My Favorite Florida: Billy Corben remembers a strange turnpike vending machine
Miami-based documentarian Billy Corben launched his career with the cult classic "Cocaine Cowboys" about Florida drug smugglers. He has since directed more than a dozen docs, including the acclaimed ESPN 30-for-30 "The U," about the swaggering 1980s University of Miami football program, "537 Votes," about the "too close to call" 2000 presidential election hinging on Florida and "God Forbid," chronicling a seven-year affair between a Miami pool boy and evangelical power couple Jerry and Becki Falwell Jr.
Corben's latest is an upcoming documentary about Paula Deen. He got on the phone with the Tampa Bay Times to share his favorite slices of Florida culture.
A roadside business-card machine: There's an old saying that L.A. is where you go when you want to be somebody, New York is where you go when you are somebody and Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else. In the late '90s, I was dating a woman who went to (the University of Central Florida) and I drove the turnpike between Miami and Orlando a lot. At one of the rest stops there was an arcade-style machine with a slide-out keyboard where you could design and print your own business cards and letterhead, right there, in the middle of the night. If you handed someone a business card in the '90s, that's who you were. The fact that you could just pull off the highway in Florida and reinvent yourself for a few bucks is the most Florida thing I can think of.
Watching space shuttle launches: I started my career as a child actor and got cast in the 1989 movie "Parenthood." We spent days shooting a 10th birthday party scene at a house on Lake Sue in Orlando. This was late 1988, and NASA had just restarted the shuttle program after the Challenger tragedy. We actually stopped shooting, and the whole cast and crew, including Steve Martin, gathered along the lake and looked due east toward Cape Canaveral to watch a space shuttle launch in the distance.
A Watergate burglar: There's always a Florida connection to the news. Woodward and Bernstein even followed the money to Florida. Our office is in Miami Beach, and every day I'd drive there and see Eugenio Rolando Martinez - one of the Watergate burglars - walking. Well into his 90s, he'd wake up, do his 10 push-ups and take this elderly power walk. (As a CIA operative), he'd made missions into Cuba and was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. I guess he was training for the day he'd go back. I interviewed him once in this room full of photos of young men, frozen in time, who'd lost their lives at the Bay of Pigs. ‘For what?' he asked me. ‘We lost Cuba.' Then he paused, got this really sly grin and said, ‘But we won Miami.' What an ending, I thought. That documentary never came out, but years later, when he died, that quote, ‘We lost Cuba, but we won Miami,' was the last line of his New York Times obituary.
If you have an idea for someone we should feature in My Favorite Florida, email cspata@tampabay.com.
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