Billy Corben On The Literary Roots Of ‘Florida Man,’ His Favorite Florida Movies, And Florida’s Influence On Trump (UPROXX) →

When I got Billy Corben on the phone this week, I asked how he was doing by way of opening pleasantry. “Exhausted, thanks for asking,” Corben told me, an understandable response from anyone doing a press tour, as Corben is, to promote his new documentary, Screwball (which I recently described as “an insane masterpiece of Floridiana.”)

Then I asked my first real question, and Corben proceeded to give one of the most expansive, caffeinated interviews I’ve ever conducted. This is exhausted? Billy Corben’s tired makes my wired look like Steven Seagal after a couple quaaludes.

I soon found that Corben is easy to wind up, loves to tell stories, and is a great salesman, which probably helps explain what makes him such great documentarian — whose mostly Florida-based ouvre includes Cocaine Cowboys (1 and 2), Dawg Fight, and The U (1 and 2). Where some documentarians seem to have a standard style guide that they merely apply to different subjects (Ken Burns’ photo zooms come to mind), Corben’s subjects seem to inspire his formalistic approach.

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How the 'Cocaine Cowboys' director used the doping scandal that brought down Alex Rodriguez to create a comedic documentary about Miami gangsters (Business Insider) →

In the office of Rakontur, the South Florida-based production company of “Cocaine Cowboys” director Billy Corben and producer Alfred Spellman, there’s a spreadsheet that the duo have been building for most of their professional careers. It’s a unique wish list with the names of shady characters who became notorious in their hometown of Miami that they hope to one day make movies about.

Checked off that list already are the figureheads behind the cocaine blizzard that hit the beaches of Miami in the 1980s, which became the subject of their breakout documentary “Cocaine Cowboys.” There’s also the outlandish University of Miami football program during the 1980s, which they profiled in “The U” as part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary series. And within the last year, they were surprised to check another off the list: Biogenesis owner Dr. Anthony Bosch, better known as the man who provided performance-enhancing drugs to numerous Major League Baseball players, including Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez.

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How A-Rod Explains Modern America (Wall Street Journal) →

I’m not sure the filmmakers behind the new documentary “Screwball” set out to make a baseball movie that explains America—but they did.

We tend to turn preachy and moralize when we talk about PEDs in sports, but “Screwball” is more like a Coen Brothers caper with Carl Hiaasen vibes. Biogenesis wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy—it was a clown car pileup. Bosch’s clinic was an operation run by wannabes who couldn’t shoot straight, improbably entangled with some of the best baseball players in the world. Whatever could go wrong, eventually did, and that included Major League Baseball’s own clumsy investigation into the matter.

The Florida-born Corben and producer Alfred Spellman were behind “Cocaine Cowboys,” the 2006 documentary about the Miami drug trade in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and as in that film, “Screwball” has an undercurrent of love for the Sunshine State’s rich tradition of start-over hustlers and “gray market” economies. Mostly everybody in “Screwball” is on the make, trying to be someone bigger than they appear to be—some figuratively, others literally.

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