Playboy Magazine South Africa November 2013 November 2013 | Page 39

that had been fighting the oppressive regime
of President Hugo Chávez, who had enlisted
murderers and thugs to enforce his will. She
had a flair for the dramatic, and he bought all
of it. He was moved by the imagery of these
kids fighting for freedom, and he also had a girl
to impress. Sensing an opportunity to play the
hero, Tim made a fateful promise to Alejandra:
He would make a film about the injustice in
Venezuela and tell the world. He booked a
ticket to leave in three months’ time and began
tutoring himself on Venezuelan politics.
Chávez was no run-of-the-mill caudillo (Latin
American military dictator); he was a supernova. Born in poverty to schoolteacher parents,
he got his start in the Venezuelan military and
began to fashion himself as the socialist reincarnation of Simón Bolívar, who had liberated
Venezuela from Spanish rule in the early 19th
century. Following a disastrous coup attempt
in 1992, Chávez was imprisoned yet somehow
managed to secure his release two years later,
eventually seizing power in 1999 in what he
called the Bolivarian Revolution. Aligning
himself closely with his friend Fidel Castro,
he emerged as a deceptively savvy anti-US
firebrand whose questionable mental stability
and rumored cocaine dependency never got
in the way of a camera. Every Sunday, he’d
hold court on his nationally televised talk show
Aló Presidente, which ran around six hours or
whenever he decided to end it.
Tim was hooked. He soon found out through
a friend that Alejandra was sleeping with another guy in Venezuela. It stung, but he could
handle it. He was losing track of the girl. Now
he had fallen in love with the country.

In 2010 Tim spent two weeks in Venezuela,
filming rallies organized by students who didn’t
quite live up to Alejandra’s billing. One lesson
his friend Aengus had taught him early on was
that a documentary filmmaker’s best friend was
a bullshit detector, and most of these well-off
kids weren’t passing the smell test. They were
great at organizing rallies, but all it took was a
glimpse of the chaotic shantytowns that dotted
the outskirts of Caracas to see there was more
to this story.
At a protest outside the Ecuadorian embassy,
Tim met a local legend named Humberto
Lopez who called himself Che and resembled
the real Che Guevara to an astonishing degree.
Che offered to take Tim for a walk through 23
de Enero, the most notorious barrio in Caracas
and Chávez’s spiritual base. The moment Tim
walked into the hillside shantytown built on
the ruins of a public housing project, he felt
the jolt of inspiration. This was a place where
Chávez was considered a god – a point driven
home by a massive Last Supper mural with
Hugo sitting alongside Jesus – but whose
inhabitants were living in squalor. How was
that possible?

Tim realized that in order to
make the film he wanted,
he would have to go into
the heart of darkness,
into the barrios. That
the disenfranchised
could be so in awe of
a leader as to make
him a deity – there
was the story. Tim
knew he’d need a
dramatic event to
frame his narrative. It
took two years to materialize. In September
2012, nine months after
I’d met him, he was back
in LA when he got a call from
his friend Ricardo Korda in Caracas. The presidential election was
a month away, and Chávez’s opponent,
Henrique Capriles Radonski, was gathering
steam. Chávez was politically vulnerable
and suffering from a dangerous cancer, and
everyone knew it. The Caracas streets buzzed
with demonstrations and the occasional violent
exchange between Chavistas and the opposition. Civil war was on the table.
“If you want to make this film, you need
to come down here right now,” said Korda,
who eventually became a co-producer on the
project. “You’re never going to have another
chance to do something like this. Everything is
on the verge of falling apart.”
Tim grabbed his equipment and took the first
flight out of LA.

In a city where using a cell phone on the
street even in a good neighborhood is considered reckless because of rampant street crime,
Tim spent most of the next seven months filming in the most dangerous barrios of Caracas,
places like 23 de Enero and Catia. He did so
with a $20,000 camera on his shoulder, and he
never had to defend himself.
“Take the South Bronx of the 1970s, transport
it to the age of crack in the 1980s, overpopulate it and throw in Fidel Castro during the
revolution, and that’s 23 de Enero,” says Jon
Lee Anderson, who in his 35-year career
as a foreign correspondent has filed stories
from the most harrowing war zones on the
planet. Anderson has written extensively about
Venezuela, including a portrait of present-day
Caracas for The New Yorker that appeared in
January, exploring the same barrios that Tim
was filming at the time. “In a place like Caracas, the abnormal is normal,” says Anderson.
“There were times when I was in the proximity
of people who would have had no compunction to shooting me. You adopt a certain body
language, you try to be inoffensive, you do
this, you do that, but you also have to push it.
I pushed it. Tim pushed it. It’s just what you
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NOEMBER 2013

have to do.”
To understand Venezuela, Tim needed to
learn the ways of the poorer Chavistas – how
they operated, the blurred lines between
political activism and criminality. The fact that
he didn’t speak much Spanish allowed him to
learn the language in the most organic way
possible, from his sources.
Tim soon discovered his affection for Venezuela was reciprocal. While gaining the trust
of hard men whose leader was constantly proselytizing about the gringo devils of the USA,
he found that Venezuelan girls couldn’t get
enough of him. He ended up choosing a guy
named Jhonny as the focus of his film. Jhonny
was a member of El Frente, one of 23 de Enero’s most powerful colectivos, the pro-Chávez
radicalized street gangs who handled law
enforcement in the police-free barrios. Jhonny
was also one of Caracas’s infamous motorizados, the independent motorcycle taxi drivers
who weave through the city’s gridlock at breakneck speeds. A girl Tim knew once told him a
story about being on the back of one of these
bikes when her motorizado calmly pulled
out a pistol and tapped it on the window of
the car next to him. The terrified driver gave
up his wallet and phone, and the motorizado
sped off. At the next stoplight, the terrified girl
3