The story of Griselda Blanco building Miami’s most profitable drug cartel in the seventies and eighties is well documented. It is also the subject of a television series called Griselda.

Starring Sofía Vergara in the title role, creators Eric Newman, Ingrid Escajeda, and Doug Miro discussed bringing her story to life with Creative Screenwriting Magazine. As is often the case with high profile figures, there is a mountain of information available to research. Although they had access to some people who were part of her circle, the creators chose not to solicit or accept any offers from them.

“Telling a story about someone like Griselda, who you can’t speak to, and even if you could, you probably wouldn’t want to,” says Newman. “It’s not the first time we’ve had a family member, whether it be Pablo Escobar’s son who reached out to us in the early days of Narcos, or Griselda Blanco’s son wanting to tell his version of the story. Not only is it a waste of time, because they see it through a certain lens, but it’s also potentially compromising when you get into their subjectivity. Once you choose not to tell a particular story, you’ve betrayed them in some way.”

For Miro, “We don’t know what Griselda was thinking, or what was said behind closed doors, so there are things that we needed to take liberty with. It’s based on a true story and there’s certainly a lot of truth to it.”

“We create television. We’re not necessarily in the business of writing an autobiography, so there are things we’re inspired by, and we have to link them together in a way that is entertaining and makes sense narratively.” 

Continues Miro, “The emotional truth is the most important thing for us, and sometimes when you tell a true story, people get caught up in the factual rather than the emotional truth.”

Griselda – A Story Of Wish Fulfilment

Griselda Blanco was a vicious drug cartel with few redeeming features, as are many gangsters. We asked the trio why audiences are attracted to such characters. “There’s part of us that wishes we could do that,” states Ingrid. “I think our minds go to some dark places, and I think especially for me as a woman, watching Griselda has a little bit of wish fulfilment in it.” Blanco committed many monstrous acts, but there are still aspects of them that aren’t fully known.

“Her story was written by men. So, I couldn’t help but wonder if some of these horrific truths may be fiction because the men that she was besting were feeling emasculated and the only way that they could not feel emasculated was to call her a monster,” explains Escajeda.

The wish fulfilment of the Great American Dream certainly comes into consideration in Griselda, albeit in a perverted way.

“We always see these stories as being about capitalism, aspiration, and individualism,” states Miro. “All these ideas are so essential to the foundations of American society and are at the base of aspiring to certain heights.”

We are constantly being bombarded with messages about being strong individuals and figuring out how to get  here. “Characters like Griselda, or any of the Narcos, are extreme versions of that. They’re the biggest, broadest versions.”

“They allow the viewer to walk in Griselda’s shoes and consider how far would they go to fulfil their dreams, to be an individual, to be exactly who they want to be, with no compunction, no guilt and no looking back over their shoulder. The flip side is that there’s always a cost.”

This sentiment is demonstrated in Episode 5 when a lavish party descends into chaos. “It’s the party you want to be at until you really don’t,” says Ingrid.

The Allure Of Gangster Stories

The American Gangster has been romanticized on our screens as a warped response to the American Dream being denied. “If you look at the incredibly rich tradition of gangster stories beginning with the Warner movies of the twenties, there is always an underbelly from which these people are forced to climb. It is often a sympathetic immigrant story, whether it’s Paul Muni, James Cagney, Marlon Brando or Al Pacino in The Godfather,” mentions Newman.

It’s a result of a system that’s failed certain members of the community, who’ve become criminals because they find it difficult to assimilate and find support in their new homes.

“There is also a fantasy to rejecting the boundaries, the laws of decorum, and the consequences of crime… I’m not going to settle for this. I want that. And invariably it all goes wrong. All these stories are tragedies.”

If you want a happy ending, that depends on where you stop your story ― Orson Welles

Characters like Griselda can’t stop at the top of their game, especially if they start at the bottom. Their addiction to power and success is unstoppable.

Adds Ingrid, “Griselda follows the humble beginnings, uncontrolled wealth, power, and then the final destruction. The story of kings and queens and civilizations that have fallen apart.”

Griselda Blanco begins her life in Miami as a sympathetic character fleeing an abusive relationship in Colombia. Some of her background was embellished in the series to encourage audiences to better identify with her.

“In Griselda’s case, it was the time and place that made her what she is,” continues Escajeda. “By virtue of her gender, she automatically became an underdog. No matter how tough you are as a woman, it gets to the point where you can be strong, you can power through, you can bust through these walls, but she’s driven by this innate knowing that she can do this better than men can.”

“It just gets to a point where it just starts to harden you and it makes you heavier. You hit a point where it just becomes second nature, so even if a door could be gently opened, you’re not going to do that. You’re going to pound right through it.”

Griselda is also a mother of two sons. She claims that everything she does is in service to her family. So when her husband Dario (Alberto Guerra) calls her a bad mother, it’s stings more than a bullet wound. This scene in Episode 5 was built around an actual exchange between the couple.

“In our version of Griselda, we have to show her whole family and gangster life and her emotional trajectory through them. You’ve got to be able to hold these two things in your mind at the same time. She’s ambitious. She’s violent. She wants to get what she needs to get for her family to survive. She’s a mother. She’s a friend. She has close friends and employees who she’s really attached to. She comes at it from a ruthless, tenacious, ‘I need what’s mine’ side,” states Doug.

The strain of being The Godmother and excessive drug use takes its toll on Griselda as she crumbles into paranoia and fear.

Adds Miro,”Having seen her unravel, having seen her face the fact that she’s now undone everything because of her own weaknesses, you hope she can maybe get past it, that maybe she can avoid the tragedy she’s facing, but you know she can’t.”

Griselda’s descent mirrors cocaine addiction. “In the beginning, it’s great. There’s a euphoric feeling and the audience goes on this ride. At some point, you’re alone in a motel somewhere with a with a gun in your mouth,” states Newman.

Building Female Characters

Eric Newman had been thinking about telling Griselda Blanca’s story for years. He initially met with Sofia Vergara in 2015 who wanted to tell it. “Doug and I went back a few years later and we began the process. We very much recognize that the one thing Doug and I very much lack was a female point of view. And as Ingrid said, the story had only been told by men, so we definitely needed her as a partner, someone who offered that female voice.”

Doug Miro and Eric Newman worked on Narcos together, “so Ingrid was a welcome addition to an established writing dynamic. Director Andrés Baiz was incredibly involved and we had a great team of writers. It was a great collaboration of people who understood exactly what we were making.”

Much like Griselda, June (Juliana Aidén Martinez) is a female character trying to function in a man’s world. Although she’s a foil for Griselda, they share common life experiences, albeit on opposite sides of the law.

“In another world, these women could have been best friends because they would have understood each other’s struggles.”

It was also essential for Ingrid to define Griselda’s POV in Episode 1. “Griselda had a terrible childhood between the abuse and sexual abuse and all the horrible things that she went through.” She didn’t want to excuse Griselda’s behavior, but rather to give it context. More importantly, Escojeda didn’t want to create pity for the character. “We let it happen, as opposed to commenting on it. We just wanted to see it.”

Shaping The Writer

We asked each writer what influences their work.

“I definitely gravitate towards crime,” declares Newman. “I’m a big believer that there are not good guys and bad guys, but they’re probably more accurately, bad guys and very bad guys. I also believe that nobody is born bad.”

“There is a character with some sense of a moral code that they stand by in the end.” Newman cites Jean-Pierre Melville and Bogart’s films, where the criminal adheres to that code.

“Then there are characters who will do whatever they have to do –  lie, cheat, and steal to bring you down. That’s my take on the drug war.”

Eric Newman was a producer before he started writing. After he saw Die Hard when he was seventeen, he was inspired to write.  “I realized for the first time that Die Hard is not about a guy in a building with a bunch of terrorists. It’s about a guy who, whose wife isn’t using his name anymore. He doesn’t fit into her life anymore. I understood the thematic architecture of what I think is a brilliant movie. Subtext has become text now.”

“I would never say that I have a social conscience, but I do have a conscience and I do believe that part of my job as a storyteller is to tell stories to seek to try to understand complicated people.”

“I’m attracted to genre material because of the way that it uses convention and then the opportunity to undo that convention. I love undoing convention in the context of stuff that’s very emotionally grounded in very extreme situations. I like to tell that story because it gives us humor and surprise and it puts us in the shoes of that character,” says Doug Miro. “It helps me to say something in the end because that character inevitably confronts the fact that whoever they are then is not necessarily who they end up being.”

“I’m very interested in stories about identity and about individualism and how our individualism coincides with our community and how as individuals we work within a community. And I think that where it comes from is I grew up in suburban Detroit. I think Detroit is a really authentic city that’s very cool, edgy and funky, but it also has a lot of issues and problems in its history. All of that made me interested in those things and how capitalism works in an urban environment.”

“I always hope there’s a sense of humor and fun in what I do. I really want people to be entertained. I agree that there are things we have to say, but there’s the sugar that makes it go down and makes you feel like you’re enjoying it. You see the characters’ intelligence and their emotions is  brought out by the circumstance.”

“I think authenticity is the number one word for me,” says Ingrid Escajeda. “I’ve always been someone who doesn’t particularly like small talk. I like to bond with people I like. I will ask them tell me about their family. I try to come through that noise. I love underdog stories for the same reason.”

“I love worlds that I’m not a part of, like the coal mining town, for example, going out to Harlem, Kentucky. I would talk to people and I would hear the stories of the coal miners. I would want to hear people the stories for people for whom life had been hard in a way that I couldn’t particularly understand.”

“In a way, that honors those people. It’s never exploitative, but shows the world who these people are and what drives them. I’ve always been a more muscular woman. And even in the softer stories, I still want to look for that gritty undercurrent.”

“The human story makes things a little bit more accessible whether it’s a mystery, a loss, or something that brings us back to understanding this character and seeing the world through those eyes.“