LA SCREENINGS: C21’s sister publication Drama Quarterly picks out six of the biggest new dramas being shopped by the independents at the Fairmont Century Plaza this week and catches up with the creators and exec producers behind the shows.
With the independents showcasing their wares this week at the Fairmont Century Plaza, ahead of the major Hollywood studios starting at the weekend, there’s plenty of new drama for international buyers to peruse between the serious business of cocktail parties and poolside catch-ups.
C21’s Drama Quarterly has caught up with the showrunners and execs behind six of the best new dramas on offer from the independents in LA this week, sharing their thoughts on their shows and offering insights into what buyers can expect. Click through for the full interviews on the Drama Quarterly site here.
Hotel Cocaine
Chris Brancato, showrunner
“We had finished the scripts prior to shooting and prior to the writers’ strike, so we were able to go shoot. Then, of course, when the actors struck, we had to stop. And I must say, probably in retrospect, that while it was frustrating to be in the middle and have to take a pause, once the writers’ strike ended it allowed us to go back and reread the last four scripts and make improvements. So in retrospect, it will have turned out to be a good thing in terms of the show quality because we’ve improved the last couple of scripts. But yes, it’s been strange.
“The tagline of Hotel Cocaine is ‘Pleasure has a price.’ 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. Further to that, it is to understand that for every line of cocaine that’s done in a pleasure setting, there’s actually 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.”
“I believe the show is a little bit of a unicorn in this sense. We do the standard stuff you would do in a drug show, where people are fighting for dominance and there’s violence and tension. We also have the owner of the hotel [Mark Feuerstein’s Burton Greenberg], who exemplifies the ‘me decade,’ this relentless self-absorption, and that adds a comedic element to the show. And then, through Roman, there’s a familial element. I hope those different tones work together in the same hour, because you don’t often see that blend of tones attempted.”
Hotel Cocaine (8×60’) is produced for MGM+ by MGM Television and MGM+ Studios and is distributed by Amazon MGM Studios. For the full article on DQ, click here.
This Town
Katie McAleese, executive producer
“You never quite know what a show is going to be while you’re making it. This show, in many ways, is quite unconventional. There are no murders, no big mystery engine. It’s talking about a lot of different things, but the ideas at the centre of it are about how you live and about creativity. Everybody involved in the making of it believed in what the show was trying to do, but you don’t really know what it’s going to be until it’s done and it’s out there in the world. It’s a show that is on its own terms, and there’s a lot of integrity in the way the story is told.
“The broad area of the storyline is something we took to [writer] Steven Knight; doing something set in this place, at this moment, when all this music was happening. In the most brilliant way, Steven just connected with that and saw how it resonated with his own life and experience. He talks about the fact that if Peaky Blinders was the stories his grandparents told him, then This Town is the stories he grew up with. He describes it as a love letter to Birmingham and Coventry, and that comes through in the scripts. He’s really put himself into it and found a way of talking about things like storytelling and creativity and who that belongs to. It feels like a really personal show for him.”
This Town (6×60’) is produced for BBC One by Kudos, Nebulastar and Mercury Studios, and is distributed by Banijay Rights. For the full article on DQ, click here.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Claire Mundell, creative director and exec producer
“I’m very drawn to stories that are based on real life, and it just struck us as such an extraordinary love story. I had never seen a love story told in a notorious, murderous death camp such as Auschwitz. It was so inspiring that two people could survive a place like that when so many others didn’t, but also that they could find each other and they could fall in love. In fact, they became each other’s survival, and that has inherent drama in it.
“But it’s also a specific story of trauma, of one man’s experience of what it was like to be there and what it took him to survive what he, Gita and so many others had to endure. The book continues to capture people’s hearts and inspire people, and great drama does that. It was a daunting challenge, but I like a challenge.”
“Hopefully people will be moved by the emotion of it. They’ll be moved by two people who found each other and who had to endure what they did, as so many other people did and so many people did not, because of how many perished there,” she says. “But I hope the audience will see the perils of intolerance and antisemitism and choose tolerance and love instead of hate. That’s partly why the book is so successful. There’s a very pure message at its heart, which is inspiring on so many levels.”
The Tattooist of Auschwitz (6×60’) is produced for Sky, Peacock and Stan by Synchronicity Films and Sky Studios, with NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution and All3Media International handling international sales. For the full article on DQ, click here.
Swift Street
Tig Terera, series creator
“We presented it to our commissioner on the Friday and she said yes on the Monday. But she was like, ‘I want eight episodes.’ So there was one more round of development. But since the beginning, the start and end haven’t changed, so we were just getting more into who our characters are and what our world is, instead of just chucking more plot in.
“The development process was just under three years. That ended up being my film school. Then, while I was writing Swift Street, I released [2021 short film] Tinashé because I really wanted to direct this but the longest thing I’d done at that point was five minutes. I knew I could carry a story, but I had to prove I could. Tinashé was an exercise and ended up becoming a lot more than that.
“My life ambition was to be a bar manager. Now, I’m not pouring any more pints. If you don’t grow up in an environment where the arts are even looked at as a possibility, it’s hard to think of them as one. That’s changing more and more every single day. But to this day, in the country I live in, Australia, I could probably count on one hand the number of African-Australian longform filmmakers.”
Swift Street (8×60’) is produced for Australia’s SBS by Magpie Pictures and is distributed by Fifth Season. For the full article on DQ, click here.
Living on a Razor’s Edge
Alex Medeiros, series head writer
“Betinho had a very eventful life and one thing we tried to do is show the backstage of politics. He was behind the scenes of a lot of public events that happened in Brazil. When Brazil had the military coup in 1964, Betinho was on the wanted list of the military police, so he’s always been around very big national events. The hardest thing was what to leave out.
“It’s very specifically Brazilian; it has a very specific political context and a very specific Brazilian personality, but Betinho was dealing with universal issues: freedom and social challenges other countries will also face. When people found out we were doing the show, a lot of people from the industry would call us up and say, ‘I want to be a part of the show. It doesn’t matter how.’ That actually led us to have the most amazing crew.
“Betinho has this institute, Action for Citizenship, and for the last 30 years they have done a campaign called Christmas Without Hunger, a network trying to engage people to donate food for people who need it. This year we had the biggest campaign ever, and now we have a statue of Betinho in Rio. To me, the real-life impact is something I had never experienced before, and that is really rewarding.”
Living on a Razor’s Edge (6×60’) is a biopic produced for Brazil’s Globoplay by AfroReggae Audiovisual and Formata Produções e Conteúdo, and is distributed internationally by Globo. For the full article on DQ, click here.
The Responder
Tony Schumacher, series creator and writer
“Everyone on the show is just trying to be a better human being. I love shows like Succession where people revel in being evil, but I’m always interested in people who are just trying to be better. I love having inner demons and trying to overcome them – and everyone on this show is trying to do that.
“You want it to be a lot of love, a lot of laughing, betrayal and, hopefully, people getting better, and there are different ways of being better. They don’t just all start collecting dog food for charity. There are different ways to improve your situation.
“If I thought of writing a [traditional] cop show, what’s the point of leaving the police? I may as well have just stayed if I was going to do that. It’s easier to just write about people. I’m not interested in cops, bin men or taxi drivers. I’m interested in people. That’s all I want to write about, so it’s the people I’m writing about. It just so happens one’s a drug dealer and one’s a cop. That’s all that matters.
The Responder is produced for BBC One by Dancing Ledge Productions and is distributed by Fremantle. For the full article on DQ, click here.
