WAVE in Louisville produced a documentary that took advantage of the hoopla surrounding the fictional movie, Cocaine Bear. In the incredible true story WAVE tells, the bear isn’t even the main character.
WAVE, Gray’s NBC affiliate in Louisville, Ky., released a documentary that tells the true story of a local legendary incident from the mid-1980s, part of which involves a bear eating cocaine.
WAVE’s documentary took advantage of the hoopla surrounding the fictional movie version, Cocaine Bear, made by Universal that was released this year.
But when Natalia Martinez, a WAVE investigative reporter and anchor, started digging into the true story six months ago, it wasn’t the bear who was the main character.
“This cop was smuggling drugs,” Martinez says. “This crazy story about this rogue officer who fell from the sky with millions of dollars in cocaine. The bear really didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Then Martinez found out a movie was coming out about a bear who finds and eats cocaine.
“It turned out to be the same bear,” Martinez says. “I had no idea at the time. I was just giggling over the fact that of course a bear would find cocaine.”
WAVE released its documentary, Blow: The True Story of Cocaine, a Bear, and a Crooked Kentucky Cop, in early March on the station’s connected apps, Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, WAVE’s news app and the station’s website, WAVE3.com, as well as YouTube.
To date, the documentary has 330,000 views on YouTube, says Kris Baete, WAVE’s marketing director.
Half of the views are from people who live in the Lexington area, he says.
Baete says the release of the movie version was the station’s chance to “tell an interesting and a relevant hyperlocal story that we felt our audience would be extremely interested in. It has paid off.”
Blow: The True Story of Cocaine, a Bear, and a Crooked Kentucky Cop, relies extensively on archival news footage from the 1980s when the story happened.
“It was on a Hail Mary that we found the archival footage,” Martinez says.
“We were lucky that all of that was already digitized,” Baete adds.
Baete says his marketing team worked with Martinez, the executive producer of the documentary.
“Jonny Trego, our director of photography, did an outstanding job with the visuals,” Baete says.
“Scott Isaacs helped elevate the documentary with his excellent animation skills, and of course, Natalia’s ability to tell the story in a uniquely compelling way really helped set this piece of work up for success.”
Baete says the magic happens when everyone can have a space to foster ideas.
“We all came together and made it our mission to do the best job that we possibly could and also get it done in a relevant, timely manner,” Baete says.
The time crunch was caused somewhat by the national release of Cocaine Bear, the movie.
“It was a perfect recipe,” to time the release of the documentary to the movie hype, Baete says. “It’s timely, and interesting not only in Lexington, but to everybody across the country.”
Baete says the documentary is starting to travel to Gray stations across the country, which is a teachable moment.
“A lot of stations are sitting on gold mines of archival content,” Baete says. “So being able to take a deeper dive into those types of stories, telling them in a different way and providing that to our audiences wherever they are is a great goal”
Telling old news in a different way might be the key.
Martinez says the feedback from viewers has been positive, some saying they were surprised it was a news product at all.
“That was very intentional on our part and Kris’s direction, which I thought was very smart,” Martinez says. “People didn’t expect that from a news organization.”
In addition to the archival footage, Martinez was able to track down the names of people who were mentioned in the stories and interview them.
Some turned out to be strange characters themselves, drawn into the shady life of a drug smuggler.
“I got to the lead investigator,” she says. “And then I tracked down the medical examiner who did the necropsy on the bear.”
Martinez says while the bear is an alluring part of the story, her research centered on the former paratrooper, lawyer, cop-turned-drug-smuggler who turned out to a larger-than-life character.
“I talked to people who actually knew him,” she says. “He was charming, he was very smart.”
Baete says in addition to promos telling people about the documentary streaming on all its platforms, it was plugged heavily during newscasts leading up to its launch.
“Our intention is to always create content and be able to meet our viewers and consumers where they are,” Baete says.
As soon as the station can find some time, the documentary is “readily available to fill out a one-hour slot on linear television,” he says.
Spoiler alert: The bear did indeed ingest about six grams of 98% pure cocaine. It died 10 minutes later.
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