know what was happening.

Even so, director Billy Corben and producer Alfred Spellman (Raw Deal: A Question of Consent) have created one of the most impressive and comprehensive documentaries about the drugrunning and violence that threatened to destroy the city back before the days of "Miami Vice." It features shocking interviews with two of the city's most successful and notorious cocaine traffickers Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday, and a rare interview with Jorge "Rivi" Ayala, the deadly enforcer for Griselda Blanco, the vicious "godmother" of Miami responsible for much of the violence that surrounded the cocaine trade.

CS Indie spoke to Corben and Spelling during a recent visit to New York about making what is one of the most fascinating docs this year.

CS Indie: I guess this movie started out by you meeting Jon Roberts?

Billy Corben: Absolutely. Like any piece of investigative journalism, it's all about the access, and that's really what makes "Cocaine Cowboys" transcend your typical television documentary. What makes it worthy of its theatrical release is access to unique people. You can always find a journalist or a cop to sit down with you and talk about something like you see on TV all the time, but to get the actual "cocaine cowboys" to sit down and talk was unique. It all started with a phone call from somebody saying, "Do you know who Jon Roberts is?"

Alfred Spellman: Even before that, I was always fascinated with this time period. Everybody has heard the fiction and seen "Scarface" and "Miami Vice." The real stories I would hear from parents and friends and older people who lived in that era were just so outrageous and so over the top that we wanted to find a real story. It was something that we wanted to do for a while, but again, it was all about the access, finding the right characters to tell the story through.

CS: You're both pretty young guys, so I'm assuming you were way too young to know what was going on.

Spellman: We both were born in '78, and the Dadeland Mall shootout was '79, so basically when the murder rate peaked in '81, we were three-years-old. I grew up in Miami Beach, and I used to play little league soccer in Flamingo Park which is the heart of South Beach. I remember being four or five years old and my parents coming and hustling me out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible because the neighborhood was horrible, just crime-ridden, and basically just the result of the cocaine cowboys.

Corben: The affluence is what I remember growing up, that everybody was doing really well in the middle of a nationwide recession. This middle-class neighborhood, but yet guys whose families had car dealerships or were jewelry salesmen or some sort of retail business, everybody was just very wealthy. You'd see these modest homes, but then you'd see a Porsche in the driveway or a Beamer or a Mercedes.

Spellman: I don't remember "Scarface" but I do remember my parents watching "Miami Vice" and the opening credits with Jan Hammer's theme, I just remember watching it and it looked so exotic. The nice thing about Miami is that it's close to America, it's still kind of the way it was, its own territory almost.

CS: After seeing your movie, I can't imagine how Hollywood could turn it into something so glamorous in "Miami Vice."

Corben: You have to remember that stylistically and esthetically, it seemed like a glorification because of the pastels and the costumes, but in actuality, the show was very twisted, especially when you consider what was on primetime in those days. It really was disturbing if you watch some of those episodes now. It was kind of the "Law & Order" of its day, especially when Dick Wolf came and worked on the show and it really dealt with a lot of f*cked up kinds of issues at the time. Money and murder is what it's really about.

Spellman: You talk about the revival of Miami, and you can really trace the lineage back. If it weren't for the cocaine wars, Oliver Stone might not have been inspired to write "Scarface" and Michael Mann might not have created "Miami Vice" and it was [those two] that led to the revitalization of South Beach. It made Miami kind of America's Casablanca, which is what Newsweek called it in '88. The resurgence of the city of South Beach owes a debt to those shows and those shows owe a debt to the cocaine wars.

Corben: Art imitates life imitates art.

CS: And of course, you got Jan Hammer to do the music for your movie, which some might find ironic. Whose idea was that?

Corben: Alfred called me and said, "Who do you want to score the movie?" and I was like "What does that mean? Who can we get to score the movie or who do I want to score the movie?" He said, "What's the wish list look like?" so I sent him three names, and I asked where he was going to start. "At the top." And I happened to have a "Miami Vice" album that actually had Jan's management's contact information, and he called them up and we showed them "Raw Deal: A Question of Consent," my first documentary which is just out on DVD now, and they liked it a lot. We flew up to upstate New York to "the house that 'Miami Vice' built"… that's not exactly true. He's been living in that house longer. He actually wrote his scores for four years of the show including the theme and Crockett's theme in the same studio space that he wrote the "Cocaine Cowboys" score. We screened about half hour, just a rough assembly of some of "Cocaine Cowboys" with temp track of his music from "Miami Vice," which I'm sure he found very flattering, but it was also the most appropriate music for the movie.

CS: As far as Jon Roberts goes, what was your first conversation or meeting with him like?

Corben: It's funny, because with 25 or 30 years hindsight, John had done ten years in prison and had gotten out and returned to Miami. This era really hadn't been covered in non-fiction. There's a couple of books that are out of print now, but no one's really examined it, so we basically pictured our perspective on this, testing this theory that modern Miami was built on the cocaine industry. By telling his story, we could tell the story of the city. We knew that Mickey Munday had gotten out as well, and John was in touch with him. I remember at some time, because we did John and Mickey's interviews first and then a couple cops and attorneys. We were making this movie about the Columbian drug trade and we didn't have any Columbians. When some of the Columbians came over here to build this trade, because they were building an industry, they sent people over here who they would transport it to, but they needed some Americans at the highest levels to help them facilitate certain things, starting companies, opening businesses as fronts, money laundering, because if you had a bunch of Columbians running around with money, red flags would have started to go up. Although Miami was the best sport of assimilation for them, they still needed those Americans involved.

CS: What do you think Jon and Mickey's motivations were for wanting to tell these stories and reveal the step-by-step system for getting the drugs into the country?

Spellman: I think that John growing up had worked with the Gambinos here in New York and had gotten into trouble and started working with the Medellin cartel, so he's got a unique perspective, having worked with the Italian Mafia and with the Columbians. It was what John did, it was his whole life basically, and having served ten years and coming out and seeing modern Miami, our pitch to him was, "The things you guys did—good, bad and indifferent whatever your take on it is—still has a lot to contribute" so I think that encouraged him. I think he took a second look and thought it was a good idea to tell their story now.

Corben: The time they had lost, to look back with our hypothesis essentially that what they had done before they went away, had paved the way for what Miami is today, so it gave them a chance to actually look back. I don't know if they wanted to take credit for that right off the bat, but it gave them a chance to examine that hypothesis and wonder if it might actually be true. Mickey says in the movie that Miami has grown so much in the years that he was gone.

CS: How long did you actually spend with them doing interviews?

Corben: On camera? With John was probably like nine hours.

Spellman: Mickey was just a few hours. We did one [session] with Mickey and got everything done.

Corben: And then we had multiple angles, so double the amount of footage essentially. And then Rivi we shot with three cameras, because we were going into prison and we didn't want to leave anything to chance. And that was quite a trip. We had three camera operators and a dolly grip because one of the cameras was on a dolly, and that was a scene, going to prison with all that sh*t, you can imagine. You're essentially bringing a whole set and they were very cooperative with us, thank God

CS: Once you have all these interviews, how do you go about putting them together with everything else? I liked the fact that it seemed to be edited to the music, though that wasn't the case.

Corben: In a way, it was kind of edited to the music because we had Jan's "Miami Vice" music that we weren't working to, but certainly working with. It was always on in the editing room and on the movie as a temp track to give us a feel or vibe for a given scene. I'm probably still a little out of it, because editing the movie was exhausting. The average movie has somewhere around 800 or 1200 cuts, and we know that with the archives alone, we know we have 1200 archive shots, and that's a cut on each end of those alone, so that's twice as many cuts as an average movie. And we cut between the multiple angles in the interviews themselves.

Spellman: And the still photographs.

Corben: 700 still photographs. And that's the thing. Even though every shot goes by in a matter of seconds, every single one of those things, we either had to shoot, we had to find, and then we had to integrate into the movie. With the stills, it was a little more involved because they're layered with 3-D animation. Every single one of those 4000 shots, as quickly as they flash by, took a lot of time and care and attention to get right and to get it into the movie.

CS: Did you actually create some of the images and footage for the movie?

Corben: Yes, a minimal amount of the material, where we couldn't get enough money footage or enough drugs, or the Harbor House footage at the end. They demolished that building in the middle of our production. I wanted to do this real end of the era symbolism, so we went out there at 4 o'clock in the morning to set up and we actually beat the "CSI" guys to the spot they staked out. Then you have all the other archival sources that we tapped. What was interesting was that the Dadeland Mall shooting was the first time they started shooting video in Miami. That was when the local news stations made the switch from film to video was July 1979. We met a cameraman from the local news who remembered that was the first thing he ever shot on video.

Spellman: What's interesting is that there's a whole chunk of history that was basically erased because all that early video stuff has deteriorated so badly, 'cause that early video tape format was awful, so unless something was done to archive and preserve them… There's lot of video footage that looked terrible in "Cocaine Cowboys" and it's only 20 years on now. There's a big concern that period of our history that was documented by news crews in the early days of video is going to be gone.

Corben: I'm happy to preserve a nice chunk of it. Every city should have an archive like this where you can just walk in and find everything you need.

CS: Can you talk about the narrative story you created for the doc?

Corben: It's that structure, because it's the business which brings you to the money it generates which yields to violence and people protecting their trade and territory. So those are the acts, and we do that shift to "Rivi" where he suddenly becomes the central narrator of the story, 'cause John and Mickey give us the business, the money and the flash and the glamour and then all of a sudden, the violence suddenly puts the brakes on all that.

CS: Do any of the guys you interviewed seem repentant about what they did now that they're out of jail? They certainly seem to be very proud of their achievements.

Corben: Mickey Munday looks at it as if he got involved for the adventure. That was his big thing. Jon describes him in the movie as MacGyver. He's like one of those geniuses from "The Mythbusters," who can build or create anything. He knows too much about everything, particularly from an engineering standpoint, the guy is literally a genius. He got involved because he was in a business where he had more money than anybody else, and with that money, anything that he can conceive of, any hair-brained brilliant idea he would come up with, he would just do it. He was like, "I have the idea to build the lightest boat in the world that still floats but we can fill up with so much cocaine that we can maximize our trip." And he would conceive, design and build it from scratch. He says, "It was a tremendous adventure, because no one was doing what we were doing or had the resources to do it." He got a lot of his friends involved in it from the low-end of the business and he regrets the time that everybody lost. He didn't feel like he poisoned the streets or anything like that. There was a very lively debate at the premiere in Miami Beach between Mickey and someone in the audience who asked a similar question, but a little bit more passionately about their culpability.

CS: Is there any danger of glorifying the lifestyle that these guys led back then, considering how many modern day "gangstas" worship "Scarface"?

Corben: Jon says, "You either end up dead or in jail. There's only two roads in this business." And a lot of people in the movie, they only end up in one of those two ways.

CS: Is there going to be a lot left for the DVD?

Spellman: The DVD is going to be loaded.

Corben: We shot 160 hours of footage, we gathered over 12 hours of archive footage, we had 700 photos. The DVD is going to be outrageous and I don't know how we're going to pack it up. We might have to spillover onto more discs because there's so much stuff. People might think that all the best stuff has to be in the movie. It's actually not the case.

Spellman: In fact, the stuff in the movie is what propels the narrative forward. There's nothing in there that's extraneous really. It's a long movie, but it all moves forward, so there's tons of great little stories that we know we chopped out.

Corben: Great anecdotes and great details about how their operation worked.

CS: What are you doing next?

Spellman: "Clubland." We are producing a documentary series that's kind of a behind the scenes look at a cutthroat world of the South Beach nightclub industry, following the building of a brand new club in South Beach and the behind-the-scenes backstabbing world.

Corben: Fortunately, after "Raw Deal" and then "Cocaine Cowboys," we kind of have a reputation now, and so we got unprecedented access to the world of the nightclub business. And our offices on Miami Beach don't hurt either. We're locals, so we're really welcomed in with open arms, and we got the goods.

Spellman: It's going to be for the web, we're doing that with "42 Below" vodka.