MIAMI — Atlantic City has HBO’s Prohibition-era “Boardwalk Empire,” and 1960s Manhattan has “Mad Men” on AMC.
Now Miami Beach will have its own starring role in a period drama.
“Magic City,” a series set in a fictional Miami Beach hotel in the late 1950s — when the Rat Pack played and Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba — got the green light this week for 10 episodes from Starz Entertainment.
Casting is to start soon, and production will begin in 2011, though it’s still unclear how much, if any, of the series will be filmed in Miami. The show is set to air on the Starz cable channel in 2012.
Writer and producer Mitch Glazer is intimately familiar with the subject matter: Growing up in Miami Beach in the 1950s and ’60s, he accompanied his engineer father to work at the area’s most glamorous hotels, including the Fontainebleau, Eden Roc, Deauville and Carillon.
Glazer, a one-time Deauville cabana boy, said he remains obsessed with the era.
“So much that ended up shaping America — politics, pop culture, everything from civil rights to geopolitical situations — came through the lobby of those hotels,” he said.
Glazer said the show’s hotel is inspired by the architecture of Morris Lapidus, who fashioned the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau. He said he would love to shoot the entire series in Miami, but Starz said it is in talks with several locations, including some outside the state.
“It’s a love letter to the city and that would be the dream, to do it down there,” said Glazer, who wrote several films including “Scrooged” and “Great Expectations.”
Miami Beach was enjoying headier times during the era when the show is set, said local historian Paul George.
“It’s one of the heydays of the Beach, with the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc,” George said. “It was just on the world’s map at that time.”
But as Frank Sinatra crooned and the wealthy gathered at the region’s finest hotels, a darker side of Miami Beach existed under the glossy surface.
The show will touch on drugs, strippers, gangsters, racial tension and global unrest as seen through the prism of the Miramar Hotel and its boss, Ike Evans.
“My fantasy is of it being like Rick’s Cafe in ‘Casablanca,’ where all roads lead to and through the Miramar,” Glazer said.
