‘Magic’ inspiration started back in the day
Screenwriter Mitch Glazer brings his Miamibased gangster vision to TV in the new Starz period drama “Magic City” — and, yes, he’s ready to defend it against that other period drama that just made its comeback.
Have you become a pro at fielding “Mad Men” comparisons?
The answer that always comes to mind is that I was born and raised in Miami Beach, grew up in these hotels. I’ve been carrying around stories my whole life of this period, which as a kid to me felt really glamorous and exotic and cool and worth writing about. But I had already been writing versions of it for years.... Andi had pitched it, sold it and wrote it before “Mad Men.” You mention these were the stories you sort of witnessed growing up. How did you approach writing them as an adult?
As a kid — I’d hear a story … literally, I’m in my friend’s bedroom and we’re in seventh grade; the older brother comes in and just starts packing. “I was at the Algiers Hotel, and this girl picked me up for the weekend, and it turns out she’s Trigger Mike Coppola’s wife, and I spent the weekend with her and I’m going to the Catskills!” I remember my friend said, “Who’s Trigger Mike Coppola?” His older brother said, “Who cares? His name is Trigger Mike Coppola! I’m leaving!” And there’s a moment where a guy is driving down Indian Creek and the girl is in his lap and he shuts his eyes and drives into the creek — that happened to another friend’s brother.
As those stories are happening, as a budding journalist, I was kind of scrolling them away for the time when I could research and write about the period. And then, besides the whole Sinatra-rat Pack kind of cool era of it, I started doing research over the last 20 years of what was happening in the lobbies of those hotels in that time — ’59, ’60, ’61, the Kennedy period — and it’s incredible. 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.
So there’s this great Cia-mob-cuba thing that was actually happening at the time; the very first civil rights marches in the country were in 1959 in Miami. My parents were involved in that. I have a 26-year-old daughter; when I tell her that in Miami Beach, black acts like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. could play in the hotels but couldn’t sleep there, she looks at me like, “Really?” All that is
going to be reflected. What do you hope this portrait does for the city?
The thing that’s 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 comes out. It seems like a storytelling engine. You can keep writing about how those worlds smash into each other. Will [“Magic City” star] Jeffrey Dean Morgan give Jon Hamm a run for his money?
I know Jon, and I love him. We met because he worked as a waiter at my house like two years before — yeah, it’s completely random. And, of course, my wife and daughter were in the back room while he was making drinks, just gawking at him.... But again, comparisons are weird. I met Jeff, and he’s such a man, and there’s a depth to him and a complexity to him. And Jon has those same things, but Jeff has a real soulfulness to go with the great looks.