HBO
On Sept. 18, 1977, Hazen, Arkansas’s Gary Betzner took a daytime drive along with his spouse and daughter in his El Camino to a dairy bar. Afterwards, he stopped on a bridge on account of automotive hassle, opened the hood to examine on the issue, after which all of the sudden and inexplicably dove into the White River. This despatched his spouse Sally into hysterics, and forged a right away and horrible pall over his household, which—like everybody else of their small, rural southern city—was suffering from a single, persistent query: why?
[Spoilers follow]
For a solution to that question, administrators Phil Lott and Ari Mark (and government producer Adam McKay) flip to the one one who can greatest make clear this seemingly tragic occasion: Gary himself, who winds up being not solely the topic of their three-part HBO docuseries The Invisible Pilot (April 4), however its main narrator. Sitting for prolonged chats within the current in addition to at common intervals over the previous decade (by way of older footage shot by Craig Hodges, a good friend of Gary’s son Travis), Gary proves a resurrected ghost on the outset of this newest true-crime affair. The truth that he didn’t commit suicide again in 1977, nevertheless, is simply the primary of many bombshells delivered by Lott and Mark’s enterprise, which begins with a bang earlier than really fizzling out as soon as it trades entertainingly wacko criminality for sober political intrigue.
Gary rose to native renown as an ace crop duster with unparalleled piloting abilities; he was a daredevil who couldn’t resist performing flips, flying below bridges, and skimming his craft’s tires alongside the water. Sally met Gary on July 20, 1969, the evening of the moon touchdown, and she or he describes it as a universe-shaking second—a notion visualized by Lott and Mark by amusingly edited clips of the astronauts’ outer-space feat. Gary already had a spouse, however as soon as his daughter Polly was born, he bought a divorce and married Sally, with whom he had two extra youngsters, Travis and Sara Lee. He established—after which bought—the Betzner Flying Service, transferring his clan to Alaska for a pipeline alternative that didn’t pan out. With few prospects and even much less money, Gary turned to a different supply of earnings: utilizing his planes to smuggle marijuana.
Gary Betzner along with his household in 1974
HBO
A subsequent bout of painful gout led Gary to an unlikely remedy: cocaine, a narcotic that he admits was used each to alleviate his ailment and for leisure functions. When he was busted in a large 1977 Miami DEA sting, although, Gary confronted 20 years behind bars. Fairly than try this stint, he determined to stage his loss of life and go on the run. To ensure that this ruse went in response to plan, he and Sally took a three-month self-hypnosis course so as to program Sally into believing the lie that Gary was actually useless. Someway, this madness labored and Gary efficiently went on the lam, throughout which period he turned a drug-advocating hippie named Lucas Noel Concord who noticed nothing unsuitable with both consuming or transporting unlawful substances. Earlier than lengthy, he was revealing his still-breathing existence to a shocked Travis and Sara Lee in Hawaii (the place all of them lived as nudists), and he finally discovered himself employed as a smuggler for George Morales, a Miami speedboat racer with deep ties to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel in Colombia.
If Morales sounds acquainted to true-crime aficionados, that’s as a result of he was prominently featured in Billy Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami, an analogous story of daring criminals residing the excessive life whereas evading the legislation. But what begins as a loopy saga about an outlaw flipping the fowl to authorities – each figuratively and, on a couple of event, actually – quickly takes a drastic flip as soon as Gary begins flying cocaine for his Colombian bosses, after which army cargo for people straight linked to the CIA. It’s at that time that The Invisible Pilot turns into not merely a stand-alone story about defiant wrongdoing, however a chunk of the Iran-Contra puzzle, since Gary was now transporting weapons to the Contras, and returning to U.S. shores with kilos of cocaine sought by U.S. authorities officers.
A prolonged jail sentence and cooperation with John Kerry’s subcommittee investigation into Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal ensued, though The Invisible Pilot can’t make any of this later motion hum with electrical energy; regardless of first-person accounts from Gary, interviews with varied different pertinent people, and appreciable archival footage, the docuseries loses its momentum the extra it shifts its gaze from Gary’s outrageous conduct to the president’s headline-making mess. Gary will get virtually wholly misplaced within the shuffle for a stretch of the third and last episode, and that does a lot to sabotage the vitality of the complete manufacturing. Equally unfulfilling are these passages regarding Travis, Sara Lee and Polly, whose mixed-up feelings about their dad—a mixture of anger, resentment, and love—by no means come into sharp focus, irrespective of their candid commentary concerning the ups and downs of residing with a fugitive father.
The most important downside to The Invisible Pilot, nevertheless, is that it by no means is aware of view Gary. Lott and Mark are neither taken with reveling in his exploits nor in casting a crucial eye at his egocentric conduct and rebellious ethos; as a substitute, the proceedings exude a tepid empathy towards him. Sadly, Gary himself does a lot to frustrate any compassionate consideration of his plight, what with him touting medication as a way of magical liberation, smuggling as “a holy factor” and “a service to mankind,” and the murderous Escobar as “a legend, and rightly so. I'd hope that his praises, not solely as a smuggler however as a human being, could be sung.” Removed from merely a go-with-the-flow counterculture rabble-rouser who thought everybody must be allowed to smoke some weed, Gary proves a narcissist filled with hole and amoral self-justifications.
Thus, by the point Gary will get round to railing towards his unjust therapy by the hands of the CIA—who used him for his or her operation after which left him to rot in jail—any minor wellspring of sympathy has lengthy since run dry. Whereas a shrewder docuseries may need had a extra acute viewpoint about Gary, what emerges here's a combination of astonishment and admiration that comes throughout as largely unjustified.