Smuggler Movies
Denna Repaci
It was two years of rejections from Turkey. Then a friend led us to Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records and one of the most famous Turks in the world. This gracious gentleman saw that our aim was true and agreed to become our champion in the cause of my revisiting Turkey. We felt for the first time that we could actually get there. But when Ahmet fell backstage at a Rolling Stones concert, went into a coma and died, our hopes died with him.
When my one-man show, Riding the Midnight Express With Billy Hayes, played at the Barrow Street Theater in Manhattan in 2014, prominent members of the Turkish-American community came to see it, and suddenly, their hatred toward me evaporated. They later invited me to raise the Turkish flag above Wall Street for the annual commemoration of the founding of the Turkish Republic, attended by the consul general and other Turkish officials. Talk about coming full circle! Sally finally had the ending for her documentary.
Infamous drug smuggler and prison escapee whose experience in a Turkish prison was the basis of the hit cult film, Midnight Express, Billy Hayes recounts his story and his shocking return to Turkey in a new feature documentary, Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes and Turkey, available on iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon on March 23.
American Made is a 2017 American action comedy film[3][4][5] directed by Doug Liman, written by Gary Spinelli, and starring Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Alejandro Edda, Mauricio Meja, Caleb Landry Jones, and Jesse Plemons.[6] It is inspired[7] by the life of Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel in the 1980s and then, in order to avoid jail time, became an informant for the DEA.[8]
The film was first released in Taiwan on August 18, 2017, and then in the United States on September 29, 2017. It is the first film directed by Liman to be released by Universal Pictures since The Bourne Identity in 2002, and played in 2D and IMAX in select theaters.[9] It grossed $134 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Cruise's performance.[10]
In 1978, Baton Rouge pilot Barry Seal, who flies commercial jets for TWA, is recruited by a CIA case officer calling himself Monty Schafer. He asks Seal, who has been smuggling Cuban cigars into the country via Canada, to fly clandestine reconnaissance missions for the CIA over Central America using a small, fast, twin-engine Piper Smith Aerostar 600, outfitted with sophisticated aerial surveillance cameras. Seal tells his wife, Lucy, he's still with TWA.
In the 1980s, Schafer asks Seal to start acting as a courier between the CIA and General Noriega in Panama. During a mission, the Medelln Cartel picks Seal up and asks him to fly cocaine on his return flights to the United States. Seal accepts and starts flying the cartel's cocaine to Louisiana, delivering the drugs via airdrop in the countryside instead of landing at an airport. The CIA turns a blind eye to the drug smuggling, but the DEA tracks Seal down. To avoid the authorities, Seal and his family must relocate to the remote town of Mena, Arkansas, and his wife comes to accept the wealth generated by his new life. The small town gradually becomes wealthy as the hub of U.S. cocaine trafficking.
Later, Schafer asks Seal to run guns to the Nicaraguan Contras based in Honduras. Seal realizes that the Contras are not serious about the war and just want to get rich and he starts trading the guns to the cartel. The CIA sets up a Contra training base in Mena and Seal flies the Contras in, but many of them escape as soon as they arrive.
Seal makes so much money he buries it in suitcases in the backyard. Seal's freeloading brother-in-law JB moves in, needing a job. Eventually, he starts stealing money from the Seals and is arrested after Sheriff Joe Downing catches him with a briefcase full of laundered cash. With JB out on bail, Seal gives him money and a plane ticket to Bora Bora and tells him to get lost for his safety. JB demands weekly cash and insults Lucy. As Seal chases after him, JB is killed in his car by a bomb placed by the Medelln Cartel, who had previously promised to "take care" of the JB problem.
The FBI soon catches wind of the sudden exuberance on the streets of Mena, not helped by JB's reckless spending, and eventually, the CIA shuts the program down and abandons Seal, who is arrested by the FBI, DEA, ATF and Arkansas State Police simultaneously. Seal escapes prosecution by making a deal with the White House, which wants evidence of the Sandinistas being drug traffickers. They ask Seal to get photos that tie the Medelln Cartel to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Seal manages to get the pictures, but the White House releases them as propaganda against the Sandinistas. Seal is prominently shown in the pictures, which leads to his indictment by the crusading state attorney general, and the cartel plotting revenge.
Seal is convicted but sentenced to only 1,000 hours of community service. Moving from motel to motel making video recordings of his experiences, Seal fears an explosion anytime he starts his car. As his community service is performed at the same Salvation Army building every night, Seal cannot hide from the cartel and is shot dead by assassins. The CIA destroys all evidence connecting them to Seal and continues smuggling, instead using Iran to get guns to the Contras, as proposed by Schafer.
The film ends with Schafer getting promoted for his idea, though it is soon discovered by the public with reporters asking President Reagan and Vice President Bush about the scandal. Lucy and her kids move back to Baton Rouge, where she is seen contentedly working in fast food. One of her expensive pieces of jewelry is seen on her wrist.
I was looking for little hidden pieces of history. Small stories that affected larger global events and I came across the Mena story. And I always wanted to do a gangster film. Goodfellas is one of my favorite movies and I was always on the hunt to try to find my version of that. And once I started researching CIA's involvement in Mena, the same name kept popping up, was this Barry Seal character. As soon as I found Barry, I knew I had a movie.[11]
The film was originally titled Mena and in 2014 was featured on The Black List, a survey showcasing the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood.[12] On January 14, 2015, it was announced that Tom Cruise and Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman would reunite for what was originally titled Mena.[13]
Principal photography on the film began on May 18, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.[14] Filming locations there include counties Cherokee, Clayton, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett, Morgan and Pickens.[14] Filming on the Georgia Unit wrapped on July 12, 2015. On August 20, 2015, Cruise arrived in Medelln, Colombia, and on August 31, in Santa Marta[15] to scout filming locations for the film.[16] Filming in Colombia commenced on August 26, 2015 and wrapped on September 11, 2015. Production on the film resumed February 3, 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana as filming has been suspended due to a plane crash in Colombia that occurred in September 2015. Reshoots occurred in late January 2017 in Atlanta.
A plane crash on the set of the film in Colombia on September 11, 2015, killed two people and caused serious injuries to another member of the crew. The plane (a twin-engine Piper Aerostar), which was carrying crew members (three American pilots), was returning to Enrique Olaya Herrera Airport in Medelln when it ran into bad weather and the crash occurred.[17] The dead were identified as Carlos Berl and Alan Purwin, who was the founder and president of Helinet Aviation, a company which provides aerial surveillance technology to government agencies and law enforcement, and a film pilot who had worked in top films. American pilot Jimmy Lee Garland was seriously injured and rushed to a local hospital.[18][19]
Variety's Guy Lodge wrote: "A sweat-slicked, exhausting but glibly entertaining escapade on its own terms, American Made is more interesting as a showcase for the dateless elasticity of Cruise's star power. It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years."[29]Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "This is yet another hyper-competent, boyishly devil-may-care character that offers Cruise, famous for his derring-do on set, a chance to do his own stunts and fly a plane; it's not a role all that far out of the ageing megastar's wheelhouse."[30]
The film's opening credits make clear it is not entirely factually accurate, with a "Based on a true story" disclaimer. Liman has described the film as "a fun lie based on a true story."[31]When asked by Abraham Riesman of Vulture if the film was a biopic, director Doug Liman said "You know, we're not making a biopic. Tom Cruise doesn't look like Barry Seal. His character is inspired by the stories we learned about Barry." Although Cruise reportedly gained weight for the role, he is only 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) tall, and Seal was an obese man who reportedly weighed 300 pounds (140 kg).[31]
Despite the film's suggestion Seal was recruited by the CIA while working for TWA, Seal denied in court that he had ever worked for the CIA. Monty Schafer was a fictional character and not based on a real-life CIA officer.[32] A 1996 report by the CIA inspector general acknowledged that the agency had conducted a covert training exercise at the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport with another federal agency, but found no evidence that the agency had been involved in any illegal activities.[33]
Seal was fired from TWA in 1974 for falsely claiming medical leave when he was involved in a smuggling scheme. Seal's connections with cartel bosses were also not direct when he was running his drug operations, and he did not meet Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers in person until 1984, when he was working as an informant for the DEA on an undercover operation, following his arrest.[32]
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