‘Cocaine Cowboys’ director’s new movie looks at Alex Rodriguez doping scandal

Biogenesis founder Anthony Bosch, the subject of the
documentary, “Screwball.”
Joe
Readle/Getty

• Billy Corben, the director behind the acclaimed
  documentary “Cocaine Cowboys,” turns his focus to the world of
  performance-enhancing drugs for his latest movie.
• His Toronto International Film Festival entry,
  “Screwball,” is a comedic documentary that looks at the rise
  and fall of Anthony Bosch, the doctor who provided PEDs to some
  of the biggest names in Major League Baseball, including Manny
  Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez.
• Corben and his longtime producer Alfred Spellman tell
  Business Insider why the rise and fall of Bosch’s empire had to
  be told through casting kids in the doc’s reenactments and why
  it’s the most Florida story they have made yet.

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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 films
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.

Though Bosch isn’t the first to disgrace the MLB with PEDs —
before Bosch there was the BALCO scandal that outed users like Barry
Bonds and Jason Giambi, and also led to the Mitchell Report — it’s how Bosch operated that
fascinated Corben and Spellman, who have made a living making
documentaries about, as they coin it, “Florida f—ery.”

And with Bosch, they had hit the jackpot.

Alex Rodriguez, who was suspended an entire season
after it was revealed he used performance-enhancing drugs
provided by Anthony Bosch.
Getty
Images

Having its world premiere at the Toronto International Film
Festival on Friday night, Corben’s “Screwball” is a zany
documentary that looks inside Bosch’s Biogenesis operation, which
was touted as being a rejuvenation clinic operating out of Coral
Gables, Florida, when in reality it was a one-stop shop for
athletes to get their human growth hormones, obtained by Bosch
often on the black market through the help of gangsters who were
using South Florida tanning salons as a front. And it was all
overseen by Bosch, who never had a license to practice medicine
in the US and studied just three years at a medical school in
Belize.

It inevitably all crumbled when Porter Fischer, a disgruntled
“professional tanner” who was helping out Bosch with marketing
for the company, wasn’t paid back $4,000. So Fischer took
notepads and documents that revealed the big-name clients Bosch
had and handed it all over to a reporter for the New Miami Times,
which ran an explosive story about MLB players’ involvement with
Bosch. It led to suspensions for 13 MLB players in 2013,
including a full-season suspension for Rodriguez, then the
highest-paid player in the game.

“This is our most Florida movie,” Spellman told Business Insider
over the phone earlier this week. “This story is so insane it
always struck me as a Coen brothers movie meets Elmore Leonard
story.”

And strangely it all fell in Corben and Spellman’s laps very
quickly.

The subjects come calling

Months before Bosch would be sentenced in 2014 for conspiracy to
distribute testosterone, Spellman got a call out of the blue from
a friend of Bosch’s who said the doctor wanted to talk to him and
Corben about making a documentary. The plan was that Corben would
interview Bosch before he went to prison, which Bosch assumed
would take a little time as he was currently in a drug rehab
program. But on the day of sentencing, Bosch was hit with a
four-year sentence and immediately hauled off to a white-collar
prison in Alabama.

Miraculously, things didn’t end right there. A few months after
Bosch’s sentencing, Corben got a call saying that the
whistleblower behind the collapse of Bosch’s empire, Porter
Fischer, also wanted to tell his side of the story.

Corben couldn’t ignore the good fortune.

“Sometimes these stories have to ripen, we weren’t sure if this
was too soon,” Corben told Business Insider. “And though I don’t
believe in spirits or the universe or fate, I said to Alfred,
someone is trying to tell us this was the time to make this
movie.”

After writing letters to Bosch in prison, Corben learned that he
would only do 20 months of his sentence (thanks to cooperating
with prosecutors), so once Bosch finished his time in prison,
Corben went forward with the movie. He interviewed Bosch and
Fischer separately over the span of six days last year.

(L-R) “Screwball” director
Billy Corben and producer Alfred Spellman.
Seth Browarnik/WorldRedEye.com

From the start, Corben was taken by how vivid both Bosch and
Fischer’s recollections of events were.

“They were very excited and animated,” he said. “They would tell
these stories and almost perform what the other person was saying
in addition to what they said. It all was very in-the-moment.”

Corben wanted to capitalize on the storytelling talents of his
two main subjects. Knowing this movie wouldn’t have a lot of
archival footage like his past work, as most of the story
revolved around chats in Bosch’s office, night clubs, or in
tanning salons, for the first time in his career Corben would
have to film reenactments. However, with a title like
“Screwball,” they couldn’t be conventional.

“I was starting to assemble the interviews we shot and I thought,
‘My God, all these guys are acting like such children,’ and the
light bulb went off,” Corben said.

The director would cast kids to reenact the scenes Bosch and
Fischer told so vividly.

Big-boy story, but played out by kids

It was an idea that had been in the back of Corben’s mind for at
least a decade. It started all the way back when he wanted to do
a documentary on Scientology and stumbled across an off-Broadway
musical in the East Village of New York City titled, “A Very
Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant.” The cast was
made up of elementary school students telling the life story of
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

At the time, Corben wanted to option the rights to the musical so
he could use it as a framing device in his Scientology movie. He
even got as far as talking to the writers of the musical. But the
project fell though and was never made. However, with Bosch’s
wacky story, Corben felt the kid aspect could fit perfectly with
the doc’s tone.

“Our vision was that this was always an Elmore Leonard farce,”
Corben said. “It wasn’t like halfway through the movie we were
like, ‘It’s a comedy!’ It was well established and the kids were
something to continue building on that.”

The child actor who plays Anthony Bosch in
“Screwball.”
Rakontur

From the start of “Screwball” that comedic feel is laid out to
the audience, as the opening goes from a traditional talking head
interview with Fischer and cuts to a kid version of Fischer in a
reenactment of what he’s describing in voiceover. The rest of the
story Fischer tells is then reenacted by kids, who are even lip
syncing what Fischer is saying (think of an episode of Comedy
Central’s “Drunk History”).

And along with kid versions of Fischer and Bosch, there’s
reenactments that feature kid Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez,
Miami gangsters, MLB investigators, and even Miami hip-hop legend
Pitbull.

And though the reenactments have a playful tone, Corben was
extremely serious about authenticity, picking out the wig himself
that the kid playing Anthony Bosch would wear, and insisting that
costumes for the Miami police were designed to represent the
correct municipality by color of the uniform and correct badge
style.

“It took a very Wes Anderson level of attention to detail, it
almost killed us,” Spellman said half-joking of the 10-day
reenactments shoot, which included them filming at some of the
actual locations Bosch and Fischer reference in their
recollections.

And then there’s the story itself told in “Screwball,” which at
times is more bizarre than watching kids playing gangsters and
Major League players.

Sunny place for shady people

Bosch weaves a stranger-than-fiction tale in “Screwball” of his
ascent to becoming pro baseball’s go-to guy for PEDs (though he
also provided them for college and even high school ball
players). He recounts his first meeting with Manny Ramirez, when
the player didn’t greet him with a handshake but instead patted
him down to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire. And he talks of
later becoming a part of Alex Rodriguez’s entourage. Bosch claims
one night when they partied at the posh Liv night club in Miami,
he lost a vial of Rodriguez’s blood he had just drawn from him in
the bathroom and the two crawled around the nightclub looking for
it.

And things get even more bizarre when the MLB begins to
investigate Bosch. Throwing cash around South Florida like it’s
Monopoly money (with Rodriguez’s camp doing the same to try to
get him out of trouble), instead of getting assistance, they get
conned by gangsters.

In all, it makes “Screwball” the ultimate “Florida Man” story,
which begs the question, what motivated Bosch to go on camera and
retell his rise and humiliating fall?

“People get to a certain point in life sometimes when all they
have is their story,” Corben said. “We’ve experienced this with
other people we have interviewed, opportunities are now limited
and all they have is their story, and so they are inclined to
share it, for better or worse.”

“Screwball” is currently seeking distribution.