New ‘Cocaine Bear’ Film Is More Bear, Less Bluegrass Conspiracy
Maybe you’ve heard the tale of the “Bluegrass Conspiracy” and the Cocaine Bear, or maybe you haven’t. But anybody who is familiar with the story will tell you on the spot that the subject matter has been ripe to tell in cinematic form for decades. That is why when we heard that Elizabeth Banks, known for her role in The Hunger Games, was directing a movie based on the story for Universal Pictures, it was reason for excitement.
The story is so complex that it’s hard to give a proper summation, but long story short, a crooked cop from blue blood Kentucky society turned into a drug smuggling kingpen and ended up parachuting to his death when he loaded down a private plane with too much cocaine. Some of the precious cargo also ended up getting dumped into a Georgia forest, where a black bear happened upon it, and reportedly consumed some 40 bags of the white powder before succumbing to overdose.
If you want to hear the full story, it’s the subject of Country History X episode #6, which can be read at that link, heard on your podcast network of choice, or via the YouTube player below. The episode was composed in part in anticipation of the new Cocaine Bear movie.
However, this movie is not what a lot of people were expecting when they heard that author Sally Denton’s book The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs & Murder was being referenced to make a movie, at least judging from the trailer for the movie, and the description that accompanies it. The film could have been like a Kentucky version of the film Blow from 2001 starring Johnny Depp, which despite the racy title ultimately told a very human story.
Instead, Cocaine Bear appears a comedic horror flick with a CGI bear running through the woods terrorizing hikers, while the more captivating details of The Bluegrass Conspiracy are left on the sidelines. The movie appears to be just a succession of canned one liners looking to split sides and string together a flimsy premise because making an actual movie about this story would be too hard. Cocaine Bear looks basically like just a step up from Sharknado.
This is not to say that the film might not be good fun for a certain audience. But this feels like a big miss of an opportunity to take a compelling true story and make something of value and intrigue from it. The actual cocaine bear never ran through the woods terrorizing anyone. It was just an interesting side note to the story. Whether the film will even get to the rumored ownership of the Cocaine Bear in taxidermist form by Waylon Jennings, or how it ended up in the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, we’ll still have to see.
The country music ties to the Bluegrass Conspiracy and the Cocaine Bear were loose to begin with. But with the way Kentucky is churning out revolutionary country performers these days, it could have made for a cool backdrop and soundtrack to an intriguing film. Perhaps Cocaine Bear will still be good for a laugh or two though.
The film premiers on February 24th, 2023 in theaters.
December 2, 2022 @ 10:49 am
Haha. I get this could have been more than what it looks like, but I love goofy ‘horror’ movies. I’ve seen all the Sharknados, and even worse, all 3 Sharktopus movies. I’ll definitely want to watch this.
December 2, 2022 @ 10:50 am
Furthermore, this looked like at the very least an opportunity to showcase some hot Appalachian artists on the soundtrack. There was rumblings of Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers involved in some capacity in the infancy stage. But, Sturgill’s voice is busted and Childers found sobriety and Natalie Holt was replaced as the music director (Margo Martindale). I don’t think that is the direction anymore.
December 2, 2022 @ 10:55 am
Some of that cocaine was Parmesan cheese and Sam Harris wouldn’t have even cared if there were dead cubs in it’s basement.
December 2, 2022 @ 2:56 pm
That was a very interesting and informative listen. Enjoyed it.
December 2, 2022 @ 3:43 pm
I still can’t believe no one has done a proper Bluegrass Conspiracy film. It would be unreal. Also, we need a Cornbread Mafia movie as well. That book/story might be even better.
December 2, 2022 @ 8:16 pm
Regardless, the movie looks absurdly entertaining.
December 3, 2022 @ 4:01 am
What we could really use is a movie based on Dakota the Dancing Bear Part II.
December 3, 2022 @ 7:53 am
Elizabeth Banks is also the host of my favorite game show press your luck, the trailer to this movie makes it seem like a bad campy horror movie, but in a fun way. Bring on the country sound track, the great Ray Liotta is in this as well, so it looks really fun, I am all on board for this one.
December 3, 2022 @ 11:55 am
I think this seems like such a missed opportunity. I remember this story being referenced on an episode of Justified several years ago. This could have been a cool Appalachian crime movie instead of a campy horror flick. No disrespect to anybody who likes it just not at all what I expected.
December 3, 2022 @ 1:18 pm
You can make a silly movie about a cocaine-eating bear (or something similar) without tapping into The Bluegrass Conspiracy story. Now if someone tries to make a serious movie about the story, Hollywood will say, “It’s already been done.”
Very similar issue with the Hank Williams story. So many bad movies have been made about it, it’s questionable if anyone will ever be allowed to make a good one.
December 3, 2022 @ 9:41 pm
Yeah my MIL clued me into this movie because she saw the last name of the “parachutist” and thought it was a funny coincidence.
As I told her, it ain’t a coincidence.
My old man’s got some pretty interesting, distant relatives. I suppose all originally Southern families do.
December 4, 2022 @ 2:02 pm
As a Knoxvillian, I will never forget the day that Drew Thornton “dropped into” South Knoxville.
There is so much to this fascinating story that one has to read Sally Denton’s wonderful book on this topic.
The collateral consequences just kept getting worse.
A month or so after Drew Thornton’s misfortune, someone (presumably a Columbian drug dealer or confederate of the cartel) watered the aviation fuel of a Cessna Caravan owned by an Atlanta real estate developer who had a passion for skydiving.
The plane dropped back to earth shortly after it took off, killing all 17 occupants, including a young lawyer I went to law school with at the University of Florida School of Law.
December 5, 2022 @ 8:30 am
As a native Kentuckian who has read the Bluegrass Conspiracy and visited the actual Cocaine Bear in Lexington multiple times, I was hoping for the actual story to be portrayed – what a great movie the real tale would have made. That being said, though I’m personally disappointed, I’m not surprised they went this direction. But the “inspired by actual events” caveat apparently means 5% true story, 95% sensationalized made-up story.
But when you have a choice to tell a real story that ends up involving Waylon Jennings, no matter the other options, you choose the tale that ends up involving Waylon Jennings. It’s like I tell my wife sometimes when choosing where to eat and it often comes down to Waffle House and somewhere else, when you are choosing between a restaurant that Sturgill wrote a song about and one he didn’t, you always choose the restaurant that Sturgill wrote a song about.
December 19, 2022 @ 11:21 am
The part of the story where the bear corpse goes on an adventure is almost certainly pure fiction designed to sell tickets to see a random stuffed bear. I looked into it after the Country History X episode, and the simplest problem with the story is that the first place the bear was supposedly displayed, the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area visitor center, sounds remote but is actually Atlanta Metro- about 5 miles north of I-285. There were no evacuation-level wildfires anywhere near that area anywhere near that time. That would have been a huge story, except there’s no record of it because it didn’t actually happen, and I’ve talked to people who lived around there their whole life who confirmed that nothing like that ever happened. And also got reliable confirmation that the bear corpse was never actually displayed at the visitor center to begin with.
December 22, 2022 @ 2:29 pm
I will say this: Before releasing the Country History X episode, I called Kentucky for Kentucky, and talked to someone who swore up and down that the story they have posted of how they ran down the bear was accurate as far as they knew, and gave me the contact info of the owner. I have since tried to contact the owner a number of different ways, as well as the writer of the Kentucky for Kentucky story a number of different ways. I haven’t received even a pleasant, “Go shit in your hat” from them. Nothing. Not even an acknowledgement of my emails. Having talked to other members of the media, they have been stonewalled to the same degree, including folks from The New York Times and other major periodicals that you would think a local org looking for publicity would be receptive to.
I’m not saying that their story is not true, or only partially true, or mostly made up, and if I said so and was wrong, I could be held libelous. But it is very curious Kentucky for Kentucky continues to not offer any sort of verification or even really acknowledgement of their story whatsoever.
December 22, 2022 @ 3:09 pm
I filed some FOIA requests with both Georgia and Knoxville (should have done the FBI too), but I didn’t get any hits back even about parts of the event that definitely happened. That was annoying. Having talked to people on the ground who could verify the authenticity of parts of the corpse journey story and/or who’d seen the dead bear and pictures of the exhibit, the truth is pretty clear to me, but I’m just a guy who looked into it out of curiosity, and as you say, I don’t need the potential hassle, and I doubt anybody I talked to would welcome it either.