'Hotel Cocaine' on MGM+ gives viewers disco, drama and plenty of blow in Miami in the late '70s
The lapels are wide, “Disco Inferno” is blasting and lines and lines of nose candy are... 'Hotel Cocaine Hotel, set in 1978, is set in Miami and follows the story of the general manager, Roman Compte, played by Danny Pino, a Cuban expatriate who serves as the hotel’s general manager. He becomes embroiled in a life of crime as he tries to protect his daughter from unsavory federal agents and his estranged brother, a mobster. The series is heavily influenced by music from the era, including Latin sounds and pop classics like Eric Clapton's "Cocaine." The show is set to be shown on MGM+ and aims to understand what is currently being analyzed as Americans are trying to understand in the '70s and '80s.
Published : 10 months ago by AP Entertainment Writer, By MARK KENNEDY in Entertainment
“Cocaine Hotel,” set in 1978, centers on the hotel’s general manager, Roman Compte (played by Danny Pino), a Cuban expatriate who caters to high-end hotel patrons. He slowly gets sucked into a life of crime trying to protect his daughter from unsavory federal agents on one side, and his equally unsavory estranged brother, a mobster, on the other.
“This show has become about many things. 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.”
Brancato says he created a careful balance between a “meat and potatoes drug show” and comedy. “I wanted there to be a sense of humor to what is otherwise could be a kind of dark and very dreary subject matter,” he says.
The series is enlivened by music from the era, including Latin sounds and pop classics, like Eric Clapton's “Cocaine.” Brancato managed to get the rights to use Dire Straits “Sultans of Swing” at a discount because singer-guitarist Mark Knopfler was a fan of “Narcos.”
“You not only had the cocaine trade flowing through the Mutiny. But you had lawyers, money launderers and intelligence officers. All those roads converged in that little place,” says Vazquez, whose sister partied at the nightclub in her youth.
“For me, it’s not interesting to do these crime shows unless you can find some interesting new angles. So, for example, ‘Godfather of Harlem’ is the collision of organized crime and civil rights, two things that actually don’t really belong in the same sense.”
“It’s just filled with all kinds of buttons," says Vazquez, whose brother was a political prisoner in Cuba. "I want to say it’s filled with memories, but it’s more than memories. It’s proper buttons. I jumped at wanting to do this.”
“We do these drugs, and we snort the cocaine, and we give no thought whatsoever to the fact that every line of cocaine has three dead bodies behind trailing back to South America,” he says.
"It sets up I think a lot of what we hope this show is going to be in terms of understanding maybe what we’re going through today as Americans — through the microscope of being able to analyze what happened in the ‘70s and ’80s," says Pino.
Topics: Cocaine, Drug Trafficking, Social-ESG