Just say maybe
The Seven habits of Reasonably effective Documentary People
How to Make Money Selling Drugs writer and director Matthew Cooke makes it look so easy, anyone can do it!
1. Be proactive Maximize the attention the documentary will get by having someone notable co-produce it and talk it up — Entourage’s Adrian Grenier, say. Cover all your bases with research, both of vernacular drug culture and lingo and federal laws, policies and industry statistics.
2. Keep it real you need them for buzz, but don’t dwell too much on the celebrity activists. Outspoken stars such as Susan Sarandon and Russell Simmons are smart but can often come off as dilettantes. Stay gritty and let real people, famous or not, tell their harrowing personal drug-related stories — like Eminem, 50 Cent (rap is his second career, after teens spent as a drug dealer) and a random ’ 80s drug dealer such as Bobby Carlton. Whenever possible, go to detroit and shoot some architectural-ruin porn, and juxtapose that with footage of the bygone city’s industrial booms. everyone loves the tragically poetic beauty of abject poverty. Bonus: panning the abandoned, burnt-out buildings offers maximum bleakness for minimum cost. Find a real drug dealer willing to talk about the utter lack of economic opportunities there. Call him Mister X, never show his face and distort his voice.
3. Be clever. But not too clever. Mix references in your framing device, to appeal to maximum audience. Speak like a sarcastic business/self-help book, sure, but also structure the documentary storytelling like the progressive levels of a video game, with occasional graphics that nod to Grand Theft Auto. Try adding the tinny synthesized blips and sound effects of 8-bit arcade games, for a retro feel. Be sarcastic but tread carefully. remember not to be too sincerely persuasive: you’re talking about drugs, there is such a thing as too glib. Whenever you can, plant your tongue firmly in cheek (sometimes more firmly than you originally intended). If you’re too deadpan, you actually risk seducing vulnerable, lowincome people into the entrepreneurial drug-selling lifestyle.
4. Show, don’t tell don’t just mention how biased prosecution using rockefeller laws are basically apartheid policies (90% of those serving are, as one puts it, “black or brown”) but play the race card out onscreen, wordlessly. Talk to drug boss Brian O’dea, who served just two years although he had more than 100 employees and brought in $120million a year by doing things such as soaking the traditional ponchos he imported to the u.S. in liquefied cocaine. The likeable Freeway rick ross, whose L.A.-based empire once grossed $3-million per day and ingeniously branded his product as “ready rock,” is black and served 13 years. Talk to former police officer Barry Cooper, who became an activist against drug laws and lives in political asylum in Brazil because he and his family are the frequent target of police harassment,. Make him your breakout star.
5. Demo demo demo So important, it bears repeating! All that jargon and patter you nodded about in The Wire but didn’t actually understand? research it and explain it in detail. It’s refreshing, not condescending, to have some things all spelled out. Wow your peers with the complicated math formulas a ninthgrade dropout former drug dealer uses to figure out marijuana yield per plant times $2,300 street value per pound divided by number of months of growth. Viewers will also be glad to learn that a trap is an elaborately rigged system of hidden compartments in a bucket (an old car). 6. Combine glamour with
danger — and humour If possible, don’t get too cynical right away: Insert a little light comedic relief and call him Pepe, and make him a former drug runner straight out of Miami Vice casting. His attitude should be jovial but the information he shares sobering, so that it packs more of a makes-you-think punch. remember, these are victimless crimes, yet with police incentives that rape and murder arrests don’t enjoy — unlike alcohol, tobacco and regulated big-pharma drugs, the War on drugs has built a government system of kickbacks for arrests. The exploitation of the prison system isn’t funny, but it can be glamorous: The department of Justice earns more than $3-billion a year from seized goods and drug-related asset forfeiture. Show an actual go-fast boat and a map of the Caribbean and movie clips (everyone loves Scarface) and a dizzying amount of marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth. Then scare people with infrared camera footage of actual wrong-address home invasion arrests that are illegal or bumbling (or both). 7. Sharpen the saw, but consider an exit strategy Once you’ve made your point, don’t digress into a last-minute lecture on alcohol and tobacco, taxation of pharmaceutical drugs or addiction. This complete shift in tone will lose the audience. Viewers have zero tolerance for preachiness.