Magic City | |
---|---|
Genre | Period drama |
Created by | Mitch Glazer |
Starring |
Jeffrey Dean Morgan Olga Kurylenko Steven Strait Jessica Marais Christian Cooke Elena Satine Dominik García-Lorido Taylor Blackwell Danny Huston |
Composer(s) | Daniele Luppi |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of seasons | 2 |
No. of episodes | 16 (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Executive producer(s) | Mitch Glazer Geyer Kosinski Lawrence Konner (co-exec) Ed Bianchi (co-exec) |
Producer(s) |
Dwayne Shattuck Todd London (sup) Tim Christenson (co-prod) Jennifer Jackson (assoc) |
Location(s) | Miami, Florida |
Cinematography | Gabriel Beristain |
Editor(s) | Christopher Nelson |
Camera setup | Multi camera |
Running time | 50 minutes |
Production company(s) | Media Talent Group South Beach Productions |
Release | |
Original network | Starz |
Original release | March 30, 2012 | – August 9, 2013
External links | |
Website |
Magic City is an American drama television series created by Mitch Glazer for the Starz network. The pilot episode previewed on Starz March 30, 2012 and premiered April 6, 2012. Starz renewed the series for an eight-episode second season on March 20, 2012 and canceled it August 5, 2013, after two seasons.
Set in 1959 Miami, Florida, shortly after the Cuban Revolution, Magic City tells the story of Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the owner of Miami's most glamorous hotel, the Miramar Playa. Evans is forced to make an ill-fated deal with Miami mob boss Ben Diamond (Danny Huston) to ensure the success of his glitzy establishment.
The thing that’s really cool for me about Miami Beach is you have this dichotomy between sunlight and family and happiness and innocence and then at night, darker, stranger mob conspiracy stuff sort of comes out. It seems like a storytelling engine. You can just keep writing about how those two worlds smash into each other.
Magic City was created by Miami native Mitch Glazer, who wrote the series around his experiences growing up there: he once worked as a cabana boy in a Miami Beach hotel, his father was an electrical engineer at the city's grand hotels in the late 1950s, and he grew up listening to stories of the exploits of hotel staff and clientele. Many of the incidents Glazer relates in the series "are based on stories that happened, that I saw, or older brothers and sisters or my parents told me." As a journalist, he did extensive research on what was happening in the lobbies of hotels in late 1950s and early 1960s: "There’s wiretaps—tapes they’ve made public now—where the CIA gives Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli $300,000 and poison powder to kill [Fidel] Castro in the Boom Boom Room in the Fontainebleau Hotel," he said. Included in the series, Glazer states, will be CIA activities in Cuba and Civil Rights issues. He first envisioned Magic City as a feature film, but said he quickly realized he had more stories to tell than would fit in a film.