In news that will probably upset Tom Hanks, Starz has ordered 10 episodes of producer (and Scrooged co-writer) Mitch Glazer’s Magic City, a 1960s-set drama about the collusion of mobsters, CIA agents, and Rat Pack-era entertainers set in Miami—the same general milieu, in other words, as James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, which Hanks' Playtone production company has supposedly been developing as a potential miniseries or full-blown series for HBO since around 2008.
To be fair, Magic City will mostly sidestep the D.C. and Cuban angles and limit its scope to a single swanky Miami hotel, while also incorporating a broader mix of family drama and interracial tensions than Ellroy’s story. But there’s no denying it will cover much of the same ground, i.e. the wake of Fidel Castro angering the Mafia by shutting down casinos in Havana, the tensions that spilled over into anti-JFK sentiment (and quite possibly his assassination), and the commingling of the criminal underworld and the men hired to investigate them in smoky nightclubs filled with showgirls and those fancy cocktails with the little umbrellas in them. Ah, well. Perhaps Tom Hanks shouldn’t have spent so much time playing soldiers.