Is Hotel Cocaine the next Casablanca?
Genre: 1 Hour Drama
Premise: Pitched as “Casablanca in late 70s Miami,” Hotel Cocaine follows a hotel that acts as a neutral site where everyone on every side of the drug trade can co-exist… in theory at least.
About: Chris Brancato is a pretty big TV writer. He created Narcos, in addition to its Mexico spinoff. He wrote on Hannibal. He created Godfather of Harlem. But he’s got an uphill battle with this one. While the idea sounds cool, you may need a map from the 1970s to find it. That’s because it’ll stream on MGM+. I’m not sure I even know what that means, seeing as Amazon acquired MGM. I suppose we’ll find out when the show debuts. Or hear about it from the one person in our friend group who owns MGM+. The show will star Michael Chiklis.
Writer: Chris Brancato
Details: 56 pages
One of my favorite ever TV pilots was The Shield. I mean, can you beat that final scene? Michael Chiklis was huge after that show but the weird thing about Hollywood is that they only give you a couple of chances to capitalize on your buzz. And if you don’t pick the right projects, you become radioactive.
Chiklis followed the money and joined the one superhero franchise Hollywood can’t seem to figure out – Fantastic Four – and paid the price for it. His costume looked like something out of Sesame Street. And, all of a sudden, Chiklis wasn’t so hot anymore.
But Chiklis is getting another shot in the spotlight, in so much as MGM is able to afford the bulbs that power that spotlight. Will his new show be a banger?
It’s 1977 in Miami. Cocaine is becoming THE drug, to the point where people are building tiny submarines, basically coffins, that allow them to smuggle coke into Miami from South America.
We watch as one of these coffins pops up off the Miami coast and the two riders get out and wait for the boat that’s going to pick them up. Instead, a group of Haitian pirates show up and machine gun a bunch of holes into the smugglers.
Cut to The Mutiny Hotel, the Casablanca of Miami, where we hear our hotel manager, Cuban ex-pat, Roman Compte, explain the scene: “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.”
After dealing with a Hunter S. Thompson incident (yes, the author), Roman gets cornered by two DEA agents who explain that the aforementioned submarine massacre included one of their men working undercover. They want Roman to reconnect with his estranged brother, Nestor, who’s essentially this story’s version of Scarface. Nestor is the one who owned the sub.
The last person Roman wants to deal with is his bloodthirsty crazy brother. But after the DEA threatens to send him back to Cuba, where he’ll be shot dead for betraying Castro, he doesn’t have a choice.
Nestor is not happy to see his sibling but Nestor also realizes the advantages of having an inside man at the most desirable hotel in town. Once Roman is in with Nestor, the DEA wants him to tell them when and where Nestor is going to deal with the Haitians who killed his submarine crew. They want to get there first and arrest Nestor. But when Nestor sniffs out his brother’s betrayal, he changes the meet-up location, and everything falls apart for both the DEA and Roman.
This was a really good pilot.
It gave me some Taylor Sheridan vibes. Paramount’s probably pissed they didn’t snatch this up.
When it comes to TV shows, you’re trying to find scenarios that create a never-ending series of problems that need to be solved by your protagonist. This is why cop shows are so reliable. A cop always has another problem to solve. As soon as one murder is over, another one happens in the next neighborhood.
Same thing here. The series takes place in a hotel. Even at a normal hotel, you’ve got a new problem every 30 minutes. But imagine if you took a normal hotel and turned it into one of the most high profile hotels in the world where criminals, cops, DEA, celebrities, FBI, all hung out.
Now, you’re going to have a new problem every minute. And these problems are going to be much higher grade than the ones at your average hotel. For example, you’ll have your fair share of dead bodies in rooms. That’s why this is such a good idea for a show. Roman is always going to have a problem to solve.
Contrast this with The Mandalorian, a show that’s starting to fall apart narratively. They don’t have built in problems for that show. This forces the writers to artificially come up with problems every week. That never works as well as when the problems are organic to the concept.
That’s why you got that weird episode a couple of weeks ago where the Mandalorian and Lady Mandalorian go to some planet run by Jack Black and Lizzo to solve a robot uprising. Was there a problem that needed to be solved? Yes. But the audience didn’t know about this planet until two minutes so they don’t care. That’s what happens when your problems don’t organically extend from the concept.
What’s great about Hotel Cocaine is that the writer, Chris Brancato, didn’t stop there. He turbocharged his idea by placing Roman in a very precarious position. Roman is being controlled both by the DEA, who want an inside man into Nestor’s operation, and Nestor, who wants an inside man into the DEA’s operation. This forces Roman to walk the thinnest tightrope in Miami.
This is how you write, guys. It’s not hard when you think about it.
a. Come up with a concept that generates problems.
b. Place the story somewhere where those problems feel big, so the stakes are high.
c. Make things as difficult as possible on your protagonist.
That simple formula is what makes this pilot work.
I do have a beef, though. There’s a big scene late in the pilot where Nestor needs to know if he can trust Roman. So he calls him over then takes him into some back room. Sitting in the back room is a guy who’s tied up. Nestor says this guy deceived him. And Nestor will work with Roman if Roman kills him right here and now. He gives Roman the gun and Roman is tasked with a difficult decision. Kill or don’t kill?
My beef?
I’ve seen this scene a million times before.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a compelling scenario. And it usually works. But if you’re not going to do anything new with it, don’t write it. Cause once you give the audience something they’ve seen a ton of times before, you lose a little piece of them. Cause they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve been to this house before. I’ve seen this room.’ You’ve lost a little bit of that magical storytelling hold you have on the reader (or viewer). And if you do that a few more times in your script, you lose the reader altogether.
I’ll tell you how to fix that scene in the What I Learned section. But that was the only real blip on the radar here. I suspect this is going to be a really good show. Assuming, of course, that Roman can solve the hotel’s biggest problem of all – how to relocate to a streamer that viewers have access to.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: All right, so let’s say you want to write a “Shoot this guy so I can trust you” scene. You’ve heard the Scriptshadow criticism ringing in your ear imploring you to find a unique way into the scene. Yet, no matter how hard you try, you can’t come up with a fresh angle. Here’s what you do, instead: Make the person he has to kill someone we’ve set up earlier in the script as a character he has a connection with. That way, your protagonist isn’t just shooting anyone. It’s personal. They know, and are maybe even close, to this person. That scenario works 99.9% of the time, even though we’ve seen it before. There’s something about seeing our protagonist tasked with killing someone they know that’s riveting and overrides any ‘cliche’ criticisms.
