Jimmy Warden wants his bear to have 15 minutes of fame — while it’s still alive.
A few years ago, Warden, a screenwriter, stumbled upon the story of a 175-pound black bear that died in a forest in Georgia after ingesting cocaine that drug smuggler Andrew Thornton had thrown from a machine. flying down. Thornton parachuted out, carrying $14 million worth of drugs along with guns and survival equipment. He was found dead on September 11, 1985wearing a bulletproof vest and Gucci loafers, in his driveway in Knoxville, Tenn.
The bear’s carcass, stuffed and named Pablo Escobear, is said to have ended up at the Kentucky Mall for Kentucky Fun in Lexington, Ky.
Some believe that’s how it happened; Others think it’s an urban legend.
But Warden was more intrigued by the bear than the smuggling, and he let his imagination run wild. the result is new comedy “Cocaine Bear.”
“I took the story and was like, ‘What if it doesn’t die?’,” he said on a video call from his home in Los Angeles.
Besides, he felt sorry for the bear and thought: “Let this bear win by pounce on some people in the forest”.
The way Warden sees things, the bear isn’t the perpetrator – it’s the victim.
Warden invented a 500-pound version of the black bear that, heavily using cocaine, went on a bloody rampage and terrorized campers, rangers, children, and other erratic visitors into the woods.
He sent the script to a friend, who gave it to a producer at Lord Miller’s production company, who passed it on to Universal executives, who bought it. And in about a week, Warden’s professional life became a very different creature.
Scenario landing with Elizabeth Bankand she immediately recognized the antidote to the world’s pandemic and climate change catastrophes: a crazy, funny story that reminded her of “Pulp Fiction,” with a twist. sharp between intricately interwoven stories, drug dealers and gore scenes, sprinkled with some “Stand by Me Moments”.
“I just thought, ‘Well, there’s no better metaphor for the chaos going on in nature,'” she said on a video call. “And not only that, it was humans who did it. They are the real bad guys.”
The Scary Story of ‘Cocaine Bear’
The bloody horror-comedy directed by Elizabeth Banks is hardly — very loosely — on true events.
Banks began contacting friends and acquaintances, while others reached out to her.
She asked Keri Russell to read the script. Russell, who plays Sari, the divorced mother of a 12-year-old girl who went missing in the woods with a friend, said: “It feels like a complete departure, ridiculous, stupid, sad. laugh in amazement and relief from life.
And when Russell learned that Banks wanted to cast Margo Martindale, her former “American” co-star, as the ranger, she said, “Oh, I agree,” because she could see Banks’ desire. is to keep the story true. .
“You wouldn’t pick Margo Martindale if it was purely a silly comedy,” Russell said.
Silly enough.
“It was going to be a close-up of me screaming about a bear attack,” recalls Russell, “with Banks shouting in the background, ‘Okay, now the bear is ripping his leg off and blood is spewing out. everywhere and he was screaming and now his trunk is falling out of the tree!’”
“That’s the problem with these movies — you can’t do it halfway,” she added. “You have to give your best, and the bigger the better.”
Russell was packing for a trip to Ireland, where the film is set to shoot in 2021, when her husband, Matthew Rhys, decided he wanted to be in the action too — specifically as a smuggler.
“Text her now, tell her I want to do that part,” Rhys urged Russell. She did, and he was hired (making a mini reunion of the stars of “American.”)
When O’Shea Jackson Jr. reading on Twitter that Banks had acquired the rights to “Cocaine Bear,” his first thought was, “There is no way they would make a movie like this.”
But he retweeted the announcement, his excitement clear. Banks have blown up and signed him up as Daveed, the trusted fixer for drug lord Syd (Ray Liotta) and a former best friend of Syd’s son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich). Jackson and Ehrenreich developed such a close friendship off-set that their story was rewritten to give it a warmer twist.
And to work with Liotta, in one of that actor’s final roles before his death in May, “was an unexpected blessing in my career,” Jackson said.
The shoot is not without its downsides: bees and mosquitoes are attracted to fake blood; remember the ice cold river.
But it was also the first film in which Jackson’s character was mutilated and required prosthetics. “I really dug that part of it,” he said.
Warden was quite pleased with Banks’ approach.
“It was like, ‘Damn, we’re going to chop off this guy’s arm right now and then we’re going to let this severed leg fall to the ground and the bear will make a coke out of it!'” he say. “To work with someone who is willing to do all of that is a dream come true.”
Even Liotta, Banks recalls, was a game. “This movie was crazy, so the idea I thought was, ‘Can you climb these ropes and fight a bear performer?’ – I don’t think Martin Scorsese ever said that to him. But I did, and he happily did it.”
Which brings us to the beast that Banks and her crew affectionately call Cokey.
“Cocaine Bear” will require a top-notch computer-generated predator as formidable as its name suggests. And Weta FX, the New Zealand special effects company that has worked on the “Lord of the Rings” and “Planet of the Apes” films, understands the need for an authentic, believable bear in documentary. But since it’s packed with cocaine, there’s plenty of opportunity to stretch in small ways to create a superpower character.
That’s when Allan Henry, a stuntman and motion capture, arrived on set to help bring Cokey to life.
Wearing a black spandex suit and fur gloves, Henry wears an arm extender and walks on stilts, which, depending on whether Cokey walks on four or two legs, allows him to move like a quadruped. He also wears a helmet with a silicone bear snout attached to two telescopic rods and a ping pong ball for eyeliner.
That soft muzzle allows him to snuggle or sniff the actors without injuring them, while also giving them a sense of weight and scale to play opposite roles, even if he’s crashing into a car. medic or dancing.
But what is a bear without its voice?
Henry said: “Oh, I made a lot of noise. “I tend to sing anyway, no matter what I’m performing, because breathing and vocals energize your body. I can’t roar like a bear, but I can certainly speak loudly and I can snort, grunt, sneeze and make weird noises in the bushes.”
He can even play a Cokey coked-up.
“EB has great ideas,” Henry said of Banks. “She said, ‘Maybe you jumped a little higher, or maybe you fell this way, or maybe you didn’t notice this because you were so focused on the bag.’”
“The idea is to have a high performance without going over the edge,” he said.
About two months before she learned about “Cocaine Bear,” Natalia Martinez, an investigative reporter for WAVE News, NBC’s Louisville affiliate, began making a documentary about Andrew Thornton and his fans. the passionate grave of Pablo Escobear.
Martinez drove to the store claiming to have the real bear. She then spoke with the medical examiner, who performed the autopsy in 1985, and learned two things: The bear had consumed about six grams of coke, according to the tests. And its carcass was a pile of bones, skin and feathers. No stomach left to back up the claim that it ate millions of dollars worth of cocaine. There is no head to attach to the body of another bear.
“There is no sure way that this bear could have been taxed,” the medical examiner told her. Agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Natural Resources agreed.
“Blow: The True Story of Cocaine, a Bear and a Crooked Kentucky Cop,” begins streaming March 10 on YouTube and other platforms, also delved into the disappearance of 200 kilograms of cocaine and a plane that the FBI said was sabotaged by Colombian traffickers.
Whatever the true story, Martinez, the documentary’s executive producer, sees only good in the two films’ serendipitousness.
“I think I owe them a kidney,” she said with a laugh.
“Cocaine bear” is available Kentucky premiere in Lexington on Thursday. Pablo Escobear was in attendance.
