Some of the best movies are based on true stories. Think Schindler’s List, American sniper and The Pianist to name a few.
Well, now there’s a new one that can be added to the mix – a film is being made based on a true story about a bear who accidentally ate 70 pounds of cocaine. It will be called Bear cocaine – attractive, right?
Although we don’t know much about the film, we do know that Elizabeth Banks (The 40-year-old Maiden) who will direct the pluck, while filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller will – and this is their first deal with Universal Pictures.
According to reports, the film is a ‘character-driven thrush inspired by real events that happened in Kentucky in 1985’.
According to Variety, the script for Bear cocaine from Jimmy Warden (Am Babysitter, The Lounge), but everything else is keeping them underfoot … or they haven’t gotten that far yet. Who knows.
Fortunately, we have more information about this famous 175-pound polar bear. It was discovered by investigators back in 1985, lying next to a duffel bag.
The duffel bag was filled with over 70 pounds (weight, not price) of the Class A drug before being thrown from the Andrew Andrew Thornton smuggler’s plane.
But when the contraband – worth around $ 15 million (£ 10.7m) – was finally discovered, only 40 empty packs were left scattered around the animal.
A medical examiner, who looked inside the bear, said: “Her stomach was literally full of cocaine. There is no mammal on the planet that could keep that alive.”
According to The Independent, Thornton was a lawyer and a narcotics police officer, but he had run cocaine smuggling in a Cessna plane from Colombia and was dropping off packages in northern Georgia.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Thornton fell to his death when he jumped out of the plane and ‘hit his head on the plane’s tail’ and did not open his parachute.
The 40-year-old man was found in a sidewalk in Knoxville, Tennessee, with night vision goggles, a bulletproof vest and Gucci loafers. The uniform is very good. He also had $ 4,500 in cash, plus guns, knives and plane keys.
When the flight path of the plane was assessed, police found nine duffel bags of cocaine – the tenth duffel bag was found by the bear in the Chattahoochee National Forest.
That’s not the end of the story for the bear. It’s now filled and can be seen at the Kentucky For Kentucky store in Lexington (which is in Kentucky, no wonder). Oh, and he was called ‘Pablo Eskobear’. Weaving. Very appropriate indeed.