Drugs: education, prevention and policy, Vol. 9, No.

2, 2002

From Chaplin to CharlieÐcocaine, Hollywood and the

movies

HARRY SHAPIRO*
Drugscope, London, UK

ABSTRACT Throughout the history of cinema, the use of drugs such as opiates and
marijuana has been consistently condemned or has passed through distinct phases from
opprobrium to celebration. But because of both its image and functionality within the ®lm
industry, the framing of cocaine use has been more ambivalent and ¯uctuating. The period
prior to World War II saw cocaine use portrayed both in comic situations and in so-called
exploitation ®lms which more closely mirrored sensational press coverage where cocaine
was viewed as the `gateway’ drug to opiates. Cocaine largely disappeared from the
recreational drugs scene until the late 1960s. Since then, ®lms as diverse as Easy
Rider (1969), Annie Hall (1977), Scarface (1983) and Clean and Sober (1988) have
framed cocaine use and dealing variously as comic, heroic, glamorous, as well as
damaging. This contrasts with crack cocaine in the context of black cinema in the 1980s
and 1990s where settings of violence and death predominate. With the cocaine cartels as
the focus, Traf®c (2000) questions for the ®rst time in a Hollywood movie, the ef®cacy of
the `war on drugs’ while the cocaine traf®cking ®lm Blow (2001) returns to a more
traditional Hollywood view of vice punished.

Their biggest money maker in Hollywood last year was Colombia. Not
the studioÐthe country. (Johnny Carson, 1981 Academy Awards)
In line with the prevailing view of opiates in modern-day society, cinema’s take
on the use of these opiate drugs has been invariably negativeÐmorphine or
heroin use follows an inexorable path to the livin g hell of intractable addiction
ending in death. The heroin users in Trainspotting (1995) were marginalize d every
bit as much as the young people in Panic in Needle Park (1971), Frankie Machine in
The Man with the Golden Arm (1956) or the many fallen doctors and society people
of the early silent opium and morphine movies from 1910 to 1930, who exchanged
position and esteem for the handle `drug ®end’.
Marijuana in the movies has followed a different path, as views about dangers
of the drug have modi®ed over the years. From 1930 to 1960, marijuana passed
through two phases; one as the psychotic drug of Reefer Madness (1936) and
Marihuana: weed with its roots in hell (1936) and then, when that position became
medically unsustainable, the gateway drug to heroin of High School Con®dential
(1958) (Starks, 1982). Through the 1960s and early 1970s, marijuana use was

* Correspondence to: Harry Shapiro, Waterbridge House, Drugscope, 32±36 Loman Street, London
SE1 0EE, UK. Tel: 020 7928 1211. Fax: 020 7928 1771. E-mail: harrys@ drugscope.org.uk

Drugs: education, prevention and policy ISSN 0968 ±7637 print/ISSN 1465±3370 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.108 0/0968763011011 9161
134 H. Shapiro

exclusively linked to alterative youth culture, smoking being a political statement

in its own right, most notably in the signal moment for youth culture movies, Easy
Rider (1969). Through the 1980s up to date, dope smoking has either been the
backdrop of a different kind of youth movie, one much more anarchic, blank and
disaffected such as Dazed and Confused (1993) or Kids (1995) or just an incidental
and unremarkable part of the landscape of modern ®lms.
The depiction of cocaine use has been much more ambivalen t and ¯uctuating.
Partly this is because medical views on cocaine over the decades have similarly
swung between praise, neutrality and condemnation (e.g. Ashley, 1975; Gold,
1986). We also have to take into account the view of cocaine within the industry
itself. From an aesthetic perspective, much of mainstream Hollywood movie-
making has been about promoting the Great American Dream (GAD)Ða view of
success founded on being the best, the loudest, the brightest, the richest, the most
aggressive and powerful. This, at the experimental and recreational phases, is the
illusion created for the cocaine user. By contrast, heroin and marijuana can be
framed as drugs for those who have dropped out of the chase for the GAD (if they
were ever signed up) while LSD and other psychedelics could be said to be the
vehicles for those trying to locate an equally subversive alternative to the GAD.
Either way, users of other drugs are not onside and decidedly not team players.
Cocaine, too, has a pervasive functional purpose within those highly stressed
and ruthlessly competitive entertainment industries such as ®lm and popular
music and within ®nancial institutions (such as Wall Street and the City of
London) where appearances of control and power are seen as vital to promotion
and success, to be seen as always on top and ahead of the game. Also given its
cost, being a conspicuous consumer of copious amounts of cocaine has been a
benchmark of individual wealth and status within these industries. For many in
the ®lm industry, signing up to the image of cocaine as a statement of power and
wealth has been every bit as important as the physiological effects of using it
(Fleming, 1998). Taken together, the confusing medical response to cocaine, the
cocaine aesthetic and its functionality within the industry, arguably accounts for
the belated cinematic recognition of the potential dangers of chronic cocaine use.
In the late 19th century, cocaine became a staple ingredient for a whole variety
of cold and hay fever remedies, tonics and pick-me-ups. The coca wine marketed
as Vin Mariani was the favourite tipple of royalty, religious leaders and other
celebrities of 19th-century Europe. America’s main manufacturer of cocaine from
imported coca leaves was Parke-Davis who, in 1883, promoted cocaine to doctors
with assurances that cocaine was ef®cacious well beyond the needs of clinical
medicine in that it would `make the coward brave, the silent eloquent’ as well as
`free the victims of alcohol and opium habits from their bondage’ (Jonnes, 1996).
By 1906, 80 million Americans were drinking and hoovering up 11 tons of cocaine
a year.
However, while some doctors were endorsing cocaine products, others were
already sounding alarm bells about cocaine and concerns were raised that people
were being exposed to dangerous drugs without any warnings, as the patent
medicine companies were not obliged to print the list of ingredients on the labels.
The press kept quiet because of the advertising revenue provided by the medicine
business but, in 1905, a series of investigative articles in Collier’s Magazine started
the ball rolling to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which enacted labellin g
requirements.
 From Chaplin to Charlie 135

The legislation left entirely untouched a thriving business in pure pharmaceu-

tical cocaine for purely recreational purposes. And here, far from being the drug
of the rich and famous that we know today, it was much more the drug of the
down and outs (Jonnes, 1996; Sante, 1991).
Cocaine was the subject of much opprobrium well before controls were put in
place in the US through the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 because of this
association with urban depravity. The campaigns against drugs in the late 19th
and early 20th century were led by the ProgressivesÐa loose coalition of white,
Protestant, rurally focused politicians, religious groups, doctors and moral
reformers who were appalled at what they saw as the degeneration of the nation
brought about by urban growth with its attendant political corruption, urban
squalour, immigration and social problems such as prostitution, alcoholism and
drug use (Musto, 1987). There was a strong strain of crude nationalism and racism
running through the movement backed by the tabloid newspaper empire of
William Randolph Hearst. He helped create the `drug ®end’ lexicon of moral
outrage against drugs and built up a momentum of anti-drug sentiments by
blamin g much of the trouble on the opium habits of the Chinese community,
cocaine use by southern black workers and later marijuana use by Mexican
immigrants (Helmer, 1975; Silver, 1979).
The passing of the Harrison Act in 1914 was both the beginning of the war
against drugs as we know it, but also the culmination of over 40 years of anti-drug
campaigning. The barrage of lea¯ets, articles, books, meetings, lectures and
seminars fashioned the zeitgeist whereby large numbers of middle-class profes-
sionals, working-class immigrants, young people and a whole raft of moral
outlaws (musicians, criminals, prostitutes etc). were criminalized in law and
morally demonized as pathological liars and semi-lunatics. Taking its lead from
tabloid journalism, the new engine of mass media entertainmentÐthe cinemaÐ
enshrined these stereotypes on celluloid.
One of the earliest cocaine movies was released at a time when anti-cocaine
sentiments were gaining momentum. D. W. Grif®ths’ For His Son (1912) tells of a
father who needs money for his son’s wedding. The man invents a new soft
drinkÐDopokoke: `for that tired feeling’. The son gets hold of bottle of cocaine
and starts shooting up. His ®ance refuses to join him and runs off with the coke.
The businessman’s son dies haggard and drawn in hospital; `The awful result of
criminal sel®shness’ (Brownlow, 1990).
There was actually more sympathy shown for those with an opiate habit than
cocaineÐuse of coke was seen much more as a form of vicious indulgence. The
coke ®end was a ®end because of the enjoyment sought from taking the drug.
There was a problem of squaring the circle between a drug that appeared to give
the user energy and vitalityÐwhile at the same time being addictive , the model
for which was the opium. In fact, ®lms often confused the effects of the two
drugsÐboth classi®ed as narcotics in US drug law. This was demonstrated in one
of the many Sherlock Holmes ®lms from the silent era where the detective takes
coke and dreams the opium dreams of the Orient (Starks, 1982).
But as well as Victorian melodramas, the very early drug ®lms could be funny.
One of the most bizarre drug comedies was another, very different D. W. Grif®ths
production. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916), written by the later cult horror
®lm director Tod Browning, starred Douglas Fairbanks Snr as Coke Enneyday
who, while ostensibly trying to bust an opium-smuggling gang, spent the whole
®lm ingesting every substance he could lay his hands onÐmountains of coke (of
136 H. Shapiro

course), tins full of opium and a belt full of needles for that busy detective who
needs to inject-and-go. In fact, Fairbanks was fanatical about healthy living. But
he was also up for a good practical joke and as ®lms goÐthis was it. Most
biographies of Fairbanks omit reference to this ®lm as if to mention the fact that
the great star appeared in a drug ®lm, let alone one where he seemed to be
having a good time, would be to sully his reputation.
Glamour for cocaine came with illegality and expense. Cocaine was reinvented
for post-World War I modernity, the break with Victorian approaches to moral
rectitude. Film stars encapsulated this fundamental sea change in popular culture.
Through the new engines of mass media, million s of people could see otherwise
ordinary people becoming not only rich, but also famous and even infamous
simply by looking beautiful and acting badly. In the early days of Hollywood,
they did not even have to speak. These were the ®rst aristocrats of mass media
entertainment, many with more money than they knew what to do with. In the
early 1920s, on the back of untrammelled wealth, came sex and drug scandals,
involving wild parties, overdoses, alleged rape and murder. Mabel Normand, a
famous Mack Sennett comedienne, was reputed to spend $2000 a month on
cocaine; Barbara La Marr kept coke on a silver salver on her piano. Later, Carmen
Miranda kept coke in a secret compartment in her platform shoes. The French
correspondent of the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote about
`cocainomania’ among actors, saying they used the drug to dilate their pupils
and give an expression of `astonishment, depth, brilliance and wildness’ (Anger,
1975). Aleister Crowley, on a visit to California, condemned the Hollywood
cinema crowd as `cocaine-crazed lunatics’ (Crowley, 1972). And he should
know. The moral reformers had a new challenge on their hands and through
the 1920s and early 1930s, Protestant and Catholic clean-up campaigners lobbie d
anybody who would listen about the sink of depravity that was Hollywood.
In an attempt to fend off religious boycotts (which would have decimated
pro®ts) and tough Federal censorship laws, the ®lm industry appointed its own
watchdog, Will Hays, whose of®ce over the period 1922±1934 drew up a suc-
cession of ever more tighter rules about what could and could not be shown on
the screen. Top of the banned list was drugs. By 1934, no ®lm could be shown in
the prestigious movie palaces of the big cities unless it had a seal of approval from
the Hays Of®ce (Black, 1994).
Instead it was left to the moving tabloids, the so-called `exploitation’ ®lms to
continue the drug ®lm genre [1]. The ®lms of producers such as Dwain Esper
played in low-rent cinemas across the nation and needed no seal of approval
from the industry, although they still had to battle local and state censorship
boards. In 1928 The Pace that Kills was released, later renamed in the sound
version Cocaine Fiends (1936). It was an anti-drug propaganda movie where
interestingly (in the years just before `reefer madness’ hit) cocaine was portrayed
as the gateway drug or the `kid catcher’ as it was known then, leading a bunch of
`snowbirds’ to their ultimate doom via opium and then heroin (Schaefer, 1999).
By the mid-1930s , cocaine had been a legal pick-me-up, praised by some
doctors, vili®ed by others; a legal recreational drug of urban street urchins and
an illicit status symbol for movie stars; and the subject of both comedies and
tragedies in the movies. In Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the comic played a
convict who accidentally pours cocaine on his food after it had been hidden in a
salt cellar. He becomes a ®ghter, stops a prison riot and ends up a hero of the
hour. This was the last gasp for anything remotely funny about drugs on the
 From Chaplin to Charlie 137

screen and for drug ®lms in general for the next 20 years [2]. And then, for a
variety of reasons, cocaine itself virtually disappeared from the illicit drug scene
for an even longer period.
In 1927, amphetamine was introduced as Benzedrine inhalers to relieve the
symptoms of asthma. Recreational drug users quickly discovered you could take
out the Benzedrine strips and dissolve them in coffee for a cheap hit. Ampheta-
mine may have kept cocaine off the scene, but cocaine use in the US was in
decline well before its rival was introduced. Even drug professionals as disparate
in their views on drugs as sociologist Alfred Lindesmith and Bureau of Narcotics
chief Harry Anslinger could agree on that. They both made statements in the late
1930s to the effect that addiction to cocaine was hardly a problem. And prohibi-
tion and control did have its part to play. There was simply much less cocaine
around. The pharmaceutical companies controlled virtually all cocaine manu-
facture. Hardly any was produced in the countries that grew the leaves. The
major US company was Parke-Davis and there is some evidence to show that
during the 1920s, with cocaine no longer legally available over the counter, the
company had to ®nd new markets for its product and the result was a substantial
increase in the recreational use of cocaine in Europe, especially in Paris and Berlin
(Phillips & Wynne, 1980). It was much easier for the enforcement agencies to
control a drug whose only outlet was a legitimate pharmaceutical company than
to deal with uncontrolled dealers and smugglers (Meyer & Parsinnen, 1998).
Clearly World War II played a major role in disrupting international trade,
including the export of coca leaves for the manufacture of cocaine. But already by
the early 1950s there is evidence of enterprising Chilean gangsters buying leaf
and paste in Bolivia and Peru, re®ning it into cocaine and moving it northwards
to be sold for use in the nightclubs and casinos of Batista’s Cuba. When Castro
took over, the now exiled anti-communist Cubans living in Florida received CIA
training in return for the proverbial blind eye turned to increased smuggling of all
kinds, including cocaine. Other factors such as the breaking of the heroin French
Connection and economic depression in Colombia created an environment for
the growth of the Latin American cocaine trade which Hollywood was to embrace
enthusiastically (Jonnes, 1996).
In 1968, actor Peter Fonda had an idea for a modern western. Two friends earn
a pile of money from a drug deal and head for Florida into retirement until they
are both shot dead on a deserted back road. They had to decide what drug they
would be selling. Marijuana was too bulky; heroin had too much of a bad image.
It was actor Dennis Hopper who came up with the idea of cocaine, `I had got it
from Benny Shapiro, the music promoter who had gotten it from Duke Ellington’
(Biskind, 1999). When famous music producer Phil Spector, in his cameo role in
what became Easy Rider (1969), is seen sampling the wares in the movie, he is
snif®ng at baking soda. Not because cocaine was illegal but simply the budget
would not run to cocaine.
By the mid-1960s the major Hollywood studios were in trouble. Audiences
were falling; families were staying at home to watch television. The average age
of cinema audiences was falling and this new 1960s teenage audience did not
want to see standard Hollywood fare. They wanted ®lms they could relate to. The
classic Hollywood studio system dominated by an autocratic studio head like
Harry Cohn at Columbia or Louis Mayer at MGM was replaced by an industry
which feted young directors such as Martin Scorcese, Francis Coppola, William
Friedkin and Bob Rafelson and a next generation of stars such as Dustin Hoffman,
138 H. Shapiro

Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson and Robert de Niro (Biskind, 1998; Hillier, 1992).
Those who made and went to see ®lms such as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Taxi
Driver, The Exorcist and The Godfather were also part of the Rock ’n’ Roll
generation and the New Hollywood elite were captivated by rock music. Actors
hung out with musicians, rock soundtracks now propelled many movies and a
new era of Hollywood excess was under way. And where there’s life in the fast
lane, there is cocaine.
Jack Nicholson said that cocaine was an aid to better sexual performance, but
also a drug `well suited to the driven megalomaniacal macho lifestyle of Holly-
woodÐin your brain, you’re bullet-proof; you can write, you can act, you can
direct’ (Biskind, 1998). The cocaine mirrored precisely the experience of working
in the ®lm industry as a star, a director or a studio executiveÐthe short-lived
soaring high of success, the crashing depression of failure, and the anxiety and
paranoia hovering over every studio. One ®lm producer commented:
It’s the `70s drug . . . I think our generation is now more into productivity
than creativity . . . It comes with growing up a little. To take psychedelics,
it takes three daysÐone to prepare, one to drop and one to recover.
Who has that kind of time in this town? Coke is really easyÐa toot here,
a toot there. Of course, you have the occasional lost weekend when you
do maybe a gram or two . . . But it’s a neat drugÐmakes you feel good,
you can function on it . . . It’s getting bigger all the time. (Siegel, 1984)
And for the population at large, cocaine was back, a drug of its time to `reinforce
and boost what we recognise as the highest aspirations of American initiative,
energy, frenetic achievement and ebullient optimism’ (Siegel, 1984). For an illegal
drug, it had an incredibly clean image; it looked cleanÐwhite, sparkly, ¯uffy and
pharmaceutical. Esquire put a gold coke spoon on its front cover. Newsweek, in
1971, described cocaine as `the status symbol of the American middle class
pothead’. A New York Times Magazine headline read: `Cocaine: the champagne
of drugs’. Leisure Time Products advertised Chicware sterling silver cocaine
accessories in High Times and patrons of the Beverly Hills Head Shop could
pay over $2000 for a coke spoon. The Hi-Life magazin e cover for January 1979
announced: `Hollywood Goes Better With Coke’ (Jonnes, 1996; Siegel, 1984)
Underpinning this feelgood factor about cocaine was the medical literature of
the mid-1970s which essentially gave cocaine a clean bill of health (Ashley, 1975).
The ®rst modern ®lm where cocaine was central to the story was Super¯yÐthe
story of Priest, a major Manhattan cocaine dealer. The ®lm was unusual on two
countsÐthe ®rst sympathetic portrait of a drug dealer and one of the ®rst ®lms
where a black person’s life is seen from their point of viewÐand they are
successful. Before Super¯y, black people were rarely seen in mainstream movies
other than in their relationship to whitesÐservants, comedic foils, etc. They were
rarely portrayed as individuals in their own right, living their own lives in their
own communitiesÐhowever miserable, dangerous or unful®lled such lives might
be. However, Blacks Against Narcotics and Genocide were unimpressed and the
drug-focused `blaxploitation’ movies of the 1970s began a long-running debate
between black ®lm-makers and community organizations over the depiction of
black lifestyles on the big screen.
The image of cocaine was unchanged from the 1920s , the drug was expensive
and large consumption was associated with high living. But in the 1970s, use of
the drug was increasing dramaticall y through the general population in America.
 From Chaplin to Charlie 139

This is best exempli®ed by the coke party scene in Paul Shrader’s 1978 ®lm, Blue
Collar, about car assembly-lin e workers and their run-in with a corrupt union.
People bought not so much a drug, but an image, the coke spoon, the rolled up
banknote, the symbol of what that drug meant, the personal statement its use
made, the status, the gourmet trip.
There were some coded hints that all might not be well: perhaps in Nicol
Williamson’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes’ runaway cocaine paranoia in Seven
Percent Solution (1976) or Diane Keaton’s drug-fuelled neurosis in Looking for Mr
Goodbar (1977). But this was contrasted by the famous scene in Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall (again 1977 and again Diane Keaton) where he sneezes $2000 worth of
cocaine into the air.
Into the 1980s and even as `Reagan’s War against Drugs’ and `Just Say No’
campaigns kicked in, the public view of cocaine was still relatively benign
compared to heroin, LSD or even marijuana which by now was tagged as the
key gateway drug to doom and destruction. The most extreme example of cocaine
as symbolic of that aspirational grab for the American Dream was Al Pacino’s
memorable performance as a Cuban gangster in Scarface (1983). He arrives in
America with nothing, achieves spectacular wealth dealing cocaine and then
transgresses the golden ruleÐ`never get high on your own supply’ and goes
down in a hail of bullets, mountains of cocaine and rampant psychosis.
Even the death of actor John Belushi in 1982 did not seem to stem the tide of
enthusiasm for the drug. It was not until about 1984 that the warning bells began
to ring in the media. The big novel that year, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big
City, re¯ected growing unease about the drug among New York’s young middle
class. But only in 1988 did Hollywood ®nally confront the problem of cocaine
dependency with Michael Keaton’s powerfully self-destructive performance in
Clean and Sober (1988). By then, a very different form of cocaine dominated the
mediaÐnot as part of the American DreamÐbut the American nightmare.
When crack came along, the image of cocaine changed dramatically . Goodbye
$100 bills and silver spoons, hello those coke-crazed black men so beloved of turn-
of-century tabloids (Reinarman & Levine, 1997). The beginning of the new black
American cinema arrived with Melvin and Mario Van Peebles, Spike Lee and
others who began to create ®lms that young black people could relate to. In 1991,
Boyz `n the Hood, Jungle Fever, Straight Out of Brooklyn and New Jack City together
made $165 million at the box of®ce. Crack was the backdrop to community life,
the framework or the context for violence, murder and mayhem. Drug dealing
was shown as the only route to power and respect on the streets. In New Jack City,
there are no good guys, everybody is part of a black drugs and crime ring; there is
non-stop violence in the fast, hard life of the drug dealers who dominate the
neighbourhood and exploit each other and everybody else.
Spike Lee and others were criticized by the African-American community for
showing black life in an unremittingly negative light. These ghetto movies could
be accused of proliferating stereotypical images of young blacks. Those movies do
re¯ect a reality; they serve to remind us just how far civil rights have to go [3].
In the new climate of cocaine caution, many of the problems hidden by the
Hollywood’s robust public relations machinery were laid bare. The cocaine habits
of Steve McQueen, Judy Kahn, Louise Lasser (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
1975), Stacey Keach, Robin Williams, Richard Dreyfuss and Richard Pryor all
became public. And it wasn’t just the stars; Paramount studio head Robert Evans
who made The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974) battled with chronic cocaine
140 H. Shapiro

use. In her autobiography You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, Julia Phillips
who produced The Sting (1973) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) said
that by 1979 she had spent $15,000 a week on freebase cocaine (Phillips, 1991) [4].
In the modern climate of widespread illegal drug use and a growing debate on
how society deals with the issues, less restrictive censorship has allowed for more
graphic depictions of drug use than might previously have been allowed, often
involving actual injecting scenes (e.g. Trainspotting (1995), Pulp Fiction (1994) or
the wall-to-wall coke-snif®ng scene of Boogie Nights (1997)). But the framing of
drugs as a pathological activity that is ultimately punished remains central to
Hollywood’s discourse. Traf®c (2000) offers, at least in part, a different view. In
true Reefer Madness style, young people are shown slidin g down that old slippery
slope. What was different was to suggest that the premise on which America was
®ghting the war against drugs was ¯awedÐnot just through a few corrupt law
enforcement of®cials, politicians or civil servants in an otherwise sound systemÐ
but the entire edi®ce. Blow (2001), however, shows that the essentially conserva-
tive nature of Hollywood prevails. Johnny Depp plays out the real-life story of
George Jung, who goes from campus dope dealer to a major cocaine traf®cker,
and who claimed responsibility for most of the cocaine coming into the USA in
the 1980s. Whereas Priest in Super¯y (1972) and Renton in Trainspotting (1995)
walk away from the scene, ahead of the game and money in pocket, Jung was
imprisoned for 21 years where he still resides, a broken and lonely man. Even so,
tradition has been tempered by a new reality. The drug dealer does not get blown
away by the Big Star playing the hero because the Big StarÐJohnny DeppÐis the
drug dealer. Depp is currently campaigning for Jung’s release, regarding him as
more a folk hero than an evil merchant of doom.
Cocaine best exempli®es the ambivalence to drugs at the heart of the Holly-
wood ®lm machine. The drug closely mirrors the experience of Hollywood where
wealth and paranoia rise up from the streets in equal measure and has provided
the social glue of the movie community. On screen, images of the drug have
¯uctuated wildly through comedy, tragedy, violence, and the seductive pull of
untrammelled wealth, power and sexual excess. Off screen, Presidents have
berated the industry for glamorizin g drugsÐwhich you could argue it does
simply by subjecting audiences to the sensory overload of huge screen, loud
soundtrack and pitch black auditorium. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, people
have been using the drug for decades simply to get the job doneÐand nobody is
complaining if the ®lm is a success. Reading the press, one could be forgiven for
thinking that Robert Downey Jnr is Hollywood’s only drug user whereas since
the time Douglas Fairbanks Snr was hamming it up as a drug-raddled private
detective, the white letters of Hollywood looking down on Los Angeles have
been etched in lines of coke.

Notes
[1] Exploitation has been de®ned in a number of ways: exploiting new markets
for ®lms, exploiting the audience’s appetite for sex and violence; and exploit-
ing a current hot topic like drugs, that the major studios dare not touch either
through fear of protest from powerful religious groups or the terms of the
voluntary Production Code.
[2] In the late 1940s, the restrictions on any drug themes were waived brie¯y to
allow for anti-smuggling, government-approved movies like To the Ends of the
 From Chaplin to Charlie 141

Earth and Johnny Stool Pigeon to be shown in major cinemas. The shutters
came down again until 1956 when United Artists de®ed the Production Code
and ran The Man with the Golden Arm without a seal of approval. The ®lm was
very successful and began the process where the Production Code was
eventually replaced with the movie ratings system in the 1960s.
[3] How closely these ®lms re¯ected the violent reality of black America was
shown by the murder of rap star Tupac Shakur who starred in Juice (1992) and
Gridlocked (1996) in which Shakur and Tim Roth played addicts desperately
trying to access the drug treatment system and being foiled by bureaucracy at
every hurdle.
[4] Julia Phillips died of cancer aged 57 in January 2002.

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