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From Chaplin to Charliecocaine, Hollywood and the

movies

HARRY SHAPIRO*

Drugscope, London, UK

ABSTRACT Throughout the history of cinema, the use of drugs such as opiates andmarijuana has been consistently condemned or has passed through distinct phases fromopprobrium to celebration. But because of both its image and functionality within the lmindustry, the framing of cocaine use has been more ambivalent and uctuating. The periodprior to World War II saw cocaine use portrayed both in comic situations and in so-calledexploitation lms which more closely mirrored sensational press coverage where cocainewas viewed as the `gateway drug to opiates. Cocaine largely disappeared from therecreational drugs scene until the late 1960s. Since then, lms as diverse as Easy

Rider (1969), Annie Hall (1977), Scarface (1983) and Clean and Sober (1988) have framed cocaine use and dealing variously as comic, heroic, glamorous, as well asdamaging. This contrasts with crack cocaine in the context of black cinema in the 1980sand 1990s where settings of violence and death predominate. With the cocaine cartels asthe focus, Trafc (2000) questions for the rst time in a Hollywood movie, the efcacy ofthe `war on drugs while the cocaine trafcking lm Blow (2001) returns to a moretraditional Hollywood view of vice punished.

Their biggest money maker in Hollywood last year was Colombia. Not

the studiothe country. (Johnny Carson, 1981 Academy Awards)

In line with the prevailing view of opiates in modern-day society, cinemas takeon the use of these opiate drugs has been invariably negativemorphine orheroin use follows an inexorable path to the living hell of intractable addictionending in death. The heroin users in Trainspotting (1995) were marginalized everybit as much as the young people in Panic in Needle Park(1971), Frankie Machine inThe Man with the Golden Arm (1956) or the many fallen doctors and society peopleof the early silent opium and morphine movies from 1910 to 1930, who exchanged

position and esteem for the handle `drug end.Marijuana in the movies has followed a different path, as views about dangers

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exclusively linked to alterative youth culture, smoking being a political statementin its own right, most notably in the signal moment for youth culture movies, EasyRider (1969). Through the 1980s up to date, dope smoking has either been thebackdrop of a different kind of youth movie, one much more anarchic, blank and

disaffected such as Dazed and Confused (1993) or Kids (1995) or just an incidentaland unremarkable part of the landscape of modern lms.The depiction of cocaine use has been much more ambivalent and uctuating.

Partly this is because medical views on cocaine over the decades have similarlyswung between praise, neutrality and condemnation (e.g. Ashley, 1975; Gold,1986). We also have to take into account the view of cocaine within the industryitself. From an aesthetic perspective, much of mainstream Hollywood movie-making has been about promoting the Great American Dream (GAD)a view ofsuccess founded on being the best, the loudest, the brightest, the richest, the most

aggressive and powerful. This, at the experimental and recreational phases, is theillusion created for the cocaine user. By contrast, heroin and marijuana can beframed as drugs for those who have dropped out of the chase for the GAD (if theywere ever signed up) while LSD and other psychedelics could be said to be thevehicles for those trying to locate an equally subversive alternative to the GAD.Either way, users of other drugs are not onside and decidedly not team players.

Cocaine, too, has a pervasive functional purpose within those highly stressedand ruthlessly competitive entertainment industries such as lm and popular

music and within nancial institutions (such as Wall Street and the City ofLondon) where appearances of control and power are seen as vital to promotionand success, to be seen as always on top and ahead of the game. Also given itscost, being a conspicuous consumer of copious amounts of cocaine has been abenchmark of individual wealth and status within these industries. For many inthe lm industry, signing up to the image of cocaine as a statement of power andwealth has been every bit as important as the physiological effects of using it(Fleming, 1998). Taken together, the confusing medical response to cocaine, thecocaine aesthetic and its functionality within the industry, arguably accounts for

the belated cinematic recognition of the potential dangers of chronic cocaine use.In the late 19th century, cocaine became a staple ingredient for a whole variety

of cold and hay fever remedies, tonics and pick-me-ups. The coca wine marketedas Vin Mariani was the favourite tipple of royalty, religious leaders and othercelebrities of 19th-century Europe. Americas main manufacturer of cocaine fromimported coca leaves was Parke-Davis who, in 1883, promoted cocaine to doctorswith assurances that cocaine was efcacious well beyond the needs of clinicalmedicine in that it would `make the coward brave, the silent eloquent as well as

`free the victims of alcohol and opium habits from their bondage (Jonnes, 1996).By 1906, 80 million Americans were drinking and hoovering up 11 tons of cocaine

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The legislation left entirely untouched a thriving business in pure pharmaceu-tical cocaine for purely recreational purposes. And here, far from being the drugof the rich and famous that we know today, it was much more the drug of thedown and outs (Jonnes, 1996; Sante, 1991).

Cocaine was the subject of much opprobrium well before controls were put inplace in the US through the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 because of thisassociation with urban depravity. The campaigns against drugs in the late 19thand early 20th century were led by the Progressivesa loose coalition of white,Protestant, rurally focused politicians, religious groups, doctors and moralreformers who were appalled at what they saw as the degeneration of the nationbrought about by urban growth with its attendant political corruption, urbansqualour, immigration and social problems such as prostitution, alcoholism anddrug use (Musto, 1987). There was a strong strain of crude nationalism and racism

running through the movement backed by the tabloid newspaper empire ofWilliam Randolph Hearst. He helped create the `drug end lexicon of moraloutrage against drugs and built up a momentum of anti-drug sentiments byblaming much of the trouble on the opium habits of the Chinese community,cocaine use by southe rn black workers and later marijuana use by Mexicanimmigrants (Helmer, 1975; Silver, 1979).

The passing of the Harrison Act in 1914 was both the beginning of the waragainst drugs as we know it, but also the culmination of over 40 years of anti-drugcampaigning. The barrage of leaets, articles, books, meetings, lectures and

seminars fashioned the zeitgeist whereby large numbers of middle-class profes-sionals, working-class immigrants, young people and a whole raft of moraloutlaws (musicians, criminals, prostitutes etc). were criminalized in law andmorally demonized as pathological liars and semi-lunatics. Taking its lead fromtabloid journalism, the new engine of mass media entertainmentthe cinemaenshrined these stereotypes on celluloid.

One of the earliest cocaine movies was released at a time when anti-cocainesentiments were gaining momentum. D. W. Grifths For His Son (1912) tells of a

father who needs money for his sons wedding. The man invents a new softdrinkDopokoke: `for that tired feeling. The son gets hold of bottle of cocaineand starts shooting up. His ance refuses to join him and runs off with the coke.The businessmans son dies haggard and drawn in hospital; `The awful result ofcriminal selshness (Brownlow, 1990).

There was actually more sympathy shown for those with an opiate habit thancocaineuse of coke was seen much more as a form of vicious indulgence. Thecoke end was a end because of the enjoyment sought from taking the drug.There was a problem of squaring the circle between a drug that appeared to give

the user energy and vitalitywhile at the same time being addictive, the modelfor which was the opium. In fact, lms often confused the effects of the twod b h l i d i i US d l Thi d d i

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course), tins full of opium and a belt full of needles for that busy detective whoneeds to inject-and-go. In fact, Fairbanks was fanatical about healthy living. Buthe was also up for a good practical joke and as lms gothis was it. Mostbiographies of Fairbanks omit reference to this lm as if to mention the fact that

the great star appeared in a drug lm, let alone one where he seemed to behaving a good time, would be to sully his reputation.Glamour for cocaine came with illegality and expense. Cocaine was reinvented

for post-World War I modernity, the break with Victorian approaches to moralrectitude. Film stars encapsulated this fundamental sea change in popular culture.Through the new engines of mass media, millions of people could see otherwiseordinary people becoming not only rich, but also famous and even infamoussimply by looking beautiful and acting badly. In the early days of Hollywood,they did not even have to speak. These were the rst aristocrats of mass media

entertainment, many with more money than they knew what to do with. In theearly 1920s, on the back of untrammelled wealth, came sex and drug scandals,involving wild parties, overdoses, alleged rape and murder. Mabel Normand, afamous Mack Senne tt comedienne, was reputed to spend $2000 a month oncocaine; Barbara La Marr kept coke on a silver salver on her piano. Later, CarmenMiranda kept coke in a secret compartment in her platform shoes. The Frenchcorrespondent of the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote about`cocainomania among actors, saying they used the drug to dilate their pupilsand give an expression of `astonishment, depth, brilliance and wildness (Anger,

1975). Aleister Crowley, on a visit to California, condemned the Hollywoodcinema crowd as `cocaine -crazed lunatics (Crowley, 1972). And he shouldknow. The moral reformers had a new challenge on their hands and throughthe 1920s and early 1930s, Protestant and Catholic clean-up campaigners lobbiedanybody who would listen about the sink of depravity that was Hollywood.

In an attempt to fend off religious boycotts (which would have decimatedprots) and tough Federal censorship laws, the lm industry appointed its ownwatchdog, Will Hays, whose ofce over the period 19221934 drew up a suc-

cession of ever more tighter rules about what could and could not be shown onthe screen. Top of the banned list was drugs. By 1934, no lm could be shown inthe prestigious movie palaces of the big cities unless it had a seal of approval fromthe Hays Ofce (Black, 1994).

Instead it was left to the moving tabloids, the so-called `exploitation lms tocontinue the drug lm genre [1]. The lms of producers such as Dwain Esperplayed in low-rent cinemas across the nation and needed no seal of approvalfrom the industry, although they still had to battle local and state censorshipboards. In 1928 The Pace that Kills was released, later renamed in the sound

version Cocaine Fiends (1936). It was an anti-drug propaganda movie whereinterestingly (in the years just before `reefer madness hit) cocaine was portrayed

h d h `kid h i k h l di b h f

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screen and for drug lms in general for the next 20 years [2]. And then, for avariety of reasons, cocaine itself virtually disappeared from the illicit drug scenefor an even longer period.

In 1927, amphetamine was introduced as Benzedrine inhalers to relieve the

symptoms of asthma. Recreational drug users quickly discovered you could takeout the Benzedrine strips and dissolve them in coffee for a cheap hit. Ampheta-mine may have kept cocaine off the scene, but cocaine use in the US was indecline well before its rival was introduced. Even drug professionals as disparatein their views on drugs as sociologist Alfred Lindesmith and Bureau of Narcoticschief Harry Anslinger could agree on that. They both made statements in the late1930s to the effect that addiction to cocaine was hardly a problem. And prohibi-tion and control did have its part to play. There was simply much less cocainearound. The pharmaceutical companies controlled virtually all cocaine manu-

facture. Hardly any was produced in the countries that grew the leaves. Themajor US company was Parke-Davis and there is some evidence to show thatduring the 1920s, with cocaine no longer legally available over the counter, thecompany had to nd new markets for its product and the result was a substantialincrease in the recreational use of cocaine in Europe, especially in Paris and Berlin(Phillips & Wynne, 1980). It was much easier for the enforcement agencies tocontrol a drug whose only outlet was a legitimate pharmaceutical company thanto deal with uncontrolled dealers and smugglers (Meyer & Parsinnen, 1998).

Clearly World War II played a major role in disrupting international trade,

including the export of coca leaves for the manufacture of cocaine. But already bythe early 1950s there is evidence of enterprising Chilean gangsters buying leafand paste in Bolivia and Peru, rening it into cocaine and moving it northwardsto be sold for use in the nightclubs and casinos of Batistas Cuba. When Castrotook over, the now exiled anti-communist Cubans living in Florida received CIAtraining in return for the proverbial blind eye turned to increased smuggling of allkinds, including cocaine. Other factors such as the breaking of the heroin FrenchConnection and economic depression in Colombia created an environment for

the growth of the Latin American cocaine trade which Hollywood was to embraceenthusiastically (Jonnes, 1996).In 1968, actor Peter Fonda had an idea for a modern western. Two friends earn

a pile of money from a drug deal and he ad for Florida into retirement until theyare both shot dead on a deserted back road. They had to decide what drug theywould be selling. Marijuana was too bulky; heroin had too much of a bad image.It was actor Dennis Hopper who came up with the idea of cocaine, `I had got itfrom Benny Shapiro, the music promoter who had gotten it from Duke Ellington(Biskind, 1999). When famous music producer Phil Spector, in his cameo role in

what became Easy Rider (1969), is seen sampling the wares in the movie, he issnifng at baking soda. Not because cocaine was illegal but simply the budget

ld i

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Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson and Robert de Niro (Biskind, 1998; Hillier, 1992).Those who made and went to see lms such as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, TaxiDriver, The Exorcist and The Godfather were also part of the Rock n Rollgeneration and the New Hollywood elite were captivated by rock music. Actors

hung out with musicians, rock soundtracks now propelled many movies and anew era of Hollywood excess was under way. And where theres life in the fastlane, there is cocaine.

Jack Nicholson said that cocaine was an aid to better sexual performance, butalso a drug `well suited to the driven megalomaniacal macho lifestyle of Holly-woodin your brain, youre bullet-proof; you can write, you can act, you candirect (Biskind, 1998). The cocaine mirrored precisely the experience of workingin the lm industry as a star, a director or a studio executivethe short-livedsoaring high of success, the crashing depression of failure, and the anxiety and

paranoia hovering over every studio. One lm producer commented:Its the `70s drug . . . I think our generation is now more into productivitythan creativity . . . It comes with growing up a little. To take psychedelics,it takes three daysone to prepare, one to drop and one to recover.Who has that kind of time in this town? Coke is really easya toot here,a toot there. Of course, you have the occasional lost weekend when youdo maybe a gram or two . . . But its a neat drugmakes you feel good,you can function on it . . . Its getting bigger all the time. (Siegel, 1984)

And for the population at large, cocaine was back, a drug of its time to `reinforceand boost what we recognise as the highest aspirations of American initiative,en ergy, frenetic achievement and ebullient optimism (Siegel, 1984) . For an illegaldrug, it had an incredibly clean image; it looked cleanwhite, sparkly, uffy andpharmaceutical. Esquire put a gold coke spoon on its front cover. Newsweek, in1971, described cocaine as `the status symbol of the American middle classpothead. A New York Times Magazine headline read: `Cocaine: the champagneof drugs. Leisure Time Products advertised Chicware sterling silver cocaine

accessories in High Times and patrons of the Beverly Hills Head Shop couldpay over $2000 for a coke spoon. The Hi-Life magazine cover for January 1979announced: `Hollywood Goes Better With Coke (Jonnes, 1996; Siegel, 1984)Underpinning this feelgood factor about cocaine was the medical literature ofthe mid-1970s which essentially gave cocaine a clean bill of health (Ashley, 1975).

The rst modern lm where cocaine was central to the story was Superythestory of Priest, a major Manhattan cocaine dealer. The lm was unusual on twocountsthe rst sympathetic portrait of a drug dealer and one of the rst lmswhere a black persons life is seen from their point of viewand they are

successful. Before Supery, black people were rarely seen in mainstream moviesother than in their relationship to whitesservants, comedic foils, etc. They were

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This is best exemplied by the coke party scene in Paul Shraders 1978 lm, BlueCollar, about car assembly-line workers and their run-in with a corrupt union.People bought not so much a drug, but an image, the coke spoon, the rolled upbanknote, the symbol of what that drug meant, the personal statement its use

made, the status, the gourmet trip.There were some coded hints that all might not be well: perhaps in NicolWilliamsons portrayal of Sherlock Holmes runaway cocaine paranoia in SevenPercent Solution (1976) or Diane Keatons drug-fuelled neurosis in Looking for MrGoodbar (1977). But this was contrasted by the famous scene in Woody AllensAnnie Hall (again 1977 and again Diane Keaton) where he sneezes $2000 worth ofcocaine into the air.

Into the 1980s and even as `Reagans War against Drugs and `Just Say Nocampaigns kicked in, the public view of cocaine was still relatively benign

compared to heroin, LSD or even marijuana which by now was tagged as thekey gateway drug to doom and destruction. The most extreme example of cocaineas symbolic of that aspirational grab for the American Dream was Al Pacinosmemorable performance as a Cuban gangster in Scarface (1983). He arrives inAmerica with nothing, achieves spectacular wealth dealing cocaine and thentransgresses the golden rule`never get high on your own supply and goesdown in a hail of bullets, mountains of cocaine and rampant psychosis.

Even the death of actor John Belushi in 1982 did not seem to stem the tide ofenthusiasm for the drug. It was not until about 1984 that the warning bells began

to ring in the media. The big novel that year, Jay McInerneys Bright Lights BigCity, reected growing unease about the drug among New Yorks young middleclass. But only in 1988 did Hollywood nally confront the problem of cocainedependency with Michael Keatons powerfully self-destructive performance inClean and Sober (1988). By then, a very different form of cocaine dominated themedianot as part of the American Dreambut the American nightmare.

When crack came along, the image of cocaine changed dramatically. Goodbye$100 bills and silver spoons, hello those coke-crazed black men so beloved of turn-

of-century tabloids (Reinarman & Levine, 1997). The beginning of the new blackAmerican cinema arrived with Melvin and Mario Van Peebles, Spike Lee andothers who began to create lms that young black people could relate to. In 1991,Boyz `n the Hood, Jungle Fever, Straight Out of Brooklyn and New Jack City togethermade $165 million at the box ofce. Crack was the backdrop to community life,the framework or the context for violence, murder and mayhem. Drug dealingwas shown as the only route to power and respect on the streets. In New Jack City,there are no good guys, everybody is part of a black drugs and crime ring; there isnon-stop violence in the fast, hard life of the drug dealers who dominate the

neighbourhood and exploit each other and everybody else.Spike Lee and others were criticized by the African-American community for

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use. In her autobiography Youll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, Julia Phillipswho produced The Sting (1973) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) saidthat by 1979 she had spent $15,000 a week on freebase cocaine (Phillips, 1991) [4].

In the modern climate of widespread illegal drug use and a growing debate on

how society deals with the issues, less restrictive censorship has allowed for moregraphic depictions of drug use than might previously have been allowed, ofteninvolving actual injecting scenes (e.g. Trainspotting (1995), Pulp Fiction (1994) orthe wall-to-wall coke-snifng scene of Boogie Nights (1997)). But the framing ofdrugs as a pathological activity that is ultimately punished remains central toHollywoods discourse. Trafc (2000) offers, at least in part, a different view. Intrue Reefer Madness style, young people are shown sliding down that old slipperyslope. What was different was to suggest that the premise on which America wasghting the war against drugs was awednot just through a few corrupt law

enforcement ofcials, politicians or civil servants in an otherwise sound systembut the entire edice. Blow (2001), however, shows that the essentially conserva-tive nature of Hollywood prevails. Johnny Depp plays out the real-life story ofGeorge Jung, who goes from campus dope dealer to a major cocaine trafcker,and who claimed responsibility for most of the cocaine coming into the USA inthe 1980s. Whereas Priest in Supery (1972) and Renton in Trainspotting (1995)walk away from the scene, ahead of the game and money in pocket, Jung wasimprisoned for 21 years where he still resides, a broken and lonely man. Even so,tradition has been tempered by a new reality. The drug dealer does not get blown

away by the Big Star playing the hero because the Big StarJohnny Deppis thedrug dealer. Depp is currently campaigning for Jungs release, regarding him asmore a folk hero than an evil merchant of doom.

Cocaine best exemplies the ambivalence to drugs at the heart of the Holly-wood lm machine. The drug closely mirrors the experience of Hollywood wherewealth and paranoia rise up from the streets in equal measure and has providedthe social glue of the movie community. On screen, images of the drug haveuctuated wildly through comedy, tragedy, violence, and the seductive pull of

untrammelled wealth, power and sexual excess. Off screen, Presidents haveberated the industry for glamorizin g drugswhich you could argue it doessimply by subjecting audiences to the sensory overload of huge screen, loudsoundtrack and pitch black auditorium. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, peoplehave been using the drug for decades simply to get the job doneand nobody iscomplaining if the lm is a success. Reading the press, one could be forgiven forthinking that Robert Downey Jnr is Hollywoods only drug user whereas sincethe time Douglas Fairbanks Snr was hamming it up as a drug-raddled privatedetective, the white letters of Hollywood looking down on Los Angeles have

been etched in lines of coke.

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Earth and Johnny Stool Pigeon to be shown in major cine mas. The shutterscame down again until 1956 when United Artists deed the Production Codeand ran The Man with the Golden Arm without a seal of approval. The lm wasvery successful and began the process where the Production Code was

eventually replaced with the movie ratings system in the 1960s.[3] How closely these lms reected the violent reality of black America wasshown by the murder of rap star Tupac Shakur who starred in Juice (1992) andGridlocked (1996) in which Shakur and Tim Roth played addicts desperatelytrying to access the drug treatment system and being foiled by bureaucracy atevery hurdle.

[4] Julia Phillips died of cancer aged 57 in January 2002.

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University Press.BROWNLOW, K (1990). Behind the Mask of Innocence: sex, violence, prejudice, crime: lms of social conscience in

the silent era. London: Cape.CROWLEY, A. (1972). Diary of a Drug Fiend. London: Sphere.

FLEMING, C. (1998). High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood culture of excess. London: Bloomsbury.HELMER, J. (1975). Drugs and Minority Oppression. New York: Seabury Press.HILLIER, J. (1992). The New Hollywood. London: Studio Vista.

JONNES, J. (1996). Hep Cats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams: a history of Americas romance with illegal drugs .Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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PHILLIPS, J. (1991). Youll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again. London: Heinemann.PHILLIPS, J.L. & WYNNE, R.D. (1980). Cocaine: the mystique and the reality. New York: Avon.

REINARMAN , C. & LEVINE, C. (Eds) (1997). Crack in America: demon drugs and social justice. BerkeleyUniversity of California Press.

SANTE, L. (1991). Low Life: lures and snares of old New York. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.SCHAEFER, E. (1999). Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A history of exploitation lms, 19191959. Durham, NC:

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SIEGEL, R.K. (1984). Cocaine and the privileged class: a review of historical and contemporary images.Advances in Alcohol and Substance Abuse, 4(2), pp. 3749.

STARKS, M. (1982). Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness: an illustrated history of drugs in the movies . NewYork: Cornwall Books.

WASHTON, A.M. & GOLD, M.S. (1986). Cocaine Treatment: a guide. Rockville, MD: American Council for

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