Magic City can thank certainly one of its greatest boosters for a new docuseries concerning the institution.
“Magic City: An American Fantasy,” which debuts Friday on Starz, is billed as explores “the untold stories behind Atlanta’s most influential Black cultural hub, Magic City.”
The five-part docuseries options Shaquille O’Neal, rappers T.I., Killer Mike and Drake, in addition to and producer/songwriter Jermaine Dupri, amongst different outstanding names.
Drake and Dupri are producers of the venture.
Series creator Cole Brown got here up with the thought whereas working with Dupri on the producer’s ebook and listening to the numerous tales he had about Magic City.
“I wasn’t ever really thinking about it being a documentary,” Dupri advised NCS. “It’s something that I talk about so regularly because it’s my real life.”
He shares a story in the collection about going to Magic City each Monday and his former girlfriend, singer Janet Jackson, demanding to go along with him.
Those kinds of tales intrigued Brown, a author who is aware of a fascinating narrative when he sees it.
“I live in New York and Studio 54 is still legendary. Studio 54 was open for like, somewhere between three and five years. And I was thinking about what is our Studio 54?,” Brown advised NCS. “I was like wait a second. This little club in Atlanta been open for 40 years. And it’s been at the top of its game for 40 years.”
Magic City was based in 1985 by Michael “Mr. Magic” Barney, who nonetheless owns it. Those tuning in will study that he didn’t instantly discover success.
Barney struggled for a few years and was helped when Atlanta Hawks basketball participant Dominique Wilkins began bringing a few of his fellow gamers.
Wilkins jokes in the docuseries that the club grew to become the “sixth man” on the Hawks staff. He would deliver visiting gamers from opposing groups to get together at Magic City, aiming to put on them out earlier than they performed his staff.
The partying and the flexibility for dancers to be legally, absolutely nude in Atlanta helped draw in the crowds. Music at Magic City additionally performed a position.
It was such an integral half that many credit score the club with serving to to present rise to Southern hip hop. It attracted lots of the artists who would go on to develop into superstars and acted as a testing floor for his or her tunes.
In different phrases, if the strippers at Magic City favored your music, it was most likely destined to be a hit.
Brown stated he hopes his collection challenges a few of the perceptions folks could have concerning the Atlanta hotspot.
“If you come to this documentary and then you leave it and you say, you know what, that’s not what I thought it was, that business owner is not who I thought he was,” Brown stated. “And those girls who are some of the most accomplished, independent, strongest women I’ve ever seen, they are not who I thought they were. That city is not what I thought it was. If you have your expectations challenged, then I succeeded.”
Dupri stated it’s his need for the world to “understand this is our culture.”
“When we talk about Atlanta, most people talk about the political background, Mayor Maynard Jackson, President Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr. and all of these other things,” he stated. “But we also have a street culture, a real culture in the city and this is part of that culture. I want people to accept that and stop acting like it’s something degrading to women. This is a lifestyle in the land.”