A promotional trailer for FX's newest drama, which will premiere on Wednesday, July 5, touts the show as telling the story of "how drugs started." But how confident can viewers be in the show's depiction of the origins of the crack epidemic? Is "Snowflake" based on a true story? Or is this just a fictional story that happens to take place in Los Angeles during an era of rising crack cocaine use?
"Snowfall" is produced by John Singleton, the first black filmmaker to be nominated for an Oscar for writing and directing his own film (1991's "Boyz N The Hood") . (At 24, he became and remains the youngest person ever to be nominated for Best Director.) The FX series isn't Singleton's first foray into television — he previously directed Fox's Empire , episodes of "FX's The." People v. O.J. Simpson and BET's Rebel — but this is the first time he's personally created a project for the small screen.
According to the show's official description, Snowfall is "a one-hour drama set in the early days of the cocaine epidemic and its ultimately sweeping impact on culture as we know it. The story follows a cast of characters on a violent collision course process, including: Franklin Saint, a young street entrepreneur seeking power; Gustavo Zapata, a Mexican wrestler embroiled in a power struggle within a crime family ; Teddy McDonald, a CIA agent fleeing a dark past who embarks on an off-the-books operation to raise funds for Nicaraguan rebels; and Lou, the calm daughter of a Mexican crime boss. Carla Villanueva.”
Singleton himself described the sprawling saga as a " ghetto power play, " he told The Guardian in a recent interview. Of course, there's one clear difference between his show and HBO's hit series: Snowfall takes place in our world, not a fictional fantasy realm. But that doesn't mean everything that happens in Snowfall is 100% accurate; in fact, on the question of whether the show is fact or fiction, the answer is... somewhere in between.
None of the characters in Snowfall appear to be based on real people. There is no evidence that there was ever a CIA agent named Teddy McDonald, or a Mexican wrestler named Gustavo Zapata, and Snowflake and other colorful characters. But Singleton uses original characters and storylines to reveal a very real series of events that took place in three locations in 1983: South Central East Los Angeles and the CIA.
Some of these events are all too familiar to the filmmakers themselves; Singleton, who grew up in South Central in the 1980s, said the Franklin Sage storyline was based in part on his own life. "It was kind of like my growing up years," he said of Franklin's coming-of-age story at the ATX Music Festival in June, according to The Hollywood Reporter . "Kids from the ghetto smoking pot, my friends in middle school and high school Smoking cocaine. But this was before the advent of drugs, so it was interesting to see how the drug transformed into how people in the 'ghetto' got it."
Singleton said he relied primarily on first-hand accounts and oral histories for the rest of the storyline, particularly about the CIA's involvement in the drug epidemic, about which there is little information in public records. "There are people living this life," the filmmaker told ATX. "We had to have people in the room who could talk about it. We hired consultants who understood every part of it deeply."
While Singleton himself serves as a "consultant" of sorts for the show's South Central portion, he also revealed his other sources during the show's Television Critics Association panel last January. According to Deadline's report on the panel, Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, a former drug addict and gang member, was consulted on the East L.A. storyline, while the CIA plot This was revealed through conversations with the same sources used by the producers of "The Americans " on the series. .
One thing all sources agree on is that the pandemic has caused widespread disruption. “People describe that period as like a bomb being dropped,” “ The Wire” writer Dave Andron, who was named showrunner on “Snowflake, ” said during the TCA panel. "If you went to South Central (before the drug epidemic), there were no bars on the windows; there were fewer bars," Singleton recalled. Then, "suddenly, people who didn't have money had access to capital. They didn't care if they brought death to their neighbors."
As "Snowfall" star Damson Idris said in the show's "First Look" promo (above): "We're not making a documentary, but you're going to be educated." For Singleton said it would be in his personal interest to make this particular story known to the public. “Drugs have destroyed a generation,” he lamented in the above-mentioned interview with The Guardian . "It gave me something to write about...but I had to survive it first."
