There was a purple tulip in a vase on every table, each individually spotlit from above. They filled the basement with tropical fish aquariums and a purple, blue and green color scheme. But on that day, Vice producers had to create a chic club from scratch. The basement would later be the site of Sempers, one of the earliest velvet-rope clubs. Kinerk recalls a scene he watched being filmed in the basement of the Waldorf Towers on Ocean Drive. “They made everything look fabulous,” Kinerk said. “It showed me I was really on the right track.” Allman, who was researching his seminal book, Miami: City of the Future, when Vice became the hottest TV and fashion influence in the world. “There was before the Miami Vice premiere, and there was after, and everyone said, ‘Wow.’ It just happened,” recalled journalist T.D. It didn’t matter that this TV-Miami did not quite yet exist - it would continue to seduce millions of people around the world long after Miami Vice ended its U.S. It was a new cinematic way of making television, and definitely not your grandfather’s Miami. No one had ever seen anything like this on TV before. Thus attired, Crockett and sidekick Ricardo Tubbs were then sent out in a Ferrari or a cigarette boat on high-speed chases that almost always ended in a fireworks of gunfights and explosions. They dressed the good-looking, multiracial cast in dazzling tropical shirts and Versace silk and linen jackets, in Crockett’s case draped in devil-may-care fashion over T-shirts and unbelted slacks. They recut the familiar Miami film reel of water, flamingos, palms and sky to include the previously unseen or unappreciated, and not just those old Deco buildings, but also picturesquely seedy warehouses, the ultra-modern mansions where drug lords invariably dwelled, and - here was something new - the glass skyscrapers that had started popping up along Brickell Avenue.Īll of this they saturated in subtropical colors and set to pulsating music a la MTV. They decorated beaches and hotel pools that hadn’t seen anyone under 70 in two decades with crowds of attractive young extras in abbreviated swimsuits. Obeying producer Michael Mann’s famous edict - “no earth tones” - they painted over the beige-and-brown that dulled some Art Deco trophies, revealing splendid facades. Producers and art designers created decadently luxurious dance clubs, bars and restaurants in the bare lobbies and basements of Deco hotels where none of that existed. The show not only helped save South Beach, broadcasting the architectural charms of its long-neglected Deco hotels and apartment houses to millions around the globe at a time when city fathers wanted nothing more than to tear it all down for condos, Miami Vice practically invented the idea of South Beach. It’s a remarkable trajectory, from South Beach flophouses to $1,000-a-night rooms at the Setai, that Miami Vice played no small role in launching.
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