Kelly Lynch and the Magic of Magic City
Kelly Lynch started with a career in modeling working for the prestigious Elite Modeling Agency, but quickly transitioned into a full-time acting career. Memorable roles in great films like “Drugstore Cowboy”, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine” (which earned her an Independent Spirit Award), “Charlies Angels” and “Roadhouse”, “The L Word” and now “Magic City” cemented her career as an actress. This week she came in to talk about the new Starz series, “Magic City”, which seems to be shaping up to be the next big drama series that everyone will be talking about. Excerpts from that interview appear below.
Ron Bennington: Your show really plays out like a major budget Hollywood film.
Kelly Lynch: I felt like I was watching the next episode of The Godfather.
Ron Bennington: It’s got that Godfather 2 feel about it.
Kelly Lynch: Well they shot with the lenses they used on The Godfather, weirdly enough. We don’t use film anymore, you know, it’s all digital. And our amazing DP Gabriel Berenson said I have a way of making this look gorgeous, and he put these lenses on. And Alex Rocco who played Moe Green plays Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s dad. And one of the guys went over from the camera team said, we’re using the Godfather lenses that shot you all those years ago, and he just got a tear in his eyes.
Ron Bennington: He’s so terrific in this. You’ve got so many great actors in this and the sets are….
Kelly Lynch: …off the charts
Ron Bennington: Yeah, they’re ridiculous.
Kelly Lynch: I’ve done 200 million dollar movies and not seen sets like this. There’s usually a missing wall, part of a ceiling that’s gone. Our sets you can drive up, walk through this giant lobby, go down hallways, into hotel rooms, into coffee shops, into kitchens. They can do these Scorsese tracking shots…we feel like we’re making The Godfather. Like a huge huge movie every week that we go to work. It’s an experience that for me, as an actor is so thrilling and so incredible.
Ron Bennington: Well this is a real step up for Starz.
Kelly Lynch: Well that’s Chris Albrecht. He came from HBO. He’s the one that brought us Sopranos and Sex and the City and all those great shows and now he’s doing the same thing for Starz. With Boss and Spartacus has always been great and now Magic City and he’s developing some amazing programming. And he has a very high standard. He is a really good storyteller and he has an incredible respect for talent.
Ron Bennington: And he turned around and said “I want a second season” before this thing even rolls out.
Kelly Lynch: We couldn’t believe it. On the one hand, we were thinking they would be fools not too. But it’s a really big commitment. This is a period show, shot on location in Miami on these huge stages and around South Beach and the parts of Miami that are still Rat Pack Miami. There’s a commitment to doing a show at that level with this kind of talent and this kind of writing and this kind of storytelling. It’s very political– it’s a gangster show in some ways. And he really has been completely supportive of what we want to do there and he loves it.
Ron Bennington: What’s great about the show is that it’s about a million different things– all running through that one character, but it becomes about family, it becomes about business, it becomes about gangsters, it becomes about style. I mean the men had fantastic style then.
Kelly Lynch: …civil rights, the politics, the fall of Cuba…
Ron Bennington: And the fact that you take this, and its in such a different type of state. Miami is like it’s own country.
Kelly Lynch: Absolutely. It was a city that was built on a dream. There wasn’t anything there, they created the thing. And it keeps recreating itself. Every era claims Miami as its own. They were trying to get gambling there again, and they just shot it down. It’s always been about that kind of thing– selling a dream there.
Ron Bennington: Well Miami could have been Las Vegas. And kind of was like Vegas before air travel became very very easy.
Kelly Lynch: Well it’s the same…Meyer Lansky. He was running everything in Miami; he was running a lot of the hotels in Cuba. The hotels that were built there were wired and ready for gambling…from day one. And obviously the people there keep stopping it. And then they went to Las Vegas to get that going. But it still is kind of swirling, the idea of gambling.
Ron Bennington: The other thing that works out for you is that Miami got run down for a while then built back up. But those same buildings are there on South Beach. The fact that they didn’t get torn down in the 70s…
Kelly Lynch: Well there were two women that saved Miami.
Ron Bennington: Is that right?
Kelly Lynch: Barbara Capitman, and then there’s another woman whose name I have on the tip of my tongue, who’s now doing the Miami modern area where the design district is. There’s all these old groovy hotels. She saved, I think, eight hundred buildings. But yeah, Barbara Capitman. She’s now gone, she passed away, but she saved South Beach. There would be nothing but high-rise hotels there now. And it was incredible. My husband, Mitch Glazer, has a scene he set up a scene from his childhood with his grandparents and friends playing balalaikas and you know…
Ron Bennington: That’s Mitch’s home town and that’s why he wanted to come back and do this.
Kelly Lynch: Yeah. The idea for Magic City he wrote ten years ago and was thinking, this really should be a tv series, but it could be a movie. And Chris had the chance to read it and just fell in love with it and that was that. It’s so great, these are his stories. He was a kid who sat at a lunch counter and Meyer Lansky was sitting two seats away from him. The chandelier in our beautiful Lobby was the chandelier that Mitch’s dad spec’ed for the Eden Rock hotel, went to Cuba, had it made there and brought it back. And his dad’s 90 years old, and he came and looked up and saw the chandelier and said “that’s my chandelier Mitch,” and Mitch was going to surprise him and said, “I know Dad, we got it off e-bay.” It’s crazy.
Ron Bennington: Now it’s interesting to look back at these men and women and dig their style, but at the time, it’s what everybody was rebelling against. This whole era that took place, rock and roll has started but it’s foreign to these characters.
Kelly Lynch: My husband loves this weird melancholy rat pack time, you know Lenny Bruce, Dean Martin, Sinatra. It only lasted for a few years and then the 60s kicked in. You know it takes awhile for a decade to really become a decade. What we think of as the 50s actually went through to the early part of the 60s at least. But when it was over, it was really over and these were dinosaurs. But it was such a groovy cool time.
Ron Bennington: You know Larry King actually started doing radio down there after midnight just using those same guys that were performing in all those hotels. Can you imagine now if people thought, oh it’s 12:30 in the morning, let’s listen to great entertainment? People go to bed now.
Kelly Lynch: Absolutely. A publicist who worked at the Fountainbleau told my husband a story that Senator Kennedy used to fly up with three helicopters to the Fountainbleau. Three of the helicopters would hover, his would lower him down to the roof, he would get out, go have relations with Judith Exner who would then often have relations with one of the mob guys. And then he would fly back to Palm Beach and Jackie and his family. Everybody in the hotel knew what was going on and no one heard about it.
Ron Bennington: It was considered I guess ridiculous to talk about those types of things.
Kelly Lynch: You just didn’t do it.
Ron Bennington: You guys have got a phenomenal cast. Great great people who in my opinion, would always have to play period pieces. If you look at Danny Huston, he doesn’t look like he’s of this decade.
Kelly Lynch: He doesn’t. He’s the son of the great director John Huston, and Angelica Huston’s brother , and actually a dear family friend of ours. We’ve known Danny and his family forever and ever. And he has an old world way about him that is just fantastic. And does play one of the most dangerous and scary men I’ve ever seen as a character. Also so funny and so charming. I think he’s the water cooler character, where you’ll say, “oh my god did you see what Ben Diamond did last night?”
Ron Bennington: Yeah he’s going to be the cult figure, there’s no doubt about it. Because the weird thing about men is everybody has that fantasy of being the guy in the shadows. And he’s got that Huston voice. Do people even talk like that anymore?
Kelly Lynch: No they don’t.
Ron Bennington: You have to have a certain look to be in this show because modern people don’t look like they did fifty years ago.
Kelly Lynch: It’s a weird deal to be American and think, there was no better thing to be than an American– with the huge fins on the car, and the fur coats and the smoking the cigarettes. We were it. And the arrogance of it all! But it was also fun.
Ron Bennington: How many episodes are you guys gonna do.
Kelly Lynch: We did eight last year, we were renewed before we premiered, which was amazing. And we’re doing ten next year which is absolutely great. It’s like making ten movies which is quite a challenge at the level that we’re working at but I’m so happy to have two more episodes next year to keep telling the story.
Ron Bennington: Is Mitch writing them all?
Kelly Lynch: He wrote them all last year. He does have a writer’s room this year, but I think he’s using the guys right now as researchers because it’s so his story. But I’m hoping that he can let go of some of this and let some of them do some of the work. Because he’s so involved in everything. He cast all of us. He put the team together– the crew. He designed the opening credits which are magnificent. He’s on the set every day with us and I’ve never seen someone so involved.
Ron Bennington: Well he’s always led such an interesting life. I remember early on when he was with Belushi and Michael O’Donahue and Bill Murray. How does he find those places to be? I mean if we go back and look at the characters in this, what makes them kind of interesting is where they are, and who they’re with. And you look at Mitch whose writing this, and he’s lived this kind of life.
Kelly Lynch: When we got married the most amazing people got up and said “Mitch is my best friend.” He is a great friend and he’s a great listener, and one of the things that makes him a great writer is that he’s always put himself in the room with these exceptional people, often before they were super famous, but just…he recognizes talent and has lived an amazing life because of it. Look, Bill Murray went to our premier in LA, he loves the show. He’s very interested in playing a character next year. He is really after Mitch to do this for him. So we’ll see what happens. But people love working with him and love being a part of what he’s doing. You know, people like Bill Murray and Belushi, and Michael O’Donaghue his great writing partner and dear friend. That’s the kind of guy Mitch is and just the level of work that he’s interested in doing.
Ron Bennington: I remember Mitch wrote this article about John Belushi very very early on. And then it was years later that I figured out he was very young when he was doing it.
Kelly Lynch: He was like 23 years old. They were best friends and they were inseparable. It was for Crawdaddy Magazine. He was an editor at Crawdaddy and I think it was the most dangerous man in television. Which was a phrase that he coined that we use all the time now.
Ron Bennington: And everyone else was writing about Chevy at the time.
Kelly Lynch: Yeah, Chevy was the big star and Chevy’s great, but there was this other guy that Mitch just said, what about him? And they just became dear friends. It was in the era when journalists would follow you around for like four five days and you got a chance to know each other. One time Mitch came to LA to do an interview with George Harrison and George picked him up curbside at LAX. It’s crazy. Again he was in his early twenties and spent like four, five days with George. And his journalism was really interesting.
Ron Bennington: He was able to take that into fiction, but to have that background where you’re not just thinking about character and plot, but people. And I think that shows in Magic City. They’re individuals and they’re complex.
Kelly Lynch: Often in a show you hear one person’s voice mouthed through eight characters. I loved West Wing but I always thought– this is one guy.
Ron Bennington: Yeah, I always felt that way about Friends.
Kelly Lynch: It’s hard to do, to kind of get your voice and hear different…when Mitch writes, I hear him sometimes in his room– I hear him speaking out loud. And I can imagine he’s thinking, ‘is this how Ben Diamond would be talking?’ When he knows who his actors are, he dials it in so perfectly for who we are and who are voices are, that we feel like we don’t have to memorize. And that’s one of the ways actors tell whether or not the writing is good. You can not memorize that speech, it’s not organic, there’s something wrong. And we have so much to learn so quickly in television. For all of us, we were talking about it the other day, he really is in our heads or something.
Ron Bennington: So this is like getting this great movie role.
Kelly Lynch: Well movies are video games now.
Ron Bennington: Yeah, right. It is true isn’t it?
Kelly Lynch: There’s a handful of them that come out and it’s like, how did that ever get made? It’s painful. But premium cable is where actors want to work, and where stories are being told and where the great work is for all of us, whether you’re the crew, writer or an actor, that’s it.
Ron Bennington: It’s sexy, it’s dark, it’s got everything that people want to explore, and maybe we’ve got Bill Murray next year.
Kelly Lynch: Oh God, everybody would be just– oh we’re all like hoping. He’s the best! I’ve worked with him a couple of times and it’s the most fun you can have. And he’s a wonderful actor so it would be really great.
Ron Bennington: It’s Magic City, premiers April 6, 10pm on Starz. This is going to be, I think, the show we’re all going to be talking about.through out the summer. Thank you so much for stopping by. I’ll see you next time through.
========================================
You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? Here’s how to get a free trial subscription. For more information on Ron Bennington Interviews, click here.
Follow Magic City on twitter @MagicCity_Starz and you can visit them on their official home page here on Starz.
