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N MIAMI CONDO NEWS — All About Condo Living in the Magic City — Edited by Heinz Dinter, PhD |
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Same vice — but quite a different Miami July 25, 2006 • Miami Vice the movie shows a city that’s grown up and gotten more sophisticated since the 1980s TV show. In the 16 years since Miami Vice went off the air, Florida’s population has swelled by six million people, South Beach is no longer known primarily as a haven for retirees and bohemian artists, and the only time you will likely catch anyone wearing a sky-blue blazer over a pink T-shirt is on Halloween. It makes sense, then, that the Miami seen in Michael Mann’s new Miami Vice, a $135 million movie spinoff of the classic (and now kitschy) TV cop show, is drastically different from the city that popped from televisions around the world in the 1980s. Instead of pastel hues, colorful Art Deco architecture and views of sun-baked beaches, the new Miami Vice favors industrial neon, downtown skyscraper architecture and a palette heavy on blacks and blues. Shot on high-definition digital cameras, the film’s cinematography often looks grainy and drained of color — a marked contrast to the vivid, MTV-slick style of the TV show. If Miami came off as an undiscovered paradise on TV, then the film portrays the city as an adolescent now grown up: more mature, developed and decidedly edgier and more dangerous. Mann says that’s partly because of the city’s economic growth over the past two decades. “If you were to ask me what the biggest difference in Miami between now and then was, I’d say just add a zero,” says the director, who will attend a red-carpet premiere of Miami Vice tonight at the Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach in advance of Friday’s theatrical opening. “What cost a million dollars then now costs $10 million. It’s a different city. And although there’s obviously still a huge Cuban-American population there, the dominant influence now is South American. “It’s fabulously rich people from Venezuela, people from Brazil with $25 million beach houses. It’s really insane. I haven’t been to Dubai, but there’s more big money in Miami than I’ve seen anywhere else in the world.” Latin American stops Befitting that ethnic flavor, the plot of Miami Vice sends undercover police officers Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) on the trail of drug dealers responsible for the deaths of two federal agents, with stops in Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic (standing in for Havana). Noticeably absent from the film, though, is Miami’s most popular destination: photogenic South Beach, the neighborhood whose current incarnation the original Miami Vice helped build. That exclusion, Mann says, was intentional. “We shot in South Beach when South Beach was flophouses and very expensive retirement hotels,” he says. “The real estate was worth nothing: A lot of it was abandoned or falling apart. The show wound up popularizing it, real estate went up and it became this kind of hot international place. But this is all old news. I didn’t want to go back to that.” Instead, Mann chose to focus on a side of the city that, if not quite as glamorous, is, he believes, its most crucial facet today: international shipping. “If you’re going to deal with what Miami is today, you have to go real high-end, really muscular,” Mann says. “Big shipping, container ports, the biggest container cranes in the United States. It’s a super-horsepower fueled economy. There was an opening sequence in the film [since deleted] that will probably show up on the DVD in which we started off with an offshore powerboat race that brings you into a big-money, expensive marina. That’s kind of educational about what Miami is today.” Supplanting that maritime economy is what Mann calls a visual aesthetic, very different than the 1980s, of “things being white, very light and transparency. That’s the look of Miami right now: Open to the sky, open to fabulous views of the ocean and clouds going by, open to the weather.” Weather factors That weather, of course, can be treacherous. Last year’s shooting of Miami Vice took place during the most active hurricane season in history, which kept South Florida on alert. Although the film crew suffered several storm-related delays and setbacks (including a direct hit on their Brickell Avenue headquarters by Hurricane Wilma), Mann says he never had to halt production outright. Jeff Peel, director of Miami-Dade Mayor’s Office of Film and Television, says the filming of Miami Vice pumped $27 million into the city’s economy, making it one of the biggest Hollywood productions to ever shoot here. He points out that despite growing concerns circulating in the movie industry that the high cost of hurricane insurance will hurt film production throughout Florida, the Miami Vice crew was able to handle whatever blew their way. “There is always a potential problem of being shut down. But because we have such a wealth of experience with hurricanes, and since they announce themselves before they arrive, a lot can be done to mitigate the problems,” Peel says. City officials worked closely with the Miami Vice crew after the storms, racing to restore power to neighborhoods where filming was scheduled to take place. Any Hollywood production that comes to South Florida is a boon to the local economy, but the potential benefits of Miami Vice extend far beyond the cash the filmmakers spent while they were here. “The TV series helped define Miami for people who had never been here, and to some degree, the film has the opportunity to do the same,” Peel says. “Whenever you talk to anyone from around the world and say you’re from Miami, if they know nothing else they know Miami Vice. “That conjures up all kinds of images of what the city looks like, and to redefine the city for the current era and say here’s what Miami looks like in 2006 will be helpful for tourism.” Source: www.MiamiHerald.com
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