Last fall, when Miami filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman released the feature-length documentary Cocaine Cowboys in theaters, bootleg copies of the film hit the streets almost immediately. Instead of running home and crying to their distributors, they took action.
They posted a short-film series, Streets of Miami: The "Cocaine Cowboys" Phenomenon, about the bootlegging phenomenon on YouTube. In the series, the filmmakers confront bootleggers at the Carol City Flea Market. They also talk about the movie, which focuses on Miami's wild drug era of the mid-1970s, with a few of the Magic City's biggest hip-hop stars, including Pitbull and Trick Daddy.
"Yo, you've got to see this movie," says Pitbull, after admitting he, like several of the interview subjects, watched an illegal copy of it. "If you ain't seen Cocaine Cowboys, you don't know nothing about Miami. It's better than Scarface." Regardless how they saw it, these rappers readily agreed to promote the film on YouTube.
"I can't walk up to the guy at the Carol City Flea Market, who paid $5 -- of which thousands were sold, by the way -- and say, 'Give me my dollar,' " says Corben, who directs the team's films. "You have to devise a new business model. … Embrace your audience."
His producing partner agrees. "You can't fight it. You have to accept the change," says Spellman, who readily admits to downloading movies from BitTorrent, the free peer-to-peer file-sharing network. "Wayne Gretzky said, 'I don't skate to where the puck is; I skate to where the puck is going to be.' You're not going to roll things back. People are downloading movies on BitTorrent."
Now that Cocaine Cowboys was officially -- and legally -- released on DVD Jan. 23, everyone can watch this fascinating documentary, which crystallizes Miami's drug past with great perspective and thorough hindsight. Although they have made their names in film, the 28-year-olds, who have been working together on movie projects since they were in the ninth grade at Highland Oaks Middle School in North Miami Beach, think they have found a new approach for their latest project, a short-film series titled Clubland, and are embracing new media.
Sitting down for lunch at a Lincoln Road Mall eatery, the guys talk intensely and excitedly about their plans and their company, Rakontur. Like an old married couple, they often finish each other's sentences, a testament to their close working relationship. While Corben prefers the creative aspects of filmmaking, Spellman concentrates on the business side.
Taking a break from the madness of working on a feature film, the two will debut Clubland -- which follows Nicola Siervos as he opens his new South Beach nightclub, Mokaï -- for free online. The series will include about 40 episodes, each of which will run between five and seven minutes and provide an unscripted view of South Beach's velvet-rope scene.
"It's like high school around here in the South Beach nightclub industry," Corben says. "Everybody knows each other; everybody gossips.
"The people who go to these clubs will have to watch [Clubland], and the people who hate [the South Beach scene] will hope these guys look like buffoons," Corben continues. "All we did was put the cameras on them, so whatever happened, happened."
From Sundance to Tribeca
Corben and Spellman, who both attended the University of Miami, started out in the documentary-film business at the top. Their first movie, Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, studied an alleged rape of a stripper at a University of Florida fraternity party. It received its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001. The filmmakers were just 23 at the time.
"This was when the digital revolution was just beginning. You had a lot of movies at Sundance -- The Blair Witch Project, Chuck and Buck -- that were entirely shot on video," Spellman explains, so they thought video would be ideal for a documentary.
"We started hearing about this story out of Gainesville," Corben adds. "Friends of ours told us about this stripper who got raped at a fraternity house and she was arrested, and there's a videotape."
When they received a copy of the tape, they realized the case was not clear-cut. "Everybody expects a videotape to tell some sort of objective truth, and here we had a case where it didn't," Spellman reports. "It was completely ambiguous."
So they moved to Gainesville for a month and started recording interviews. "We made up the rules as we went along," Spellman recalls.
One year later, they were at Sundance. Their euphoria was short-lived, however, as they soon had to deal with the cruel realities of the film-distribution business.
Raw Deal was bought by Artisan, a now-defunct film-distribution company, to show in movie theaters. "Artisan had this reputation of picking up the edgy film of Sundance every year," Spellman explains. "They picked up Pi in '98, Blair Witch in '99, Chuck and Buck in 2000 and Raw Deal in 2001."
But then, economic bad news arrived. After the company decided to go public, it released The Blair Witch Project 2, which was a colossal bomb. Toss in the collapse of the NASDAQ, and releasing a picture as risky as Raw Deal suddenly seemed imprudent. So the filmmakers failed to see their movie released nationwide and instead spent a year and a half fighting to get back the rights to it.
"It was a pretty extraordinary and unprecedented case as far as the relationship between independent filmmakers and distributor goes, because [the distributors] are normally the end all and be all," Corben explains. "And this was a case where they were so blatantly wrong, they had to pay our attorneys' fees."
"It was standing on the mountaintop in terms of the indie-filmmaker dream," Spellman adds. "But what I don't think we could have known in January 2001 is that it was the end of that era of indie filmmaker as rock star."
Moving on
Much wiser but still hungry for another film project, the guys latched on to the idea of chronicling Miami in the mid-1970s and early '80s, when natives, carpetbagging Yankees with crime connections up North, Mariel Cubans, Colombians and even the former president of Panama decided to transform Miami into the cocaine capital of the world.
Spellman and Corben did all their own research, reading every book they could find on the subject, including Kings of Cocaine by then-Miami Herald reporters Jeff Leen and Guy Gugliotta and The Man Who Made It Snow by Max Mermelstein, a major importer in the cocaine trade turned critical government witness.
"Nobody had really recapped it," Spellman says. "It had been treated well in fiction -- Miami Vice and Scarface -- but nobody had taken a look back to see what the effects had been."
Cocaine Cowboys began to take shape when the filmmakers gained access to the Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive, which contained critical footage from that era. They then conducted wide-ranging and exclusive interviews with important figures including glitzy wholesaler Jon Roberts and smuggler Mickey Munday, who were middlemen for the Medellín cartel. They also interviewed the unnervingly businesslike hit man Jorge "Rivi" Ayala, who worked for the Griselda Blanco, known as The Godmother and The Black Widow.
"We got the cops, the 27-year veteran who was actually at all these crime scenes and who took us on a tour in a car of all these crime scenes," Corben recalls. "And then, we got the guy who actually shot these people at all these crime scenes and who could fill in the blanks that even the cops didn't know at that time or till this day."
Spellman adds that Ayala, who is still in prison, talked openly about his criminal past because he had made an immunity deal with the government. "Most of the people are dead, and he was able to tell chapter and verse about every homicide he committed, not to mention the fact that he was one of the most prolific assassins of the era," Spellman says.
It took Spellman and Corben two years to complete Cocaine Cowboys. Despite the rampant bootlegging, they say the response has been favorable.
"The vast majority of messages I get online are from young people who often say, 'It's the greatest documentary ever made,' or 'It's the greatest documentary I've ever seen,' " Corben notes.
Barron Sherer, the curator and preservationist of the Wolfson Archive, says at least 45 minutes of footage in Cocaine Cowboys derives from that collection. He raves that Corben and Spellman are among the sharpest filmmakers with whom he has ever worked, even referring to them as "the Orson Welles of Miami."
"They were some of the most prepared [filmmakers] we ever had," Sherer says, explaining that the pair frequently visited the archive during a two-to-three year period. "They came with a timeline and made my job so easy. I learned a lot because they were so thorough."
Dana Keith, the director and founder of the independent-oriented Miami Beach Cinematheque, is also an admirer of the duo. "I like that Corben and Spellman are tackling some hair-raising subjects that really happened," he says, "subjecting people to the real side of life rather than the polished, movie version of life. That is what I call in-your-face filmmaking -- fast and furious and not necessarily what you want to see."
More Miami vice
At the same time that they're exploring online distribution, Spellman and Corben are working on another feature-length documentary. Tentatively titled Rise and Fall, the movie will look at the 1990s' golden era of club life on South Beach.
In keeping with their practice of gaining access to critical interview subjects, the filmmakers have lined up interviews with former South Beach personality Chris Paciello, who was recently released from a New York prison after serving seven years for racketeering and murder. Paciello, a buddy of Madonna's, co-owned South Beach hot spots Liquid and Bar Room with Ingrid Casares and was one of the area's biggest movers and shakers in the mid-'90s. Spellman and Corben say Paciello, whom The New York Daily News reports has recently been spotted in Los Angeles with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, is granting them his first post-prison interview.
The film promises to be as sexy and sensational as Cocaine Cowboys, telling the stories of a few characters to elucidate the larger story of the rise of South Beach. "There was basically a nonstop party going on down here for three or four years," explains Corben, who says the party stopped when designer Gianni Versace was killed on the steps of his Ocean Drive mansion in July 1997. "Now, you have Johnny Rockets on Lincoln Road."
Despite the filmmakers' success -- neither works a day job -- they have no desire to move on to Los Angeles or New York. They are content to stay in Miami and continue getting their work out to the public.
"We're interested in telling good stories, whether you're watching it on your video iPod or TV," Spellman argues. "There seems to be some conception that documentary filmmakers have to have some socially conscious message and advocate something. You see Morgan Spurlock [of Super Size Me] before Congress talking about fatty foods. We call the company Rakontur because we're just looking for good stories to tell.
"Independent film is a tree falling in the middle of the forest," Corben adds. "If there's no one around to see it or hear it, does it really exist? And my answer is no. We'd like people to see what we do. It makes it all worthwhile. You used to have to travel to film festivals to have that rapport with your audience. Now, I hear from people all over the world through MySpace."