Chris Brancato’s moves on from Narcos to make Hotel Cocaine
Chris Brancato’s Hotel Cocaine traces the rise and fall of charismatic gangsters and is promoted with a line that says it all: ‘There’s No Business Like Blow Business’.
‘The tagline of Hotel Cocaine is ‘Pleasure has a price’,” the celebrated Mexican cinematographer Gullermo Navarro, who also directs this new series set in the 1970s from MGM+, tells Drama Quarterly.
“The goal here is, number one, to create something very entertaining for the viewer and, number two, to allow the show to explore themes about legality and the immigrant experience in America.”
He points out that for every line of cocaine that’s done in a pleasure setting, there’s a trail of dead bodies that leads all the way back to South America. “Nobody considers that when they’re sitting there at a table in a club using cocaine, and maybe they should. Maybe if they did consider that, they’d be less likely to use it. I always think about the ramifications of presenting drug use.”
The series was conceived and is written by prolific US screenwriter and producer Chris Brancato whose credits include X-Files, Law And Order: Criminal Intent, Hannibal, and Beverly Hills 90210. But more recently he co-created Netflix’s Narcos, Narcos: Mexico and MGM+’s Godfather of Harlem.
Promoted with a line that says it all: “There’s No Business Like Blow Business”, Narcos was scintillating, full of action movie fireworks, set-piece escapes and gunfights, along with a persuasive message: the drug policy pursued so vigorously by the US government over the past 30 years just has not worked.
And Godfather of Harlem was also cinematically beguiling, a multi-layered gangster story, a turf war narrative played out against New York in turmoil, righteously entangled with the various sociopolitical skirmishes of the period.
His new series is another biting tale of avarice and violence tracing the rise and fall of charismatic gangsters, nicknamed by its creator as “Casablanca on cocaine”.
In the Michael Curtiz movie, much of the action occurred in Rick’s Café, a haven for refugees escaping Europe; in Brancato’s series it’s the nightclub which was the gaudy jewel of the real and notorious 138-room Mutiny Hotel in Miami.
It’s the hangout for Cubans who have escaped Castro’s Cuba, and South American drug dealers “who slid into the banquettes and hid guns in their baskets of dinner rolls,” as Esquire magazine reported in a 2014 feature story. But it is also where the Latin Americans hung out along with CIA and FBI agents, hit men, rich kids, famous rock stars and American politicians.
Then there’s the Mutiny Girls, the in-house burlesque showgirl dance group, also the club’s hostesses, available to host guests upstairs. “Big smiles mean big tips,” is their working mantra, though in the series they never seem to stop dancing, shakin’ their booty in Navarro’s disco inferno. Upstairs, there were themed fantasy suites with names like Gypsy Caravan, Hot Fudge, the Bordello and Outer Space, where marathon orgies were Olympian in execution, according to books about the hotel.
“The whole place made Studio 54 look like a picnic,” says its manager, proud Cuban refugee Roman Compte, played with cool insouciance by Danny Pino from Law & Order: SVU, who appears to be the narrator from the start. (Brancato is fond of a wryly ironic interior monologue as a framing device.)
“This show has become about many things”, the writer says. “It’s about immigration to this country and trying to achieve the American dream. It’s also about a man caught in a perilous moral quandary of trying to save his daughter at the risk of betraying his brother from whom he’s estranged.”
This is Compte, who runs the lavish drug-fuelled establishment owned by Burton Greenberg (Mark Feuerstein); his brother is Nestor Cabal, who happens to be the main cocaine trafficker in Miami, played with the right sense of moral turpitude by Yul Vasquez.
He has the ruthless cynic’s certain confidence in the corruptibility of justice and is surrounded by thick-torsoed, heavily armed Cuban refugees, all frayed at the edges. It turns out a violent coke heist that begins the story was carried out by ruthless, heavily armed Haitian crazos and Nestor wants revenge.
The lives of the brothers intersect with a driven DEA agent called Zulio, The Shield’s Michael Chiklis in another complex character role, this time with a neat cop’s moustache – nicknamed “el ratón de Zulio” because it resembles a mouse – and a nifty pork pie hat. He might just be as morally corrupt as the drug runners he’s after.
He threatens the seemingly upstanding Compte that unless he assists in compromising his brother, he will use his powers to separate him from his daughter Valeria (Corina Bradley).
This leads to a series of inevitable double crosses and deadly confrontations, hardly all that novel for the drug wars genre, but impressively directed by Navarro, a born action mechanic. The set pieces are exciting and convincing, as you would expect in a Brancato show, as the inevitable drug war threatens Compte and his family. It’s all set up as a rather violent family melodrama framing the drug story with a touch of the soap-opera style narrative and dysfunctional family dynamics typical of traditional telenovela.
The idea for the series came to Brancato, hardly a stranger working on this kind of violent caper, when he was involved with shooting Narcos. Actor Maurice Compte mentioned to the showrunner that his father had been the manager of the real-life Mutiny Club. Years later the actor sent Brancato notes on his father’s life there. Intrigued now by the idea – Pino even wears a “Caridad del Cobre” virgin medallion around his neck that serves as a spiritual link to the real Roman Compte – he added some fictional characters to the outline, including the drug dealing older brother, and the stoic drugs agent on his tail. “So with the fictional construct and using his father as inspiration, I mentioned it to Michael Wright, the president of MGM+. I just said, ‘This is Casablanca on cocaine’ and he said, ‘OK, I’ll buy it’.”
And he chose to film in Santo Domingo due to its resemblance to Miami during that era: “I think it creates a validity to all the different characterisations. It’s honest to the historical background of the fictional characters we’ve created.”
It all begins with the voiceover monologue from Compte, while the hijack takes place in the seas off Miami – with opening credits, music and theme song by rapper Swizz Beatz. “Florida has always been a smuggler’s paradise; the marijuana routes became cocaine routes,” Compte tells us, as a midget submarine carrying bales of coke pops up in the dark waters to wait for a small boat to pick them up. But the gleeful bunch of Haitian pirates arrive and machine gun the smugglers. It’s a sequence with great dramatic energy.
Compte then takes us a little manically to the garish, pulsating Mutiny Hotel, “the hottest pleasure palace in Miami”, explaining the context for his story. “The year was 1977 and the cocaine wars of Miami stop at our entrance. We were Switzerland, neutral territory, where drug dealers sent drinks over to DEA agents and avoided killing each other because everyone was having too much fun.”
The tone changes and suddenly we are in broad comedy territory when we meet Feuerstein’s uncorked Greenberg head on, a kind of bizarre jester determined to create good times for everybody he encounters. It’s a kind of parody of the era’s excesses – with its overheated, desperately sexualised sense of ruined innocence.
He’s grappling with none other than gonzo journalist legend Hunter S. Thompson (John Ventimiglia), looking for sympathetic vibrations – he wants to adopt Hunter’s mantra, “Too weird to live, too rare to die” – but Hunter’s after dirt on Greenberg’s stuffy Republican family members, not nose candy. The fact that the coked-out Greenberg forged their names when purchasing his special hotel could bring trouble if it gets into Rolling Stone.
And for a while we are landed in a tedious study of his coke-induced vulgarity, a misjudged satire on the creative maelstrom of drugs, uncorked sexual experimentation and what Thompson called the “long fine flash” of his generation.
These scenes play out like demented sketches from an early Saturday Night Live show, supposedly leavening the darkness of what Brancato calls the “meat and potatoes drug show” by bringing “a sense of humour” to what otherwise could be “a kind of dark and very dreary subject matter.”
It just doesn’t work and soon, thank goodness, Chiklis enters the scene and we’re back to the pulp, and evocation of the world of cocaine merchants. There’s a lot to like if you’re a fan of drug dramas such as Narcos or the vibrant Griselda, even if it’s a series that trips sometimes abruptly through different styles and cinematic moods.
Pino is excellent as Roman as he embarks on his morally problematic journey and has great chemistry with Vasquez’s Nestor.
And it’s great to see The Shield’s Chiklis again as a cop playing in a tough, morally ambiguous world in which the line between good and bad is crossed every day.
Hotel Cocaine, streaming on Stan.
