Re-creating the 'Magic City' world of Miami on Starz

Mitch Glazer has been breathing, thinking, and talking Magic City for decades. The show's creator, writer, and co-executive producer was born to it.

Glazer, who grew up in Miami Beach, drew on his childhood memories to create Starz's lush new period drama, which premieres Friday at 10 p.m. for an eight-episode first season.

Set in the late 1950s, Magic City stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Gray's Anatomy) as Ike Evans, a cabana boy turned tycoon who builds one of the first of the luxury hotel-resorts that came to define Miami Beach in the Rat Pack era.

A widower, Ike lives in his shiny new palace with his two grown sons, Stevie (Steven Strait) and Danny (Christian Cooke); his spoiled teenage daughter, Lauren (Taylor Blackwell); and his shiny new wife, former showgirl Vera (Olga Kurylanko).

Ike's hotel, the fictional Miramar, is an Art Deco dream factory where martini-swilling industrialists and their wives can rub shoulders with movie stars, mobsters, Cuban exiles, and CIA agents.

It's a gorgeous, baroque, over-the-top creation straight out of the notebooks of famed Miami Beach architect Morris Lapidus, who designed the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, and the Deauville Resort.

The hotels were "the center of social life in Miami Beach when I was growing up," says Glazer, 59, whose parents were born in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia. His father, Leonard, studied engineering at Penn, while his Temple alumna mother, Zelda, worked as a public schoolteacher.

"My dad was the electrical engineer on all those Lapidus-designed hotels, and I used to go to work with him and walk around in the lobbies," says Glazer. "I remember walking into the Fontainebleau. It was sublime. The most glamorous spectacle I had ever seen. â ¦ It was air-conditioned like a meat locker and the whole effect was grand and otherworldly."

And, he adds, "it has stayed in my head until now."

It's been a veritable obsession, says Glazer's wife, actress Kelly Lynch.

"Mitch and I have been together for 23 years," says Lynch, 53, who stars in Magic City as Ike's former sister-in-law, socialite, and political power-broker, Meg Bannock. "I have been hearing about his baby, as he calls it, almost from the week we started dating."

Magic City opens on New Year's Eve 1958.

The Miramar staff is in a frenzy preparing for the event Ike hopes will put the hotel on the national map: A late night show featuring Frank Sinatra. Things aren't going so smoothly: Union organizers have blocked access to the lobby.

Meanwhile, Ike's righthand man, Victor Lazada (Yul Vázquez), is consumed with anxiety: Castro's forces are about to take his hometown, Havana, where his wife, Maria, is visiting relatives.

Miami Beach underwent radical changes during this period, says Glazer, making it the perfect setting for his story.

First, the city was, in a word, cool. "It was at its most glamorous and elegant at this time - Sinatra was down there doing shows and Jerry Lewis was making movies on the beach," Glazer recalls. "But it was also a time of profound changes, of explosive and defining events" at home and abroad.

The civil rights movement was making a lasting mark on the heretofore segregated city, says Glazer, whose parents took him to his first protest march in 1959.

Miami was also seeing an influx of refugees following Castro's revolution. The Cuban crisis made Miami a hotbed of political intrigue, inspiring the CIA to send agents by the truckload. "Miami's CIA station became the largest in the world next to Langley," Glazer says with a laugh.

Thanks to Castro, American mobsters lost their lucrative Havana casinos. Run out of the country, they zeroed in on Miami's burgeoning resorts as their next golden goose.

That's bad news for Ike, who could afford to build the Miramar only with financial backing from the Bugsy Siegel-esque Jewish mob boss Ben "the Butcher" Diamond, played with ebullient bravado by Danny Huston. Ben's back in town and looking to muscle in on Ike's business.

Huston says he was drawn to the character's explosive brutality. "Take a scalpel to any villain and you'll realize none of them really considers himself to be a bad guy," Huston says. "With Ben, I didn't feel the need to do that. I loved the character for his pure, unapologetic, villainous evil."

Morgan says he sees his character, Ike, as a man deeply divided between his moral sensibility and his instinct to survive and succeed. While he acknowledges his character isn't exactly an innocent, the actor insists Ike isn't a villain.

"I think you're dealing with a guy who is a good guy, who kind of rose through the ranks and built his dream mostly by hard work," Morgan says. "And, you know, he's a family man in his heart. â ¦ he's thrown into an incredible, oh, God, incredible pressures, I guess, and he's forced to make decisions."

He makes the wrong ones with alarming regularity in succeeding episodes.

Ike's elder son, Stevie, is a chip off the old block when it comes to poor judgment: He's initiating an affair with femme fatale extraordinaire Lily Diamond (Jessica Marais), wife of the murderous Ben.

Magic City isn't all darkness, betrayal, adultery, and death. It features a tender love story between Ike's younger son, law student and perennial good-guy Danny, and Victor's daughter, hotel maid Mercedes Lazaro (played by Andy Garcia's daughter, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, in one of her first major roles).

"Our thing, our story, is an innocent one," said Garcia-Lorido, 28. "There is some room here for purity and a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this corruption."

Magic City has received mixed reviews - even Hollywood's two top trade publications are divided. Most critics have compared Glazer's show to that other slick 1950s series, Mad Men - a comparison that mystifies him.

"You know, as far as the shows being comparable, they're really not other than, I guess, the year," he said.

There is one similarity between the two series: They shed a light on the darker side of the American dream, of the extremes to which we sometimes go to quench our "desire to want more, bigger, better ," as Huston puts it. They suggest that the American dream isn't an ultimate end, but just another consumer good.

Magic City also challenges our Hollywood-influenced assumptions about human freedom, showing how even the most rugged of individualists are a product of social and economic forces they can't control.

Glazer's series moves at Charles Dickens speed - it takes time to develop its characters. It demands patience, but it promises to deliver. (As a guarantee that the story won't leave viewers high and dry, Starz has announced it plans to produce a 10-episode second season.)

Morgan says it's worth sticking around.

"It's like a train â ¦ starts on a slow burn," he says. "But hang on, it's a ride. It's a real ride."

Contact staff writer Tirdad Derakhshani at 215-854-2736 or tirdad@phillynews.com.

Television?Magic City?10 p.m .Friday on Starz