In the film Sicario, opening this month, Emily Blunt plays an FBI agent who joins a team of specialists in Texas, fighting the Mexican drug cartels in Juarez. The depiction of Juarez, where there have been 35,000 murders in five years, is terrifying. It's a vision of hell on earth, but one largely created by the US appetite for cocaine – or, as I like to call it, the drug that killed Hollywood.
Quite apart from its toll on the US in general, cocaine has cut a swath through the creative industries. It has ruined lives, warped careers, perhaps even contributed to a decline in the quality of US cinema. Big claims that I can't prove, but that doesn't mean it ain't so. I suspect that cocaine has even had a secret impact on the rhythm of movies: editing has become faster in every decade since it got established. The high-profile deaths in Hollywood – John Belushi, Chris Farley, River Phoenix, Don Simpson – are the tip of an iceberg. Many are lucky to be still walking this earth. There is no definitive history of the drug's effects on the movie industry but they are considerable, especially in the last 40 years. Really, that long?
According to Dennis Quaid, addicted from the late 1970s to the early '90s, coke was widely available by 1974 when he came to Hollywood.
"Cocaine was even in the budgets of movies, thinly disguised," he wrote in Newsweek in 2011. 'It was petty cash, you know? It was supplied, basically, on movie sets because everyone was doing it. People would make deals. Instead of having a cocktail, you'd have a line… By the time I was doing The Big Easy, in the late 1980s, I was a mess. I was getting an hour of sleep a night … I'd wake up, snort a line, and swear I wasn't going to do it again that day … The lack of sleep made it so my focus wasn't really there, which affected my acting… I kind of realised I was going to be dead in five years if I didn't change my ways. The next day I was in rehab."
Easy Rider (1969) was perhaps the first film in which cocaine was a significant part of the plot. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda financed their motorcycle journey across America by buying cocaine at the Mexican border. This was the first pro-drug movie in the sense that it argued there were more dangerous things in America than drugs. Rednecks with shotguns, for one.
Even so, there were only three mainstream movies in the 1960s that mentioned cocaine, according to the book Hooked in Film: Substance Abuse in the Movies, by John Markert. He provides a chronological index of the different kinds of drug movies. If his list is accurate, the number of cocaine-related films has doubled every decade since Easy Rider. There were 12 in the 1970s, 20 in the 1980s, 42 in the '90s and 95 in the first decade of the new century. Contrast that with heroin-related movies: 23 in the 1960s, 37 in the '70s, 17 in the '80s, 87 in the 2000s.
Markert argues that cocaine was initially depicted benignly, because people thought it was harmless compared with heroin. That changed in the '80s, when heroin movies gave way to cocaine movies. There were good reasons for this: heroin's mortality tends to dominate any movie it's in. Cocaine, with less moral stain, opens the door to wider issues, like the American way of doing business. At first, cocaine's rewards were shown in modest terms. In the 1972 blaxploitation pic Super Fly, the black dealer Priest (Ron O'Neal) tells his partner Eddie (Carl Lee) that he wants to get out of the coke business, but Eddie is amazed: "Eight-track stereo, colour TV in every room, and can snort half a piece of dope every day? That's the American dream, nigger." By 1983, Al Pacino would need four guys to carry the bags of cocaine money to his banker in Oliver Stone's Scarface.
Cocaine did not just change the tenor of drug movies, it had a profound influence on the best filmmakers. Taxi Driver (1976) was partly Paul Schrader's response to his own loneliness during years of cocaine addiction. He and Martin Scorsese, who directed it, had that addiction in common. Scorsese nearly died in September 1978 when his coke habit reacted badly with his asthma medication. Almost every Scorsese film since then has dealt partly with that legacy. His films are awash with drugs, especially cocaine. In most, it leads to riches then ruin, but its attractions are admitted, which is honest.
One of the most powerful accusations is that Hollywood normalised cocaine for the masses. It's impossible to prove or disprove, of course. Hollywood has largely disdained Washington's periodic wars on drugs. Filmmakers are not narcs. Nor is it obvious that America's cocaine problem is worse because of cocaine usage in movies – although that might be true. If you accept the argument of "monkey see, monkey do", the media would have to share the guilt, given the massive coverage over the past 40 years.
A more subtle argument is that movies rarely take the audience to task for their part in the chain of demand. Sicario does, in fairly brutal fashion. It may be harder for the average buyer to ignore their part in the trade after seeing the consequences of their desire to get high. I won't hold my breath.
Twitter: @ptbyrnes
