THE POWDER AND THE GORY

A BIZARRE TRUE STORY GETS TURNED INTO A PERFECTLY TITLED HORROR-COMEDY: COCAINE BEAR

- TARA BENNETT

THERE'S AN OLD ADAGE IN HOLLYWOOD that if you can just get a movie's title right, that's half the battle on the path to success. But what if your movie has a killer title, a stellar cast and features a bear hopped up on nose candy? Yes, that unicorn of cinema exists and its name is Cocaine Bear.

Its whacked premise is based on the wild true story of '80s narcotics officer turned drug smuggler Andrew C Thornton II. On his last cocaine run, Thornton dumped kilos out of their malfunctioning plane into the Tennessee wilderness below. Some of it was found and ingested by a 175-pound American black bear, leading to its death. Tragic and bizarre, but also one hell of a story.

Cut to screenwriter Jimmy Warden in 2018, procrastinating on the internet and stumbling upon an article about the legendary bear, now preserved in Kentucky and dubbed "Cocaine Bear". "I went down this rabbit hole and I just kept clicking and clicking," Warden tells SFX, discussing his obsession with the facts behind the case. "At the end, once I thought that I had a pretty solid foundation for what had actually happened, I was like, 'That is a great set-up."

Warden then took it upon himself to turn it into a spec (unpaid) black comedy/horror script where the bear is the hero. "Because the true story of what happened to the bear is kind of a downer, this is like my ode to, or my dark, twisted fantasy version of what I wish would have happened," the writer explains. "And that maybe is even darker because humans die in this version."