The festival screening will also include clips from another upcoming Rakontur docuseries, Cocaine Cowboys: Los Muchachos. It’s the latest in a string of projects that have helped earn Rakontur their storytelling reputation — specifically, due to a detailed attention to South Florida’s involvement in the cocaine and marijuana trade. Their past documentaries on the topic include 2006’s Cocaine Cowboys, 2008’s Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ With The Godmother, 2011’s Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja, and 2014’s Cocaine Cowboys: Reloaded.
That approach has brought Rakontur acclaim for sports-centered stories like 2009’s The U (and its 2014 sequel) and 2012’s Broke, produced for the ESPN Films 30 For 30 series, and dealing with themes of race in college football and poor economic choices in the pro ranks, respectively. Rakontur also explored the introduction of ecstasy into 1980s & ’90s New York City club culture in 2011’s Limelight, and the illegal backyard fist-fighting scene of Miami-Dade County’s most impoverished pockets in 2015’s Dawg Fight. The poster art for these films are often stamped with some variation of “From the creators of Cocaine Cowboys,” but it was Rakontur’s handling of their 2001 debut documentary that made the ongoing Cocaine Cowboys brand possible.
Rakontur’s first screen story took place 300 miles north of Miami in Gainesville, on the night of February 26th 1999 — centering on a hired dancer who claimed she was raped by a fraternity brother in the Delta Chi house at the University of Florida. Following the efforts of media and campus groups, Florida State Attorney Rod Smith released a videotape of the sexual assault filmed by a second fraternity brother, and urged those watching it to “make up their own minds.” Corben took things a step further by constructing the documentary Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, wherein the released footage stands beside new Rakontur interviews with all involved. Setting a precedent for future Rakontur films, there is no third-person voiceover narration. Not only do the participants tell their own story, they at times answer each other through cross-cutting of their interviews.
Rakontur wouldn’t release another documentary until 2006. But that film, Cocaine Cowboys, would expand the scope of their storytelling from one house, to the entire city of Miami — and how revenue from the 1970s and ’80s cocaine trade helped build the downtown skyline, while surrounding streets were stained by the blood of hundreds of drug war murders. Cocaine Cowboys‘ use of vintage still images, neon text fonts, and atmospheric Jan Hammer music would mark Rakontur as filmmakers who could tell a sprawling story with a stylized flourish to complement their established foundation of investigative substance.
Corben starts the story of Cocaine Cowboys by cutting to Dadeland Mall on July 11th, 1979, at 2:28 PM.
Peaceful 1970s/’80s-era clips of local shoppers flash across the screen, concluding with a shot of Crown Liquors. Then, cut to a modern re-creation close-up of a cartel gunman opening fire with a machine gun. Scores of spent bullets fall to the ground, liquor bottles smash, actor bodies spout blood, then vintage crime scene footage of the victims wheeled out in body bags — filmmaker blood squibs and real-life dead bodies telling the visual story of the first shots of a drug war.
Cue the driving Jan Hammer music score, over an opening montage of glowing credits and sweeping Miami imagery. The title letters of “Cocaine Cowboys” are outlined in a neon blue aura, reminiscent of Miami Vice for one generation, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for another.
I wanna say I didn’t like him. The first time I meet John, he’s driving this black Mercedes, two-door, that’s got drug dealer written all over it.
Early on, Corben utilizes interview cross-cutting to tell the tale of how Florida cocaine trafficker Jon Roberts came to work with Florida cocaine smuggler Mickey Munday — around the time when cocaine became more popular than marijuana.
Audiences proved so ready for the Cocaine Cowboys story that its sprawling saga allowed for multiple sequels, as well as a multi-faceted prequel of sorts — Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja, chronicling three groups involved in Florida’s marijuana smuggling industry, and the ferocious legal repercussions they faced.
Lawmen with “square grouper”, nickname given to bales of marijuana thrown overboard or from a plane in South Florida.
Check the Journal Friday for Part Two.