There are few better ways to tell a complicated true-life story than a well-made documentary. From Hulu and Netflix’s competing Fyre Festival documentaries, which both capture the mega-disaster of the exclusive event that never happened, to groundbreaking docuseries that rocked the music industry, like Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly” and HBO’s “Leaving Neverland,” 2019 has been the year for riveting documentaries.
And if you’re still itching to see more powerful scammers get exposed, Netflix has you covered. “Dirty Money” chronicles real cases of corruption and corporate greed as it takes shape in drug dealing and politics, while “The Great Hack” reveals how Cambridge Analytica became a propaganda machine during the 2016 election. Other political docs include “Knock Down the House,” “Flint Town,” “Reversing Roe” and “Trump: An American Dream.”
But if you’re craving something more upbeat, you can always watch Beyonce’s “Homecoming,” which chronicles the singer’s...
And if you’re still itching to see more powerful scammers get exposed, Netflix has you covered. “Dirty Money” chronicles real cases of corruption and corporate greed as it takes shape in drug dealing and politics, while “The Great Hack” reveals how Cambridge Analytica became a propaganda machine during the 2016 election. Other political docs include “Knock Down the House,” “Flint Town,” “Reversing Roe” and “Trump: An American Dream.”
But if you’re craving something more upbeat, you can always watch Beyonce’s “Homecoming,” which chronicles the singer’s...
- 8/14/2019
- by BreAnna Bell
- Variety Film + TV
Baseball probably had the most complicated performance enhancing drug scandal of any professional sport. Especially as Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa assault the single season home run record, Major League Baseball saw attendance, fandom, and finance all enhanced by drug enhanced home runs. Later on, things came to a head with Alex Rodriguez and his positive test for steroids. Within that scandal, and the whole human growth hormone scandal, are a number of unique characters. A few form the basis for the documentary Screwball, which finds a unique spin on what otherwise could have been a special on ESPN. This take helps set the doc apart and give it a fun bit of variety. The film is a very untraditional non fiction story. Truly a documentary, it also functions like a true crime dramedy, in that all of the non talking head or archival footage is dramatic recreations where the...
- 3/31/2019
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
In baseball and comedy, the term “screwball” has roughly the same meaning — something that breaks in a wildly unexpected direction. Or a series of them, in the case of director Billy Corben’s new documentary Screwball, which shines a light on the comedy of errors that led to the 2013 Biogenesis scandal, arguably the biggest in Major League Baseball history. Named for the Miami-area clinic where an unlicensed doctor dispensed performance-enhancing drugs to a variety of athletes, the affair blew up after a whistleblower walked off with boxes of medical records...
- 3/27/2019
- by Alex Bhattacharji
- Rollingstone.com
The Florida Man Birthday Challenge on social media has made Sunshine State criminal weirdness into a badge of honor for us all: Google your birth date and “Florida Man” and you might get the headline “Florida man wasn’t drinking while driving, just at stop signs” or “Florida man who had sex with dolphin says it seduced him.”
I bring this up to note that if “Cocaine Cowboys” filmmaker Billy Corben — that Miami-based celebrator of all that’s criminally excessive about his state — doesn’t squeeze a jokey documentary series out of it soon, I’d be shocked.
Until then, we have “Screwball,” Corben’s adrenalized rehash of one of the more nationally rippling “Florida man” stories in recent memory, the Biogenesis steroid scandal that in 2013 exposed widespread doping in Major League Baseball. It’s a story that grew out of a petty cash dispute between underground “anti-aging” specialist Anthony...
I bring this up to note that if “Cocaine Cowboys” filmmaker Billy Corben — that Miami-based celebrator of all that’s criminally excessive about his state — doesn’t squeeze a jokey documentary series out of it soon, I’d be shocked.
Until then, we have “Screwball,” Corben’s adrenalized rehash of one of the more nationally rippling “Florida man” stories in recent memory, the Biogenesis steroid scandal that in 2013 exposed widespread doping in Major League Baseball. It’s a story that grew out of a petty cash dispute between underground “anti-aging” specialist Anthony...
- 3/26/2019
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
The real-life misadventures of central figures in the 2013 Major League Baseball doping scandal play like outrageous twists and turns in the seriocomic crime fiction of Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard throughout “Screwball,” an impudently entertaining documentary that suggests what might result if the Monty Python troupe were given carte blanche to produce an investigative report for “60 Minutes.”
It comes to us from Billy Corben, a filmmaker whose previous chronicles of illicit activity and entrepreneurial drug traders in and around Miami might now be viewed as warm-up pitches for his latest effort. This time on the mound, he throws heat and scores impressively with help from a lineup that includes baseball All-Stars, mob-connected lowlifes, tanning and bodybuilding enthusiasts, free-spending Mlb investigators, and an unlicensed anti-aging expert whose lack of bona fide medical credentials scarcely hindered his ability to provide, one way or the other, performance-enhancing drugs for his clients. The latter shady character,...
It comes to us from Billy Corben, a filmmaker whose previous chronicles of illicit activity and entrepreneurial drug traders in and around Miami might now be viewed as warm-up pitches for his latest effort. This time on the mound, he throws heat and scores impressively with help from a lineup that includes baseball All-Stars, mob-connected lowlifes, tanning and bodybuilding enthusiasts, free-spending Mlb investigators, and an unlicensed anti-aging expert whose lack of bona fide medical credentials scarcely hindered his ability to provide, one way or the other, performance-enhancing drugs for his clients. The latter shady character,...
- 9/24/2018
- by Joe Leydon
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: While Alex Rodriguez long ago hung up his Yankees uniform and put his performance enhancing drug scandals behind him as he works as a respected baseball analyst for ESPN telecasts, that doping past is bound to rear back up at Toronto. That’s where the Billy Corben-directed documentary Screwball will premiere and re-explore the performance enhancing drugs scandal known as Biogenesis that will challenge A-Rod’s attempts to make the Hall of Fame, even though he hit the fourth highest all-time number of home runs with 696.
The filmmaker has put together a procedural on how the Miami-based Biogenesis proffered performance enhancing drugs to Rodriguez and other sluggers like Boston Red Sox star Manny Ramirez. Corben, whose past documentaries include Cocaine Cowboys and The U, acknowledges the comic absurdity behind the whole drug fiasco by adding an Our Gang element and featuring reenactments that put children in the roles...
The filmmaker has put together a procedural on how the Miami-based Biogenesis proffered performance enhancing drugs to Rodriguez and other sluggers like Boston Red Sox star Manny Ramirez. Corben, whose past documentaries include Cocaine Cowboys and The U, acknowledges the comic absurdity behind the whole drug fiasco by adding an Our Gang element and featuring reenactments that put children in the roles...
- 8/28/2018
- by Mike Fleming Jr
- Deadline Film + TV
Beloved U.S. baseball superstar Manny Ramirez has stunned the sports world after landing a 50-game suspension for allegedly taking a banned substance.
The Los Angeles Dodgers star reportedly failed a drug test for a fertility medicine, which Ramirez has taken responsibility for using, but insists a doctor prescribed.
In a statement from the sports star, he reveals he was on the prescription medication for "a personal health issue," adding, "He (the doctor) gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was Ok to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy... I have been advised not to say anything more for now."
Ramirez becomes the biggest star suspended under baseball's testing programme, which began in 2003.
It comes just months after New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez confirmed a report he had used banned steroids from 2001 to 2003.
The Los Angeles Dodgers star reportedly failed a drug test for a fertility medicine, which Ramirez has taken responsibility for using, but insists a doctor prescribed.
In a statement from the sports star, he reveals he was on the prescription medication for "a personal health issue," adding, "He (the doctor) gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was Ok to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy... I have been advised not to say anything more for now."
Ramirez becomes the biggest star suspended under baseball's testing programme, which began in 2003.
It comes just months after New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez confirmed a report he had used banned steroids from 2001 to 2003.
- 5/8/2009
- WENN
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