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4/6 - Jeffrey Dean Morgan Cusses Up A Storm On 'The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson' (VIDEO)

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:02:28 +0000

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Jeffrey Dean Morgan Cusses Up A Storm On 'The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson' (VIDEO)
by Huffington Post TV
Article Launched: 04/ 6/2012 5:25 am Updated: 04/ 6/2012 5:25 am

Jeffrey Dean Morgan was feeling a bit under the weather, but he pushed through it for his appearance on "The Late Late Show" (Weeknights, 12:37 a.m. ET on CBS). Because of the germs, Craig Ferguson first offered him some hand sanitizer, and then a mask he could war over his mouth and nose.

As Morgan was putting on the mask, he had a sudden realization. "Holy s**t, nobody knows what the f**k we're saying," he marveled.

"Hey, we can cuss with these!" Ferguson said, quickly grabbing one for himself. While the next few minutes didn't need any of Ferguson's signature flags to cover their lips, there were plenty of sound effects as both men took to their new found cursing freedom like Augustus Gloop did to the chocolate river in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

It was as if they simply couldn't help themselves. Ferguson was so delighted by this revelation, that he told Morgan he loved him. Likely, these masks will be brought out for rowdy guests to play along again and again in the future.

Find out as "The Late Late Show" is on every weeknight at 12:37 a.m. ET on CBS.

4/6 - Jeffrey Dean Morgan lands role to (not) die for

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:29:17 +0000

http://bostonherald...._to_not_die_for

Jeffrey Dean Morgan lands role to (not) die for
By Amy Amatangelo / Television
Article Launched: Friday, April 6, 2012

Jeffrey Dean Morgan is used to dying on TV.

His beloved Denny -Duquette met an early demise on “Grey’s Anatomy.” He played the only-alive-in-flashback Judah Botwin on “Weeds.” And his John Winchester perished on “Supernatural.”

“I like coming in and doing a 12-episode arc and dying,” Morgan told the Herald while driving around the Catskills Mountains in New York. “Frankly, that’s not a bad gig.”

Now the Seattle native’s chances of survival are good.

Morgan headlines his own series “Magic City,” premiering tonight at 10 on Starz. “It’s super ex-citing, and I’m nervous and I have butterflies about it being released into the world, and I hope people like it because I do,” he said. “I certainly love playing this character.”

Morgan, 45, stars as Ike Evans, owner of the luxurious Miramar Playa Hotel in Miami Beach. To finance the hotel of his dreams, Ike accepted an investment from ruthless mob boss Ben “The Butcher” Diamond (Danny Huston).

“Ike will do whatever it takes to protect his family, and he will do whatever he can to keep his hotel,” Morgan said. “And in doing that, he makes some bad decisions, and he makes decisions that are on the wrong side of moral. In playing this gray area, we get to see the impact that these choices have on him.”

Starz has already renewed the show for a second season, and Morgan, who has a 2-year-old son with actress Hilarie Burton, will return to Miami in July to resume filming.

“When the story ends this year, it’s tremendous how much (expletive) this man goes through,” he said.

While Morgan declined to divulge the upcoming plot twists of “Magic City,” he’s always willing to talk about Denny.

“I am a firm believer that if it weren’t for Denny Duquette, I wouldn’t have the career that I’ve been lucky enough to have,” he said. “I was a guy who had been kicking around this business for 20 some-odd years, and I had just about given up on this whole acting thing. I wasn’t making a good living, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was almost 40, living on unemployment between guest star stuff, and out of nowhere (‘Grey’s’ executive producer) Shonda Rhimes trusted me. ... I hope for the rest of my life I get to talk about Denny.”

-— amyamatangelo@yahoo.com

4/5 - Jeffrey Dean Morgan: Steamy Magic City a 'Dream Come True'

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:27:28 +0000

http://www.huffingto..._b_1404354.html

Jeffrey Dean Morgan: Steamy Magic City a 'Dream Come True'
by Greg Archer
Article Launched: 04/ 5/2012 3:21 pm

Jeffrey Dean Morgan may be one of the hottest draws on television this spring. The actor best known for playing Denny Duquette on the ABC hit Grey's Anatomy, has been generating buzz for his highly anticipated new drama series, Magic City, which debuts on Starz this week.

But when asked whether it's been tenacity or veracity that helped fuel a surprisingly robust mid-career boom, he happily admits that it's the latter.

"I'm easy to get along with -- I'm not a diva," Morgan admits with a laugh. "I'm just a happy guy."

True, but few actors pull off "happy" with such ease. Morgan's cheerful man's man/everyman persona certainly turned heads and warmed hearts when he played the ill-fated Denny (Izzie's beau) on Grey's (2006-09). But then he surprised critics by packing a studly creative punch on the big screen as a lead player in the box office hit The Watchmen. Now, Morgan ventures a step further dramatically as Ike Evans in Magic City.

Three words sum up the new drama: sizzle, sunshine and sex.

Well that, and the mob.

The series is set in Miami 1959. (Think Kennedy, Cuba, the rise of the wealthy class.) Morgan's Ike is the beleaguered owner of the luminous Miramar Playa Hotel. Part family man, part savvy business man, he tries to manage the two but can't help but get pulled into the undertow of the mob's shady dealings. Toss in an ex-wife (Kelly Lynch), a younger new wife (Olga Kurylenko), two sons -- steamy hunk (Steven Strait) and embraceable hunk (Christian Cooke) -- a mobster (Danny Huston) and his lover (Jessica Marais), and you got the makings of a hit.

At first glance, the series is a provocative, moody period place that dazzles by how well it's underplayed. It hits a nice stride by the third episode and manages to get under your skin as Ike (and Co.) feel the ripple effects of what it takes to run one the country's newest premier hotels. Sopranos it's not. But that's good. Here, series creator/writer Mitch Glazer winningly evokes the mood of the day in a clever balancing act that is downright original if not awfully nice to look at, too.

"I had no plans of doing a show," Morgan admits during our recent interview. "I've done tons of guest spots and in parts where the character invariably dies or is dead." (Weeds, Supernatural, Grey's Anatomy.)

"And then it was six years straight going from film to film, so I hadn't thought about doing television nor had I read anything that felt warranted it," he adds. "Then I read the script, and this character in particular, and I thought -- Mitch Glazer is fantastic. He wrote every single word of our whole season. Rough job. Not many writers can do that."

Glazer created Magic City by culling from his experiences in Miami Beach -- he was born and raised there and his father, Len Glazer, was an electrical engineer who designed a great deal of the lighting for Miami Beach's hippest '50s hotels: The Fontainebleau, Eden Roc and Deauville. Glazer even worked as a cabana boy at the Deauville in the 1970s. (No doubt he shaped Strait's character around some of his own experiences?)

As an actor, Morgan says the role was a dream come true, but also an incredible challenge.
[indent]"It was not only an emotional time for Ike Evans, but for Jeff Morgan, too, trying to keep up. Ike is a family man at heart. I am a family man at heart. He wants to protect the ones that he loves and I certainly want to do that.
"But there's also the gray area, which is where we all operate in some times," he goes on. "It's really hard to just be good or bad. You know, I am very honest with what I am feeling and what is going on, but ultimately, being instilled with a difference of right and wrong at an early age, I will always side for the side of good. But that's not to say I haven't veered over into that gray area many times in my life."[/indent]

About that... Morgan's life is a curious kaleidoscope.

Born and raised in Kirkland, Wash., before settling in Seattle, and then onto New York City, he calls acting his "happy accident" because he had no intention of becoming an actor -- at all. In the late-'80s, he had "dabbled" in graphic art, selling paintings for "50 bucks a pop" to coffeeshops and bars around Seattle.

"All my friends were musicians; The Pearl Jam and Jane's Addiction folks -- those guys were my friends and I just wanted to be an artist," he recalls. "I had no musical talent and my deal was that I'd paint. I loved it. For me, it's just 'getting out of my own way' because I live a lot in my head."

But after helping a friend move to Los Angeles in the early '90s, Morgan was soon auditioning, setting up what would become a curious 15-year cycle of television guest spots -- from ER to CSI to JAG and beyond. Suddenly that "big thing" most actors dreamed of attaining was beginning to feel like a nightmare.

"I spent years being depressed and morose until something 'happened,'" he shares candidly, seemingly amused by it all now. "I was in my late-thirties. I had no education. I went to college for, like, a quarter and I thought, 'You know, what are you doing with your life? It's not panning out!' And then everything sort of happened at once."

But it almost didn't.

One day, about seven years ago, Morgan's manager called and basically, dumped him.

"I'll never forget the phone call," he chuckles about it. "She said, 'You're getting old. It's a young man's game.' [At the time], I was building decks and fences and whatever I could do to scrape by. But literally, the next day, my first audition with my new manager was for Supernatural. Supernatural and Grey's Anatomy all happened within three weeks of each other."

And just like that, Morgan's life took a 180.

The Grey's gig -- playing Izzie's flame, Denny Duquette -- is still one of the most talked-about recurring characters in the show's history. Movie roles followed (PS, I Love You, Taking Woodstock, Jonah Hex and, of course, Watchmen).

Still, there must have been something beyond a manager swap that helped shift things.

"A lot of it had to do with me maturing as an actor and as a person, more so as a person," Morgan says. "It's a rough game. You go into these auditions feeling desperate as all hell. Somehow I got past that. I'm extremely lucky. I'm the fist to admit that. But I don't think I'm the greatest actor in the world."

Well, he's certainly one that's in demand. Aside from Magic City, Morgan appears two big upcoming films, the Red Dawn reboot, and The Devil and The Big Blue Sea, costarring Jessica Biel. Stay tuned ...

4/5 - Jakle: Sin, sex and danger in 1950s Miami

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:24:16 +0000

http://www.mysananto...p#photo-2777810

Jakle: Sin, sex and danger in 1950s Miami
By Jeanne Jakle
Article Launched: 8:01 a.m., Thursday, April 5, 2012

The new Starz drama "Magic City" is full of fabulous vintage clothes and Rat Pack nostalgia. It's the era of John Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, a time when cocktails were plentiful, smoking was cool and glamorous gowns hugged hourglass figures.

Sound like "Mad Men"? Don't bet on it.

"As far as the shows being comparable, they're really not, other than, I guess, the year," "Magic City" creator and executive producer Mitch Glazer said in a recent conference call.

Start with the settings: New York versus Miami.

" 'Magic City' is set in an ethnic, you know, Jewish/Cuban world," a tourist town, Glazer said.

Whereas "Mad Man's" workplace feels buttoned-up, "Magic City" takes place in a sprawling beach hotel that oozes sin, sex and danger.

The eight-part series debuts at 9 p.m. Friday on Starz.

The scripts were mined from Glazer's own experiences growing up in late-'50s Miami Beach. He worked as a hotel cabana boy while his father toiled as an electrical engineer for iconic hotels such as the Fountainebleu.

"Magic City" opens on New Year's Eve 1958. Havana has fallen to Fidel Castro's army; labor unions are trying to bring about change; the mob is pulling everyone's strings.

"It was such a defining moment for Miami," Glazer said. "You went from a city that had 30,000 Cuban immigrants to I believe 250,000 18 months later.

"It's a story that I've been wanting to tell for a long time. The cool thing was, besides the aesthetic and the beauty and the glamour … there were also really amazing things happening in the world. So I felt that if I could tell a story of this family under siege … I could also funnel these great stories … from the CIA … and civil rights."

That family is headed by visionary Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of "Watchmen"). He built and runs the Miramar Playa, the most luxurious hotel on Miami Beach. A widower who's remarried, he also has a young daughter and two grown sons.

"He's a family man in his heart," Morgan said. "I loved that Mitch had written this guy who loves his family (but has) incredible pressures. Like all of us, he has trouble making decisions, and he makes the wrong ones at times, and there are repercussions."
Some of these are truly scary. In the first episode, Ike grows frustrated with an inflexible union leader who plans to disrupt his planned New Year's Eve celebration and makes a kind of pact with Ben Diamond (Danny Huston), a gangster so vicious he's nicknamed "The Butcher." One of the creepier visuals is a watery grave full of corpses.

There's breathtaking beauty as well, from stunning beaches to old architecture to sumptuous sets.

"For me, it's called 'Magic City.' The city was always going to be a character," Glazer said. "I'm such a Miami guy that the only time I ever saw Miami accurately portrayed was when Michael Corleone goes to visit Hyman Roth in 'Godfather II' and you pull up to that little middle-class Jewish home. … So, it was a mission of mine to get down there and use the city, you know, the largest kind of existing pre-1959 architecture in the world is that deco area, and the light and the smells."

It also helps that Starz is a channel with few language or other restrictions, allowing the actors to get real as well.

"We show real relationships," Morgan said, "and sometimes people get naked in their real relationships."

Nudity, in fact, is plentiful, from scantily clad showgirls to a skinny-dipping wife to patron-pleasing prostitutes.

Olga Kurylenko ("Quantum of Solace") plays Vera, a kind of gypsy outsider from Eastern Europe who embraces the roles of Ike's wife, stepmother to his children and hotel queen to his king. Drop-dead stunning in the show's strapless, full-skirted fashions, she couldn't get enough of the period designs by Carol Ramsey.

"Everything was just so glamorous, and women looked very feminine," Kurylenko said at a recent Starz press session. "It's probably the most beautiful style in history, the '50s."

Morgan, already looking forward to the show's promised second season, compared "Magic City" to a train, "a slow burn" at first but "picking up speed."

"What we're seeing now are Ike's wheels turning," he said. "He's going to have to get involved. He may have to get his hands dirty. Oh, hell, I'll say it: He's going to get his hands pretty dirty."

4/3 - 'Magic City' shines bright on 1950s Miami Beach

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:21:11 +0000

http://www.huffingto...-tv-magic-city/

'Magic City' shines bright on 1950s Miami Beach
by FRAZIER MOORE |
Article Launched: April 3, 2012 07:13 AM EST

NEW YORK — A high point in the series debut of "Magic City," the new Starz drama set in 1950s-era Miami Beach, occurs about midway when hotel magnate Ike Evans makes a reluctant appeal to his brutish silent partner for help with union workers.

It's New Year's Eve, ringing in 1959, and Ike is having problems. The hotel is booked solid and Frank Sinatra is headlining two sold-out shows. Now Ike needs assistance from Ben Diamond (aka "the Butcher") in, um, persuading the union boss not to call a strike of hotel workers on this all-important night.

In the delicious scene, Ike pays Ben a visit at his palatial palm-shrouded estate.

Ike (played by series star Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is in a crisp dark suit as the sun beats down. But Ben (co-star Danny Huston) reigns with Roman-esque excess in swim trunks, recumbent on his chaise lounge on a Lazy Susan platform which, with the press of a button, swivels to position him at the ideal tanning angle.

"Ike is so uncomfortable!" laughs Morgan during a recent conversation with Huston and the series' creator-writer-executive producer, Mitch Glazer. "I'm in the heat in a wool suit, and Ben is drinking a cocktail in his Speedo."

Huston chuckles at the moment when Ben loses his hair-trigger temper and smashes a carafe on the deck of the pool, with a ricocheting splinter of glass grazing Ike's cheek.

"Ohhhhhh," coos Ben, his voice resuming a sinister whisper as he offers Ike a towel to daub the blood: "You cut yourself."
He then sends Ike home. He tells him to relax. The union boss will be "persuaded."

"It's a great dynamic," grins Huston, who is as jovial in person as his character is chilling. "I'm the Meyer Lansky to Ike's Bugsy Siegel."
Premiering Friday at 10 p.m. EDT, "Magic City" re-captures the bygone fast life of Miami Beach, fueled by the Rat Pack, the mob, the CIA and anti-Castro forces coalescing after Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba. (The first three hours are now available for viewing on the Starz website.)

The series was created – and all eight of this first season's episodes were written – by Glazer, who grew up in Miami Beach in that glamorous time and, as a teen, was a cabana boy at a Collins Avenue resort nearly as posh and grand as Ike's fictitious Miramar Playa.

Through the run of the series, Ike will face the challenges of keeping his luxury hotel afloat while preserving family harmony with his beautiful former showgirl wife (Olga Kurylenko), his two grown sons – one bad (Steven Strait), one righteous (Christian Cooke) – his precocious little girl (Taylor Blackwell), and the patrician sister of Ike's late first wife (played by Kelly Lynch, who, in real life, is wed to Glazer).

All that, plus the Faustian pact into which Ike has entered with co-owner Ben Diamond, whose dangerously gorgeous bride (Jessica Marais) presents her own special menace to Ike's family.

In public, Ike maintains a Sphinxian look of confidence and cool, but there is something about the heaviness of his bearing that suggests he carries the weight of the world, including a measure of conscience-strickenness, on his broad shoulders.

"Ike has to wear many different faces," says Glazer. "That ability to compartmentalize requires a really deft actor like Jeff who can be believable when he looks his wife in the eyes and says, `Ben Diamond is not my world,' and then goes and meets with Ben Diamond."
Morgan's many films include the recent "The Texas Killing Fields" as well as "Watchmen," "Taking Woodstock" and "The Accidental Husband," and he had a memorable recurring role on ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" as heart patient Denny Duquette.

Huston's diverse list of credits includes "The Aviator," "The Constant Gardener," "The Proposition" and the current "Wrath of the Titans," as well as the HBO miniseries "John Adams," in which he portrayed Samuel Adams.

"I loved the idea of Ben Diamond not being a leg breaker, a thug, but being more of a Roman emperor of crime," says Glazer when asked how the role was cast. "Who better than Danny?"

The production values and eye for period detail on "Magic City" are eye-popping: The vast lobby of the Miramar Playa is a visual treat, and the sunken Atlantis Lounge, whose portholes provide an underwater panorama of lovely in-the-buff sirens rapturously swimming in the adjacent pool, is wondrous. The series is filmed in Miami, and takes generous advantage of the area's real-life locations.

"I'm a big believer in shooting where the actual story takes place. It's so helpful," says Huston, then jokes, "I would never have gotten into those Speedos had it not been for the tremendous heat."

"I don't know if I necessarily believe you," cracks Morgan.

"There's an interesting dance between those two," says Glazer. "There's a moment in another scene where Ben is taking Ike to show him his hotel on the horizon. Danny-as-Ben took Jeff-as-Ike's hand, really gently. It was so gentle and terrifying, all at the same time."

Says Morgan, "I remember thinking, `What's he gonna do?'"

"It was the solution to a slight blocking problem," Huston says simply. "I extended my hand, and held HIS hand."

"And Jeff went right with it," says Glazer. "He just stood up and was led."

Morgan laughs. "As soon as they said `Cut' we said, `That was weird as hell – and great!'"

It isn't typical for the screenwriter to be on hand when his script goes before the cameras. But this is no ordinary project for Glazer. His writing credits include "Scrooged," "Great Expectations" and "The Recruit," and, with "Saturday Night Live" original Michael O'Donaghue, he co-wrote the 1979 cult classic "Mr. Mike's Mondo Video." But "Magic City" seems the project he was born to create.
"Having him on set, and being able to talk to him – who lived in Miami and witnessed the goings-on at that time – was incredibly helpful for the actors," Huston says.

"It was exhilarating for me," Glazer says. "This is my home. My life. That Lazy Susan that Ben sits on? I saw it! I sold doughnuts for UNICEF to this guy near where I lived, and he made me wait in the sun holding the stupid doughnuts while he came around on his Lazy Susan to face me.

"So then, at 13, I said to myself: `Someday I'm gonna use this!'"

3/30 - Magic City Brings Mad Men Era Mob Drama to STARZ

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:18:49 +0000

http://oceandrive.co...n-era-mob-drama

Magic City Brings Mad Men Era Mob Drama to STARZ

BY TOM AUSTIN
Article launched: 3/30/12

Walking through the set of Magic City, the new STARZ network drama set in 1958 Miami debuting April 6, is like taking a stroll through a terminally glamorous slice of local history. Midcentury Miami Beach was the aesthetic forerunner of Las Vegas, where heavy hitters wore white dinner jackets and escorted mink-draped showgirls to Frank Sinatra’s midnight show, when the underworld met the elite, and high and low mixed with a certain glossy style. The 340,000-square-foot production studio, built near the Miami International Airport, provides a skinny-dip into that 1950s fantasyland, centered around the fictional Miramar Playa Hotel, which serves as the show’s equivalent of the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels, both designed by the late Morris Lapidus. The Fontainebleau, in particular, was the epicenter of the Miami Beach elite and Mafia society, both using the ornate lobby as glorified catwalks to flaunt their prominence and clout. The portico of the Magic City set is made for the arrival of big-finned, gas-guzzling pink Cadillacs, and the lobby has another over-the-top prop, a massive chandelier that used to hang in the Eden Roc.

Magic City was created by Mitch Glazer, a hometown boy who went to Miami Beach Senior High School with Mickey Rourke, Roy Firestone, and Desmond Child. Glazer—also responsible for writing Scrooged, starring Bill Murray, and The Recruit, with Colin Farrell—grew up on Miami Beach’s Hibiscus Island. His father was an electrical engineer who worked for Lapidus, Ben Novack, and then the owner of the Fontainebleau. For Glazer, who hasn’t lived in Miami since high school, Magic City provided a chance to bring back the time of his youth: “The set of the Miramar Playa is a composite of all my fantasies, all the hotels my dad worked on,” he says. “Miami Beach was a small town then. My grandfather used to play the balalaika with his friends, other Russian Jews, at Lummus Park, and we re-created that time in Magic City. As a kid, I went to Hoffman’s Cafeteria, where Jerry’s Famous Deli is now, on Española Way and Collins. We set a scene at Jerry’s, too, which looks just like Hoffman’s.”

Magic City represents everything the old Beach was—and more. It’s an intoxicating mix of gangsters, sex, intrigue, brand-new money, and pure just-for-the-hell-of-it glitz. On the set, a graceful staircase is flanked by shimmering tiles, echoing the Fontainebleau’s famed “staircase to nowhere.” The fictional hotel’s Sea Breeze Lingerie Shop is equipped with a bookie operation behind the back door. Autographed photos of Zsa Zsa Gabor and boxer Floyd Patterson adorn the owner’s office. The Atlantis Lounge has a vintage jukebox, gold columns, and portholes that look into a swimming pool.

In Magic City, the Miramar Playa is ruled by Ike Evans, a family man who has been forced to make a deal with the Mob to stay afloat. He’s played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who also starred in Watchmen and enjoyed a stint on Grey’s Anatomy. In the first episode, Ike is throwing an epic New Year’s Eve party featuring a Frank Sinatra concert and guests that include John Kennedy and Kim Novak. To thwart a union leader who’s threatening to lead a strike and shut the hotel down, he reluctantly calls on his not-so-silent partner, mobster Ben “The Butcher” Diamond. In the series, Glazer has created a Miami Beach that blends high style with all the darkness of that era.

To Morgan, however, both the past and present Miami Beach are entirely new worlds. “I’d never been to Miami before this show,” he says, “and hanging out here has been interesting, especially the characters we met.” Yul Vazquez, who plays Victor Lazaro, the Cuban general manager of the Miramar Playa, “is a brilliant actor and also has great insights on Miami,” says Morgan. (Vazquez spent time here as a child and keeps an apartment on South Beach.) “And Mitch is amazing. We’ve done scenes at the Deauville Beach Resort, which he says is like it was when he worked there as a cabana boy.”

As for Ike Evans’s plight, Morgan looks to Miami history. “My character has a bit of Ben Novack from the Fontainebleau,” he says. “The real history is incredible, with hookers, bookies working out of the hotel, and Meyer Lansky trying to bring casino gambling to Miami after Batista fell in Cuba. CIA agents actually met in the hotel’s Boom Boom Room to talk about hits on Castro. It was so open and free, a no-holds-barred kind of place. Novack, when he found out his wife was having an affair, went in and shot up the Fontainebleau in a crazy Wild, Wild West moment.”

But then, reality often beats fiction in Miami. The 2009 murders of Ben Novack Jr. and his mother, Bernice Novack, are complete with kinky sex and plenty of intrigue. Narcy Novack, an ex-stripper and Ben’s widow, and her brother have been charged with masterminding both crimes in a case that would defy the imagination of any screenwriter.

Morgan has learned to appreciate the absurdity of our town. “Miami is pretty wild now—one day while doing a scene, I looked through the portholes at the Atlantis Lounge and saw little strips of fake hair floating into the drain. We hired extras to swim nude in the pool, but they all had perfect silicone breasts and shaved private parts. To get extras that were au naturel with real breasts and pubic hair, like women in the ’50s, was impossible in Miami.”

The mobster Ben “The Butcher” Diamond is played by Danny Huston, son of film director John Huston and half-brother of Anjelica Huston. To Huston, playing Diamond entailed a bit of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, “and a few other stereotypes I cheerfully embraced,” he says. “There’s nothing redeeming about Diamond. He just wants more of everything. In the end, there’s something kind of likable about him—the fact that he’s so unrepentant. Ike makes a deal with the devil when he does business with Diamond, but they’re actually both pretty bad; Ben is just not afraid of the ugly side of their business.”

All this is rich terrain for an actor, says Huston. “For men of that period, that was the last moment in history to behave with pure machismo. All that unapologetic smoking, drinking, and chasing women; it’s terribly seductive, and they all have a wonderful kind of ignorance about the consequences of their behavior.” Today’s Miami certainly has evolved, but Huston notes a certain louche tone to our tropical city. “Those balmy nights in Miami, the music wafting in and out, still give people a certain carefree quality and ample opportunities to discover their darker sides.”

Everything about Magic City is beautiful and lush, from the settings to the cars to the clothes. The wardrobe department is a source of drop-dead glamour, well suited to the character Judi Silver, played by actress Elena Satine, who originally hails from Georgia, in Eastern Europe. In the show, Silver is a platinum-blonde escort at the Atlantis Lounge who does favors for her protectors Ike and his son Stevie, who runs the lounge. Her seduction of certain clientele just might prove the old adage about orgasm being akin to a kind of death.

To Satine, it was a treat to immerse herself in another era. “We built a whole city for this show— it’s such a decadent lifestyle. We spent months coming up with a distinctive style for Judi. She’s a pro, a working girl, but also ahead of the curve for that time: The hemlines are shorter, the dresses more low-cut. In one scene, she wears a black corset straight out of Bettie Page.”

For Glazer, the production of Magic City is a chance to come to terms with his hometown. “Even as a kid, I knew that Miami Beach was the coolest place on earth. It was beautiful and glamorous, like one big Bobby Darin song come to life, with all the high-rollers at the Fontainebleau and the women in furs. But you knew it was something that had to end, and when it did, it would never come back.

Magic City brings some of my memories back to life, and modern Miami is still an amazing place. In our show, the Mob is trying to bring casinos to Miami, and now that issue is happening all over again. In the end, Miami never really changes all that much.”