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A third 'Traffic' adds
terrorism and immigration
By HUGH HART
January 25, 2004
HERE'S no stopping "Traffic." In 1989 the
British "Traffik," a
Channel Four production, traced heroin trade along ancient smuggling
routes from the poppy fields of Pakistan to the end-user: teenage
drug addicts in Britain. Then in 2000 Steven Soderbergh's equally
downbeat epic, with an innovative multistrand story line, shifted
locales to Mexico and the United States and earned four Oscars,
including one for best director, and a nomination for best picture.
This week, starting tomorrow evening, USA presents its own six-hour "Traffic" mini-series, with a new, terrifyingly human twist.
"What's happened is that there's now this huge international trade in
smuggling people by using the heroin smuggling routes," said Ron
Hutchinson, who wrote the screenplay for the mini-series. The drug
routes, he said, have formed part of the infrastructure for the
terrorist networks; their wheels are greased by drugs, which have
become "the international underground currency."
"It's disposable; it's portable; it doesn't give you the headaches
that a bundle of cash does because you don't have all the problems of
getting it into the banking system and hiding it," Mr. Hutchinson
said. "So there's this huge circle now and it all comes back to
drugs."
Expanding the "Traffic" metaphor to encompass immigration and
terrorism was not necessarily what USA executives had in mind when
they approached Mr. Hutchinson two years ago about revisiting the
subject. "What I basically said to them was that I didn't think
audiences would want a retread of the same tale," recalled Mr.
Hutchinson, who is also the executive producer of the mini-series. "There's this whole underground economy that's come along in
the last 10 years or so since the original `Traffik' and it's not
just about drugs anymore."
To dramatize the nexus among drugs, bodies, weapons and terrorists,
Mr. Hutchinson devised three hopscotching story lines. A rogue agent
(Elias Koteas) cuts off contact with his handlers from the Drug
Enforcement Administration to broker a suspicious heroin deal with an
Afghan drug dealer (Ritchie Coster) while, in Seattle, his wife (Mary
McCormack) tries to deal with their rebellious teenage son (Justin
Chatwin). Elsewhere in Seattle, a taxi-driving illegal immigrant from
Chechnya (Cliff Curtis) worries about the fate of his wife and child,who are supposed to be hidden in the hold of a cargo ship.
Simultaneously, a Seattle businessman (Balthazar Getty) who's taken
over his father's garment factory gets entangled with a shady Chinese-American businessman (Nelson Lee) who is interested in importing more
than textiles.
Stephen Hopkins, who demonstrated his ability to juggle parallel
story lines as the Emmy-nominated director of "24" during its first
season on Fox, was hired to braid the narrative bits together. "In
the first two hours of this series, we had to do something scary,
which is tell a bunch of different stories which you know are all
going to collide later on but no one else does," said Mr. Hopkins, a
producer of the mini-series.
"Mary McCormack's character is more straightforward because she's
trying to protect her family, so that's the easiest to jump in and
out of," Mr. Hopkins continued. "But the other ones demand being
educated by a lot of information politically and geographically. Some
of the ideas I think are foreign to most people's thinking unless you
really follow global politics."
The global reach of drug-financed trafficking was certainly not lost
on Mr. Hutchinson. "The drug business was the original multinational
corporation," he noted. "It's extremely efficient." And ruthless. Mr.
Hutchinson, who was nominated for an Emmy for his work on a previous
docudrama, "The Tuskegee Airmen," made up fictional characters
for "Traffic," but based much of the material on actual events,
including an incident he had heard about from a journalist friend at
the BBC.
"Bodies had been washing up on the coast of Sicily for months, some
of them with bullet holes in the back," Mr. Hutchinson said. "The
story was, there had been a shipload of immigrants to be dropped off
somewhere in Western Europe. The captain was being paid in heroin,
something like a half a kilo a person. When the captain found some
stowaways, the people he was delivering them to didn't want to pay
any extra so the captain basically shot a half-dozen people and threw
them overboard."
Not that the creative team had to look far afield for examples of
human cargo. Mr. Hopkins filmed "Traffic" in British Columbia. "The
first day of shooting, a giant boat bringing refugees from Asia was
picked up in Vancouver," he recalled. "There were hundreds of people
who'd been in this hold for three weeks and hadn't been let out and
were really ill."
Ms. McCormack, who recently appeared in Mr. Soderbergh's HBO
series "K Street," observed fiction imitating fact on a daily basis
while portraying Carole McKay, the well-meaning middle-class mom who
is trying to keep her son from getting caught up in the urban drug
scene. "I've never seen anything like it," Ms. McCormack
said. "You'll be walking down the street in Vancouver and right there
in an alleyway you see someone shooting up or doing crack. The people
I spoke to in Vancouver were not shocked by that at all."
For Mr. Hutchinson, "Traffic" provided an opportunity to weave
seemingly unrelated predicaments into a broader tapestry of human
behavior. "In a larger sense, this is more than just a story about
drug taking," he said. "When you see some 17-year-old girl shooting
up in an alley, that is intimately connected with this vast 2,000-
year-old network, and at some point she's connected with immigrant
smuggling, she's connected with moving guns and explosives and other
nasty stuff around the world, because that habit pays for people who
are moving things other than drugs, sight unseen, and they are doing
this through the ongoing sale of heroin."
As Mr. Hutchinson tells the tale, "Traffic" courses to its somber
destination fueled not just by the apparently incessant appetite for
cheap highs but also by an equally powerful yearning for freedom. "I
thought of this story as a way to explore immigration as much as the
drug thing," he said. "I live in California and read all the time
about people being found dead in containers coming from south of the
border or being washed ashore on the Pacific Northwest. America is
still this extraordinary beacon when you consider the terrifying
things people will still do to get here."
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