Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Mitch Glazer on Magic City: "Miami Is the City. It's a Character."

On March 30, 2012, STARZ held a press conference call for Magic City, the network's new original series set in 1959 Miami Beach. The show — created, written, and executive produced by Miami native Mitch Glazer — stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike Evans, the charismatic owner of the fictional Miramar Playa Hotel. The series premiered April 6 at 10 p.m. Eastern on STARZ. Premier Guide Miami was among the outlets on the call.

I never felt when I was doing this show that it was a television show. It didn't feel like it when we were making it.

Why 1959 Miami?

For Glazer, the choice was personal and inevitable. Born and raised in Miami Beach, he spent his childhood sneaking into the grand hotels his father — an electrical engineer — had lit: the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Deauville. "The real engine for me was that I write what I know," he said. "Having a sense of place and time — this is my home." The fall of Havana on New Year's Eve 1958 was the ignition point: Miami's Cuban population exploded from 30,000 to 250,000 in under two years, and the lobbies of the great hotels became the center of a world in transformation. "It was the perfect period," Glazer said. "Massive cultural and political shift — and a lot of it happening in the lobbies of these hotels."

Shooting on location in Miami

Both men were emphatic that shooting in Miami — not Burbank, not North Carolina — was the single most important production decision. "Miami is the city. It's a character," Morgan said. "We've all seen the shows that claim to be Miami and it's painfully obvious they're not shot there." Glazer went further: he took Morgan and several cast members to the Deauville Hotel's ballroom — the same room where The Beatles played in 1964, with the same chandeliers — and could speak to it firsthand because he was there. "You can immerse yourself in the reality of the moment," he said. "To do it in Burbank, the storytelling would've held up, but there's a depth to being in the place that you can't compete with."

Jeffrey Dean Morgan on Ike Evans

Morgan came to the role reluctantly — his agent sold it to him as a miniseries. He read three scripts at his cabin, met Glazer at the Mercer Hotel in New York, discovered within two minutes it was a full series, and told him he was in at the ten-minute mark. "I never felt when I was doing this show that it was a television show," he said. "Everybody in this comes from the world of film, both in front and in back of the camera." The character's apparent ease — what some critics read as laid-back charm — Morgan pushed back on firmly: "He puts on a front of this charming guy. But behind closed doors you see the cracks, you see the burden he's carrying. He has to give everyone — his wife, his shady business partners, everybody — the impression that everything is okay. And it's not."

The father-son relationship at the heart of the show

Glazer described the Ike-and-Stevie dynamic as the emotional core of the series — a father who loves his son but withholds the approval the boy is desperate for, because Ike sees in Stevie exactly who he was as a young man and wants to save him from his own mistakes while knowing he can't. One scene in the pilot — Ike telling Stevie that his mother was not love at first sight — became a touchstone in the press call. "As I wrote it I went, 'Wow, this is a heavy thing to say to your son,'" Glazer said. "Shattering, even. But it speaks to the respect Ike has for Stevie." The moment that moved the room in every read-through, he added, was unscripted: at the end of the episode, Ike holds his hand next to Stevie's head and the actor simply leans into it. "Not scripted. These two guys were so in it."

How the show came to STARZ

Glazer originally wrote the pilot in 2007 as a network drama. A female executive at a major network greenlit it mid-pitch — "She said, 'Where did you go to high school?' I said Beach High. She said, 'I went to Gables.' And she said, 'Let's just do this.'" But the parameters of network television — censorship, episode demands, the impossibility of the cinematic scale he envisioned — made it a poor fit. The show found its home through a chance encounter: Glazer was in Havana doing research for a separate film project when he met Chris Albrecht, who had just left HBO and had not yet started at STARZ. They walked into the lobby of the Riviera Hotel — a Morris Lapidus–designed 1959 building — and Glazer watched Albrecht's eyes go up. He sent him the script the moment Albrecht took the STARZ job. "From that moment until now it's like nothing, two years," Glazer said. "He went, 'This is great. I love it. Let's do it.' And thank God he did."

On the Ike Evans–Vera marriage

One of Glazer's stated goals from the beginning was a functioning, sexual, romantic marriage at the center of the show — not a couple drifting apart or straying, but two people fighting to keep something real. Vera (played by Olga Kurylenko) was a star at the Tropicana in Havana before Ike brought her to Miami Beach, and her arc through the season involves pushing against the restrictions placed on women in 1959 — particularly a woman who is, as Glazer put it, "the ultimate outsider": a gypsy from Eastern Europe, trying to become more Jewish than the Evans family ever was. "She's pushing for more," Glazer said. "And Ike has to ride that because she's a force he's never had to deal with before." Magic City premiered Friday, April 6, 2012 at 10 p.m. Eastern on STARZ.

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