Carlito's Way: Rise to Power stars Jay Hernandez as Carlito Brigante, and chronicles Brigante's rise as a heroin drug czar in 1960s Harlem, New York. The film also features Mario Van Peebles, Michael Joseph Kelly, Luis Guzmán, Jaclyn DeSantis, Sean Combs, Burt Young, and Domenick Lombardozzi. Critically panned, the film nevertheless received Torres's as an accurate adaptation of the first half of his novel. The story begins in the 1960s with three inmates in a New York prison — Earl (Van Peebles), Rocco (Kelly), and Carlito (Hernandez) — controlling their criminal empire within their cell. Upon their release, they all look to control the drug
Al Pacino pictures. In 2000, Pacino released a low-budget film adaptation of Ira Lewis' play "Chinese Coffee" to film festivals. Shot almost exclusively as a one-on-one conversation between two main characters, the project took nearly three years to complete and was funded entirely by Pacino. "Chinese Coffee" was included with Pacino's two other rare films he was involved in producing, "The Local Stigmatic" and "Looking for Richard", on a special DVD box set titled "Pacino: An Actor's Vision", which was released in 2007. Pacino produced prologues and epilogues for the discs containing the films. Pacino turned down an offer to reprise his