The Texas Observer

Got pot? If so, take comfort that you’re one of an estimated 80 million Americans who’ve at least tried the supposedly dangerous Schedule 1 drug, But do you know where your drug money actually goes? Is it funding terrorists, as the post-9/11 advertising campaign would have you believe?

Well, no, according to American Drug War: The Last White Hope, a compellingly researched new documentary by Austin filmmaker Kevin Booth that does an admirable job of following the money.

In the case of the United States’ war on drugs, the modern incarnation of which was launched by Richard Nixon in 1971, Booth makes the case that the ostensible battle is more accurately an economic incentive program for the private prison industry, funded out of self-interest by the Partnership for a Drug Free America (essentially a front group for legal drug industries, i.e. pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and tobacco) and waged by a series of increasingly ineffective administration-appointed Drug Czars, including current title-holder John Walters. You’ve never heard of him, Booth argues, because the current drug economy is working the way it should: drugs are flowing, prisons are full, and Wall Street is happy.

In painting this ugly picture, Booth traces the connections between the Iran/Contra debacle, infamous Los Angeles street dealer Ricky Ross, controversial CIA-cocaine connection journalist Gary Webb, Oliver North, Panamanian henchman Manuel Noriega, Phoenix’s tough-love anti-drug sheriff Joe Arpaio, pro-pot comedian/martyr Tommy Chong, the PATRIOT ACT, and the equally inscrutable war of terror.

Along the way, Booth questions why Afghanistan’s heroin production actually increased after the American invasion, gives Clinton-era Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey enough on-camera rope to make him look like a self-satisfied and not entirely bright tool, recontextualizes Osama bin Laden as a drug kingpin propped up by prohibition, and makes a convincing case that the drug war is not so much winnable as fund-able. The Office of National Drug Control Policy is budgeted at $18.5 billion for 2008.

Meanwhile, the burgeoning private prison industry finds itself a beneficiary of the million-plus nonviolent drug offenders currently behind bars in the U.S.

Observer fans will be curious to see reference to staff reporter Forrest Wilder’s Daily Texan reporting on the for-profit prison industry, and yet another examination of the drug war gone awry in Tulia, told through interviews with lawyer Jeff Blackburn and recently deceased fall-guy Joe Moore.

Booth’s narrative is hardly subtle (though he does manage to make it personal by including the legal and illegal drug-related deaths of his brother and friend), and the slightly ham-handed approach (Booth would have you believe that the solution to all these problems is to be found in Amsterdam-style decriminalization of “organic” drugs like marijuana and mushrooms) does a good job of hammering home the essential point: America’s war on drugs is incredibly costly, appallingly ineffective, and irretrievably entrenched.

American Drug War is strong medicine, impeccably sourced, and the DVD — which recently took top honors in four consecutive film festivals —is due to hit stores May 27. If you already agree with its premise, you’ll find further ammunition for your next argument. And if the film’s hypothesis sounds to you like just another round of paranoid conspiracy-theorizing, you just might learn something from it.

There’s no shortage of bait on the hook for film buffs this weekend in Austin, where the 11th Cine Las Americas International Film Festival takes over half a dozen screens for 9 days with a world-class selection of new releases, narrative features, documentaries and shorts. The programming starts tonight, Wednesday, April 16, with an 8 p.m. screening of Spaniard Carles Bosch’s documentary Septiembres at the Paramount Theater.

Other festival highlights include the films of Nelson Pereira dos Santos, a collection the Film Society of Lincoln Center has called “the most important body of work in the history of Brazilian and, arguably, Latin American cinema.”

Full festival scheduling is available at www.cinelasamericas.org.

And if you’re already making plans for next month, make a note that May 1 marks the opening of the very first Marfa Film Festival — a significant milestone in a town with a deep and current history in American cinema (Giant, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men all filmed in the neighborhood) but no movie screen of its own (films will be projected on an inflatable screen courtesy of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow).

Highlights out west include a special local screening of There Will Be Blood, a potential appearance by director Paul Thomas Anderson, Austinite David Modigliani’s Crawford (read the Observer’s review here), a late-show dance-party showing of David Byrne’s True Stories, and the promised appearance of Giant’s Dennis Hopper, who’s bringing his long-lost western The Last Movie to town.

See the Marfa festival’s site for the full week’s schedule.

The specific story may be Austin’s, but the dilemma is close to universal: a treasured civic amenity (Barton Springs, say) inevitably attracts the attention of developers, who want to reshape the natural world in a more profitable manner (by installing sprawling subdivisions, for instance), threatening in the process the very goose that laid the golden egg. Conflict and lack of hilarity ensues, and eventually, almost always, the goose dies.

That’s the broad-brush outline of the substantially more nuanced The Unforeseen, produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, and directed by Laura Dunn. The film premiered at Sundance last year. You can read the Observer’s review here. Or read our 2001 profile of director Dunn here.

The film opened its theatrical run in Austin last weekend.

Check out the Alamo Draft House South Lamar screening schedule here.

If you already have a read on this story from your time in the Austin trenches, you’ll want to see what the filmmakers got right and/or wrong. If you’re a newbie, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better (or prettier) primer on this town’s defining development/preservation dynamic.

See and discuss.

Anyone interested in journalism — can we get a show of hands, please? — ought to make a point of taking in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the mad genius/incorrigible iconoclast who most famously offed the American Dream with the literary shotgun blast of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and later killed himself (in 2005) with a single bullet to the head.

(Even if journalism isn’t your thing, you should still check Gonzo out, if only to remind yourself that this most apologetic of contemporary professions once played in the big leagues of American star-culture, right alongside politics and rock and roll.)

Thompson’s full bibliography and influence are too rich to repeat here, but director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; The Trials of Henry Kissinger) has gained access to never-before-seen archival film of Thompson at work and at play, and it’s revelatory, though it leaves unanswered the most enduring of HST trivia questions: How could a grown man who lived in snow country (Aspen-area Colorado) spend so much of his life wearing shorts?

With the addition of a few unfortunate but brief dramatic reenactments, Gibney has assembled a reasonably full biography and a monument to Thompson’s best years that doesn’t ignore the fact that they were relatively few. Or that having stared down Hells Angels and Richard Nixon alike with his twin senses of humor and rage intact, it was ultimately an enemy as insubstantial as fame that robbed the writer of his mojo.

Remembrances by running-buddies including Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Margaritaville tycoon Jimmy Buffett, illustrator/collaborator Ralph Steadman and likable xenophobe Pat Buchanan polish the already well-worn legend. Son Juan and two wives add painful human perspective to the apparently more-or-less true mythology of an uncomfortable but irrepressible cartoon character (HST is the model for Doonesbury’s Raoul Duke, of course).

The wealth of firsthand footage is a treat for fans, of whom there was no shortage Saturday night at the Alamo Draft House for the documentary’s SXSW regional premiere. The film shows one more time during the festival, at the same venue, at 10 p.m. on Thursday night, March 13th. If you don’t want to get stuck in a folding chair in the aisle, we recommend you arrive on the early side.

Special if potentially depressing treat for political junkies, of which Thompson was emphatically one: The film’s recollection of the 1972 presidential race, in which an exceedingly Bush-like Nixon beats ascendant out-of-Vietnam-now candidate George McGovern like a bad dog in the general election, is a tart and timely reminder of just how much hope and idealism can be squandered — even in the face of a compellingly evil alternative — by a few stupid mistakes. The contemporary parallels are unavoidable. And, one can hope, imprecise.