Mountains in Miami? What Netflix series ‘Griselda’ got right or wrong about local scenes

Cocaine “godmother” Griselda Blanco’s life story and the transformation of Sofia Vergara into a dramatic actress in the title role of “Griselda” on Netflix has thrust Miami back into the national spotlight. It’s as if it were 1984 “Miami Vice” all over again.

“Miami Vice” was filmed in town and transformed a city. “Griselda” producers filmed in California and transformed L.A. into the 305.

But there’s been some local backlash with the visual re-creation of Miami.

Let’s take you to the scene:

Slaughter at Dadeland Mall

Dadeland Mall is in episode four of the six-part streaming series. Dadeland was the scene of a shooting known as The Dadeland Massacre in which a drug dealer and his bodyguard, who were customers inside a mall Crown Liquors store, were sprayed with bullets by rival “cocaine cowboys.” The assassins were allegedly set in motion by Blanco.

On July 11, 1979, when Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” over the radio airwaves and pounding inside The Mutiny Hotel’s disco in the infamous Coconut Grove hot spot, the three gunmen spilled out of an ordinary-looking white Ford parcel delivery truck with stenciled lettering on its sides marked “Happy Time Party Supply” at Dadeland Mall in Kendall.

But the then-$10,000 vehicle, purchased with cash a month earlier at Hollywood Ford, was equipped into a “war wagon,” with reinforced steel and an arsenal of automatic weapons, when it pulled into the Dadeland parking lot in front of the attached stores, a Crown Liquors and a Cozzoli’s Pizzeria.

Two Crown employees were wounded in the attack. The two targets were killed. Police said that at least 60 bullets peppered the store and pierced cars in the adjoining parking lot. The “war wagon” was found hours later, abandoned less than a mile away on a Kendall street.

At the Miami airport

Viewers also see a young “La Madrina” arriving at Miami International Airport. She walks upstairs across the traffic lanes near the garages as “Griselda” episode two opens. But the screen betrays the locale. The pockmarked MIA asphalt looks right, like any old airport, actually. But that’s not Miami lighting the afternoon sky.

And those skinny palm trees in the distance look more like the California variety.

And the hills in the horizon? We’re flat, unless you count the Rickenbacker Causeway as a hill.

And of course, scenes in “Griselda” feature scores of people marinating their noses in cocaine in the open inside The Mutiny along to a Summer “Hot Stuff” soundtrack.

READ MORE: Griselda Blanco did that? Seven things to know about Miami’s ‘godmother of cocaine’

‘Not shot in Miami’

While Vergara earns raves for her first dramatic role as Blanco, the Colombian cocaine trade pioneer who earned the “godmother” nickname for her bloody reign on the streets of Miami in the 1970s and ‘80s as a drug trafficker, there are gripes from Miami people.

READ MORE: Lawmakers should bring back incentives to bring film industry back to Florida | Opinion

“Mountains of Doral in the background,” quipped a Reddit user on a thread titled “’Griselda’ is not shot in Miami.”

“I believe as a true Floridian you’ll notice the difference based on infrastructure and sunlight,” another Reddit user commented.

“They didn’t even bother to do an external shot of The Mutiny! It was obviously shot in CA! How sad,” opined Coconut Grove’s Bryn Ingram on a Facebook post.

Alex Villoch, former Miami Herald publisher and now CEO with the Baptist Health Foundation, would know a thing or two about the location and aftermath of the July 11, 1979, submachine gun attack at Dadeland Mall inside Crown Liquor Store and next door to the long-gone Cozzoli’s.

“I was actually there at Dadeland that day,” Villoch posted on Facebook. “I used to get my haircut at Mr. John’s, which was right next to these two stores. Got there to find the area blocked off and all the police there and turning everyone away.”

Villoch also reflected on how it was a time of “disconnect.” There was no social media or 24/7 news reports to warn people away from sudden crime scenes at public places like Dadeland Mall at the dawn of the 1980s or for years to come. Customers confronted with crime tape and officers had to wait for the news to break on television or in the newspaper the next day, she said.

READ MORE: Bullets once flew at Dadeland Mall in a deadly shootout. The Cocaine Cowboys were here

Miami looks different now

The lack of state tax incentives since 2016 makes filming in Florida costly. Even if “Griselda” had filmed in Miami, the trees and lighting would have been genuine but the gritty flavor of late-1970s through mid-1980s Miami could not have been captured by cameras.

That Miami doesn’t exist anymore. The Crown-Cozzoli’s storefronts at Dadeland Mall have been gone for decades. The mall has been expanded and redesigned over the last 45 years since Blanco terrorized the community.

Producers replicated the Crown Liquors and Cozzoli’s storefront logos, more or less accurately. But the stores’ re-created facades and the insertion of a “Dadeland Mall” sign facing Kendall Drive on screen to indicate the location made Dadeland look like a mere strip mall in the Netflix production. The mall execution scene in “Griselda” also featured original news footage from the day. Sharp-eyed viewers could see that the re-created Dadeland did not look as they remembered.

Drive by Dadeland today, and look toward the mall’s west side near the Palmetto Expressway where Crown Liquors and Cozzoli’s once stood to the right of a Jordan Marsh that was an anchor from 1966 to 1991. Now, the Jordan Marsh is a Macy’s adjacent to a Marriott Hotel. A modern Cheesecake Factory, several feet east by a main mall entrance, faces Kendall Drive.

A lush two-story patio on the mall’s south side with its restaurants, and a coming Gucci, look world’s removed from near where three assassins emerged from a “war wagon” in the Dadeland parking lot to pump machine gun fire into German Panesso-Jiminez and his bodyguard Juan Carlos Hernandez.

“The most violent outburst in South Florida’s drug war,” the Miami Herald’s Edna Buchanan wrote in her front page story at the time. “I have never seen a shootout like this in my life,” said the county medical examiner at the time. “This is another Chicago.”

The Mutiny, meantime, is under different management and has been renovated more than once since the cocaine cowboys roamed its halls in the early 1980s.

The Miami skyline today doesn’t look like it did in 2019 — let alone 1979.

Lisa Petrillo, an entertainment reporter for Miami Herald news partner CBS Miami interviewed Vergara for the “Griselda” premiere and weighed in on the “this-isn’t-Miami” flap on the Facebook post.

“That’s exactly what the director told me when I interviewed him,” she said. “I noticed it right away because the lighting just felt totally different, but Miami is nothing like it was back then, so they literally had to re-create everything.”