marcosgoodman

Magic City (2012)

A disappointment to someone who lived in that world

That era of Miami Beach is a fantastic treasure trove of visuals and stories of all kinds of incredible characters. I grew up in it a few years closer to those years than Mitch Glazer, so maybe I just remember it better. Hey, he got the series made, whereas I've just had this stuff in my head for 50 years, so I'll definitely give him some credit for portraying the atmosphere. Unfortunately though, he's just objectively inaccurate on a number of points where he really didn't need to be. Those are probably things that only a nitpicker like me would care about, but, to me and other Miami Beach people of the era, those things might matter. The worst part, though, is just that the characters and the story are boring, just the opposite of the reality.

So, I watched episodes 1 & 2 and then chucked it after the beginning of episode 3 which showed the girls at the 1959 beauty pageant dancing The Twist. Unfortunately, no one danced The Twist until mid-1960 when Hank Ballard's original version came out, and then it really became big with the Chubby Checker #1 version later in 1960. I spent a whole lot of time working on picking up tourist girls in teen dances in those hotels, and I screwed up my back twisting too much at one hotel bar mitzvah and had to miss a day of school. Also, my father had the first rock and roll club on The Beach, so maybe I'm a bit sensitive about the music stuff.

That's another thing- they talk about "Miami" in Magic City. Sorry, but people said "Miami Beach", not Miami. I'm serious, because Miami was this place across the water somewhere in the South of the US. It was another universe that people only visited for sports events. Miami Beach was its own world, and New York was really the next stop in those years before freeway exits. No big thing, but it just irked me, as did a bunch of things in the earlier episodes.

In episode 1, the restaurant in the hotel can't function pre-New Years 1958-59 because all of the Cuban kitchen staff are preoccupied with the events in Havana. Sorry, but the staff would definitely have been black, not Cuban, as hardly any Cubans had come across yet. I remember in 1958 when the first Cuban came into our school wearing a white suit, and I became his first friend. I used to go over to his house, one of the last houses still on the beach, and they had all kinds of weapons and adults arguing in Spanish. Although no one will ever know, his father, Eladio del Valle, was most likely key in the Kennedy assassination. He was found in his car with a bullet in his head on the same day as David Ferrie was found dead in New Orleans.

The owner's son, Stevie, has a build that only comes from weight-room workouts, and weight rooms didn't exist then. The only gyms then were places that boxers worked out, like the 5th Street Gym where I'd go to watch Cassius Clay. When my father took me to the spa at the Fontainebleau, there was no place to work out. The guys got a rubdown while getting their nails done with clear polish. The closest thing to exercise was walking into the steam room. No one in those pre-steroid, pre-workout days, except for a few very odd muscle guys, had developed lats or triceps. Even pro football players didn't use weights, as they thought that it would make you "musclebound".

The owner's wife talks about "stress". Not a concept yet. The Eames Management chairs in his office weren't commercially available yet. More importantly, Frank Sinatra opened cold, no warm-up act or big build-up! I remember sneaking into the Boom Boom Room to see Sinatra, and it just wasn't like that. Actually, when someone asks me where I grew up, I still often say, "The Boom Boom Room".

In episode 2, the guy orders "extra-lean corned beef"!! Heresy! Now, maybe Glazer was just intending that to be some kind of joke, as the guy ordering wasn't Jewish? However, I don't think that anyone ordered extra-lean anything in those days, and especially not corned beef. Then they make a big thing about the daughter's bas mitzvah, and she says, "Everybody I know has her bas mitzvah!" Absolutely wrong. Not in 1959. I doubt if one Jewish girl in a hundred had a bas mitzvah. Then, grandpa tells the daughter that he'll take her on the rides at Fun Fair. Sorry, no rides at Fun Fair other than the mechanical horsie for 3-year-olds.

A somewhat less nitpicky thing is that the big mob guys didn't live in big mansions! Meyer Lansky and "Trigger Mike" Copolla, the Italian boss at the time, both lived in modest homes without gates. As I remember, Copolla's did have bullet-proof glass in the living room that faced the street right across from our junior high school, but it was just a normal 50's house. Miami Beach definitely had big fancy houses and cars, but the mob guys kept a low profile, although everyone knew who they were. My "fraternity", Knights, had the sons of the of some of those mob guys. The dads were nice enough to me, though they did things worse than anything shown in Magic City. My friends died early.

Well, enough of my kvetching for now. Maybe I will watch the rest of the season, just because it's playing in my head whether I watch it or not.