El Patron

Why Can’t Hollywood Get Enough of Pablo Escobar?

As The Infiltrator opens, there are no fewer than three other Medellín cartel movies in the works—and there’s no sign of a slowdown in sight.
Image may contain Human Person Glasses Accessories Accessory Plywood and Wood
Courtesy of Broad Green Pictures.

In the seedy, Scorsese-ish, blow-saturated bio-drama The Infiltrator (out July 13), Bryan Cranston portrays a character who’s something like the anti–Walter White: federal agent Robert Mazur, who goes deep undercover to bring down the Medellín drug cartel’s multi-billion-dollar money-laundering operation.

By hook or by crook, he sets himself on a collision course with the ring’s legendary drug lord, Pablo Escobar—a.k.a. “The King of Cocaine,” the rags-to-ruthless-riches billionaire and erstwhile wealthiest criminal in history. Escobar remains a spectral presence who is seen only once, fleetingly, during the film. But his cult of personality is writ large across a web of corruption and bloodshed that stretches from Miami to Bogota to the salons of Paris throughout the go-go 80s. Toppling the outlaw’s vast syndicate is presented as something like a national preoccupation for law enforcement, a task at which they throw their best resources and brightest operatives.

“He was so much larger than life,” says Brad Furman, director of The Infiltrator. “When I started researching Escobar, his story was so fascinating. He’d kill whoever he had to kill to survive. He reached a height of success in his career where he had so much money he didn’t know what to do with it; he was burying millions in cash in the ground. He was appearing on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Yet at the same time, he was taking his millions and propping up the poor. He became a man of the people, and that’s why his mystique lives on.”

“In a hundred years,” he continues, “you couldn’t make something like this up. It’s just so crazy!”

Judging by the growing number of Escobar-focused film and TV projects in various states of development these days, Hollywood agrees. The industry isn’t even trying to match Escobar’s story with fictions inspired by him; instead, it’s suddenly trafficking in massive shipments of Pablo himself.

Exhibit A: last year, director Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal boarded the yayo-centric crime biopic The Man Who Made It Snow. Based on Max Mermelstein’s best-selling memoir of the same name, Gyllenhaal will portray the Jewish smuggler touted as the only American ever admitted into the inner circle of the Colombian crime cartel, an unlikely figure credited with masterminding the cocaine pipeline from Medellín to Miami and helping grow Escobar’s operation into a multi-billion-dollar business.

In Universal Pictures’ biographical thriller Mena (set for release next January), Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, an airline pilot turned drug runner for the Medellín cartel who transported gigantic shipments of cocaine from Colombia. Later recruited by the D.E.A. as an informant/operative, Seal played a key role in a sting operation establishing a cocaine connection between Escobar and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. (Seal also turns up briefly as a character in The Infiltrator.)

And in May at the Cannes Film Festival, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz signed on to star in a biopic-romance simple titled [Escobar] (http://deadline.com/2016/05/javier-bardem-penelope-cruz-escobar-loving-pablo-hating-escobar-cannes-1201749885/), based on Virginia Vallejo’s best-selling Spanish-language memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar. That project will reportedly follow the stormy amour fou involving socialite cum TV host Vallejo and Escobar at a time when the cartel kingpin had moved into politics and established a global smuggling network linking various Caribbean dictators, South American governments, and even the U.S. Secret Service.

Chalk it up to enduring fascination with a disruptive innovator variously hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood and a ruthlessly prolific murderer, who died in a hail of gunfire—Scarface-style—after a 15-month manhunt costing hundreds of millions of dollars in 1993. In recent years, there have been a spate of documentaries about el padrino, The Two Escobars and The King of Coke). Benicio del Toro portrayed the brutal and charismatic drug boss in the poorly reviewed 2014 romantic thriller Escobar: Paradise Lost. And Adrien Grenier’s feckless himbo character on HBO’s Entourage plays Pablo in a bloated biopic within the series titled Medellin. (If you want to go back even further, Cliff Curtis also turns up as Escobar in the 2001 narco-drama Blow.)

Meanwhile, rival and sometimes similarly accomplished drug barons simply haven’t exploded into public consciousness à la Escobar. Despite their potentially cinematic reputation as “gentleman drug traffickers” (as well as having cracked into the multi-billion-dollar European cocaine market in the mid-80s), you don’t see movies or TV shows about Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela and José Santacruz Londono, the co-founders of Colombia’s ultra-violent Cali cartel. There is, as yet, no Hollywood I.P. concerning Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Mexican narco capo nicknamed the “Lord of the Skies,” who pioneered the use of Boeing 727 jet airliners to import cocaine to the U.S. And USA Network’s Queen of the South—inspired by deadly Latin American “queenpins” of the drug trade such as Enedina Arellano Felix and Griselda Blanco—began airing last month to little critical fanfare and lackluster ratings.

Contrast that with the juggernaut popularity of Netflix’s trafficker triumphalist streaming series Narcos. Intertwining plotlines that chronicle Escobar’s mythic rise to dominance with D.E.A. efforts to take el Patron del Mal down, the Golden Globe–nominated show apparently struck a chord within the real-life drug-dealer demimonde. Mexican cocaine kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman—whom Forbes has called “the biggest drug dealer of all time”—openly deified Escobar and was captured in January after reportedly contacting actors to make a film about his life modeled on Narcos. And earlier this month, TMZ unearthed a formal request from his older brother Roberto Escobar, the Medellín cartel’s accountant, who wants to work as a consultant on the show. “In the first season of Narcos, there were mistakes, lies and discrepancies from the real story,” complains Roberto, who served a decade-long sentence in maximum security prison.

Robert Mazur, the real-life special agent Cranston portrays in The Infiltrator (whose 2009 autobiography of the same name provides basis for the film), can only shake his head at Hollywood’s manhunt for Pablo Escobar. When I ask him about the man behind the myth, Mazur made clear the fugitive at the center of his five-year sting operation wasn’t a glamorous antihero so much as a vindictive and coldblooded killer who thought little of sacrificing innocent lives in the pursuit of his world-beating ambitions. To illustrate, the former agent recalled what happened to Gerardo Moncada, an important cartel figure whom Escobar suspected of disloyalty.

“He was hung by his feet,” Mazur says. “They stripped his clothes off and used blow torches to melt the skin off his body. And then they chopped him up. Then they burned him up. They did that to him, his brother William, and probably a dozen other people.”

“When you think about that internal cleansing, when you think about [Escobar] blowing up a commercial airliner"—because, he believed, a pair of informants cooperating with Colombian authorities were on the plane—"my reaction to that is similar to anyone else who was on the sidelines watching," he adds, before echoing director Brad Furman: “This is craziness!” Of course, they’re using “crazy” in two different ways: Furman is impressed by Escobar’s stranger-than-fiction life story. Mazur is just amazed that a murderer is inspiring so many movies.