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April 2001
Traffic Cop
The Oscar-nominated film Traffic has been lauded for its honest and unflinching depiction of America's long-running drug war. In the filmmakers' drive for realism, a reporter from The New York Times proved invaluable.
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By
In the summer of 1999, a curious tour took place in Tijuana, Mexico. Leading the expedition was Tim Golden, 39, a veteran reporter for The New York Times. Accompanying him was a small group from Hollywood: film director Steven Soderbergh, producer Laura Bickford, and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan. Golden was introducing them to his contacts, people he knew from having covered the drug war in Mexico throughout the nineties. In a rented Ford Explorer, they drove from appointment to appointment, meeting with U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other government officials, Mexican police officers, and members of Tijuana's drug-trafficking underworld and their families and defense lawyers. Soderbergh was preparing to direct Traffic, an intricate, sweeping film about the war on drugs, and one of its three story lines was to be set in Tijuana, a primary trade route for illegal drugs heading into the U.S. Soderbergh and his colleagues were on a fact-finding mission.
Traffic's impact depends largely on its realism -- and it has made an impact. Gaghan won a Golden Globe for Traffic's screenplay, and the movie is nominated for five Oscars, including best picture and best adapted screenplay. The movie (which is distributed by USA Films, a division of USA Networks, Inc., whose chairman and CEO, Barry Diller, is a limited partner in this magazine's parent company) has also sparked op-ed pieces on drug policy, the attention of a Washington think tank, and comment from people such as Mexico's foreign minister, whose aide said he found the movie "balanced." Critics have lauded the film's pseudo-documentary style, achieved with a large and diverse cast, foreign locations, and cameo appearances by politicians, all shot with handheld cameras. Says Soderbergh, "I wanted people to walk away thinking, 'That was real.'"
Gaghan had been researching the drug war for a different project before he began working on the screenplay for Traffic and recently disclosed his past experiences as a drug addict, all of which, he says, helped him write a realistic movie about the subject. Soderbergh, explaining the unlikely success of a movie that deals with such serious material, says he thinks "people are interested in politics when they understand how it connects to their lives." In making a film about America's drug war, a piece of contemporary history hard-wired to our nation's politics, laws, and foreign policy, Soderbergh needed to have his facts straight. "I was prepared to be criticized for sins of omission," he says. "But I didn't want to get attacked for being half-cocked or superficial." And so he hired Tim Golden, who shared a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for the Times's reporting on the effects of drug trafficking in Mexico, to act as a story consultant. Golden would read and take extensive notes on every draft of the screenplay, placing him at the center of an arduous effort to make the film comply with reality.
Golden's advice was multifaceted: Most significantly, he helped Soderbergh untangle the thicket of drug-war relationships -- between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, between rival cartels in Mexico, and between all the factions within these groups. Traffic, which is based on a 1989 British miniseries titled Traffik, doesn't have a good guy/bad guy structure but rather offers a panoramic and ultimately disillusioned view of a problem nobody has been able to solve. Many of Golden's contributions were based on an almost anthropological understanding of the various cultures of the drug war -- DEA lingo and technology, Washington policy-speak, Mexican police procedure.
Soderbergh, Bickford, and Gaghan had all read Golden's articles in the Times and found his input invaluable, although Gaghan says he was well versed in the subject before Golden joined the project. "I'd been down on the border before, driven all over down there on my own doing research," he says. Gaghan instead emphasizes Golden's "deep empathy for the way U.S. drug policy affects the people of Tijuana. He was sad about what had happened in Tijuana. More important than any detail or any introduction he made was the melancholy he felt. A screenwriter can do all the research in the world, but you can't fake that." Gaghan's minimizing of Golden's factual input on the screenplay is contradicted by Bickford and by Soderbergh, who says that "none of us had the depth of knowledge about that country and about that issue that Tim had." Golden gave his notes directly to Soderbergh, who passed on relevant comments to Gaghan.
Golden had spent most of the nineties in Mexico; from 1991 to 1995, he was the Times's bureau chief, and from 1997 to 1999, he served as an investigative reporter for the foreign desk. He'd covered the assassination of a presidential candidate and a Roman Catholic cardinal, the Chiapas rebellion, the collapse of the peso, and -- the reason Golden had this job in the first place -- the rise of Mexico as the primary drug route into the U.S. By the early nineties, after the breakup of Colombia's Medellin cartel, Mexico had replaced the Caribbean and southern Florida as the main U.S. entry point for illegal drugs. The Mexican drug cartels prospered: They had been transporting cocaine from Colombia for cash, and they now began taking a cut of the product instead. By actively participating in the drug trade rather than acting as middlemen, they earned exponentially more money -- so much money that Mexico's law-enforcement apparatus was quickly overwhelmed, and just as quickly corrupted.
Central plot elements of the film and several characters are based more or less directly on Golden's reporting. (Golden received permission from the Times to consult on Traffic.) In the opening scene of the film, for example, two Mexican cops, played by Benicio Del Toro and Jacob Vargas, make arrests and confiscate drugs after an airplane transporting cocaine lands in the desert outside Tijuana. They quickly find themselves surrounded by Mexican federal police officers, who take the drugs off their hands. Leading the federales is General Arturo Salazar (played by Tomas Milian), who becomes a corrupt Mexican counterpart to Robert Wakefield, the American drug czar played by Michael Douglas. Both of these stories appear in recognizable form in Golden's reporting. On April 19, 1995, the Times ran a story by Golden about an estimated 10-ton cocaine bust made by highway patrolmen in the western Sierra Madre after an airplane transporting the drugs landed in the desert. Some seven and a half tons went missing after federal police confiscated the drugs from the local officers. "It turned out," says Golden, "that the deputy attorney general in charge of that case [in Mexico] was being paid off by the drug traffickers." The Salazar character is based on General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, the Mexican drug-enforcement chief whose arrest in 1997 for allegedly taking substantial bribes from a notorious drug trafficker was widely covered in the press, by Golden and others. The movie-reality connection in that case is "quite direct, very literal," says Golden. Before his arrest, Rebollo had been praised by U.S. drug czar General Barry McCaffrey as a soldier "of absolute, unquestioned integrity"; in Traffic, Wakefield meets with Salazar to discuss interdiction strategy. According to Bickford, the "entire Mexico story line was inspired by Tim's reporting."
Beyond providing raw material for the screenplay, Golden's contacts helped secure the cooperation of law enforcement agencies in the filming of Traffic. Their cooperation gave Soderbergh access to such locations as the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego and the DEA intelligence center in El Paso. Golden introduced the filmmakers to Craig Chretien, retired head of intelligence for the DEA, one of the agency's most senior positions. "Tim and I go back years," says Chretien. "I met him when I was down in Peru, working on an unusual paramilitary operation with the Peruvian police." Chretien took notes on the screenplay and later agreed to appear in the film, giving Michael Douglas, as the newly installed drug czar, a briefing tour of the DEA intelligence center. This is one of a few moments in Traffic that blend fiction with reality -- a customs official also plays himself in the film. "We talked to him as if he was the real drug czar," says Chretien of his scene. "Soderbergh told me, 'Give a real briefing. Just make sure you say these two sentences.' Douglas's questions were better than some government officials' questions are."
In addition to inspiring some of Traffic's plotlines and answering many of Soderbergh's questions -- Would a Mexican drug lord himself conduct a negotiation, or would he send an underling? Would the drug czar ever meet with pharmaceutical lobbyists? What is the preferred torture method of the Mexican police? How explicitly would DEA agents discuss payments with an informant? -- Golden had a few larger concerns about the verisimilitude of the screenplay's first draft. He found unrealistic the rapid metamorphosis from housewife to drug lord made by Catherine Zeta-Jones's character, the wife of a powerful American drug trafficker who goes into the business after her husband is arrested; the rapid and dramatic ascension from crooked cop to Mexican drug kingpin by Benicio Del Toro's character (this story later changed significantly); and, most striking, a scene (later dropped) in which Michael Douglas's drug-czar character smokes crack cocaine.
"That scene just didn't work for me at all," says Golden, laughing. According to the original screenplay, after Douglas confronts his daughter about her drug addiction, he's curious to see for himself what it is about the drugs that's destroying her -- and lights up her crack pipe, experiencing an intense high. Chretien says he argued until he was "blue in the face" that the scene should be cut from the screenplay. "We rehearsed the scene where Michael finds the drugs in his daughter's bathroom," explains Soderbergh. "And I thought, 'There's just no way this guy would do drugs.' Especially these drugs, with the paraphernalia and the preparation required. Michael Douglas said, 'I agree with you. I'll shoot whatever you want, but I agree with you.'" Soderbergh says he's glad he excluded the scene: "It would have completely derailed the audience. It would have taken them half an hour to recover."
Golden's suggestions on the Zeta-Jones character were ultimately rejected. "I had some stupid ideas they didn't use," he says, although he scoffs at another scene that survived in which DEA agents conduct their first meeting with an informant in a swimming pool. "That would never happen," he says. Craig Chretien laughed off the pool scene as "Hollywood," as well as another scene, in which an assassin plants a bomb under two DEA agents' car: "You wouldn't have that kind of access to cars. But I understand; it's Hollywood. You've got to blow up a car."
In the end, perhaps the most important effect of Golden's work as a consultant on Traffic was how he managed to deepen the filmmakers' view of Mexico. "I think they saw it initially as a swamp of corruption, a kind of amoral place," says Golden. "But how people operate in Mexico makes just as much sense as how people operate here." It was Golden's input, at least in part, that led Soderbergh and Gaghan to change Del Toro's character from a remorseless and increasingly corrupt cop to an officer simply trying to do his job and maintain his integrity amid rampant corruption. (Del Toro also lobbied Gaghan and Soderbergh to make his character more complex.) On the filmmakers' trip to Mexico, says Golden, "we talked to a powerful cop in Tijuana, a good guy. He starts telling stories about the depth of corruption inside the police, stories that force you to ask, How does he survive, much less do the right thing?" In Traffic, the Del Toro character raises, and attempts to answer, those same questions, which pleases Golden.
Traffic's real-world effects remain to be seen: Soderbergh says he hopes the film will get people to begin to consider drugs as a health-care issue rather than a political or criminal issue. "I'm generally a skeptic when it comes to the political impact of films," says Golden. "I'm surprised it's resonated as powerfully as it has." And with the drug war he knows so well finding such a broad audience, Golden says, "it makes you think about the disparate impact of different ways of telling a story. You always ask yourself if you're getting through to people."
Not that he's considering a career in Hollywood. "I like my day job," he says. 
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