At the time it was known as Pablo EscoBear after the 1985 discovery of a dead bear in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest had OD’d on a monumental amount of coke and it was a story ripe for turning into a film. But what’s the true story behind Cocaine Bear?
It all started in September 1985 when convicted drug smuggler Andrew Thornton died after a parachuting accident. Knowing, or at least believing that the FBI were tracking him Thornton offloaded 880lbs of cocaine by throwing it out if the plane pus more on his person that he parachuted out of the plane. All would have been fine if he had not been found dead on September 11th (setting a trend for awful events on that date) dead on a driveway in Knoxville with $15m of cocaine strapped to him. The weight of the coke was too much for the parachute and he plummeted to his death.
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It wasn’t until December 1985 that a dead coked up bear was found in Chattahoochee National Forest surrounded by 40 bricks of cocaine. The bears autopsy showed he had 3-4 grammes of cocaine in his system though it was always rumoured that it was far more. It was screenwriter Jimmy Warden who took the story and ran with it admitting that, ‘’the film is my twisted fantasy of what I wish actually happened after the bear did all that cocaine.”
It was actress – director Elizabeth Banks who signed up for the film after reading the script saying, “I really felt like this is so f**ked up that this bear got dragged into this drug run gone bad and ends up dead,” Banks said. “I felt like this movie could be that bear’s revenge story.”
And that’s the true story behind Cocaine Bear! – Here’s our review of Cocaine Bear
In other features: who else was in the running for THAT Quantumania cameo?
source : variety
