Miami Vice has an iconic, foundational myth: famed NBC entertainment executive Brandon Tartikoff, in a brainstorming meeting with series co-creator Anthony Yerkovich at some point in the early 1980s, wrote a brief phrase on a napkin: “ MTV Cops.” Yerkovich read it, it formed the basis for the show, and the rest was history. To commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the film and celebrate the series that inspired it, here are 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Miami Vice. The film, the result of a troubled production and bad word of mouth ahead of its release, was a modest box office hit, and has been defended by a small but passionate coterie of critics and other fans. Years after Miami Vice went off the air, one of its executive producers, Michael Mann, directed a rebooted movie version, also called Miami Vice, which was released on July 28, 2006. Miami Vice also popularized the “five o’ clock shadow" beard stubble look, and featured Miami detectives in sunglasses years before Horacio Crane pulled it off on CSI: Miami. The characters favored pastel colors, white jackets over t-shirts, and other clothes from noted Italian designers. The series was very much a piece of its time, and it had a great influence on the fashion and culture of the late 1980s. Running five seasons on NBC, from 1984 to 1989, the show featured Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as Crockett and Tubbs, a pair of Miami-Dade detectives, often working undercover on drug cases. And honestly, my favorite movie in general.No TV series defined the 1980s quite like Miami Vice. In my eyes, Michael Mann's greatest film. Their first moment alone together, in a speedboat on the way to Havana, it almost seems that if they keep coasting along the water, they'll reach whatever it is they're seeking. An ethereal entity that lies beyond the liquid-blue horizon. It is the one aspect that Crockett and Isabella think they can control, something beyond routine deals and payouts and drug shipments. That's what makes the relationship between Crockett and Isabella so tantalizing, so fierce in its sexuality. The modern world is spoken in code, which Mann explores in literal terms in Blackhat. There's no room for error when you're pretending to be just one small piece of the puzzle. The environment is constantly threatening to consume without remorse.īut as experienced as Tubbs and Crockett are, they are wading among the waves near the beach, nowhere near the furthest depths of the ocean, which offers a complex criminal network of insurmountable vastness.
Their physicality is unique - you can feel Tubbs and Crockett slipping deeper and deeper down into the water, each of them in over their head. Not only is the environment given a spiritual heft, an immediacy of motion, but characters are detached, given their own space to occupy while still perpetually under attack. With digital, Miami Vice is free to explore the setting in an entirely new way, reviling in sunbaked daylight and the immaterial colors of nighttime.
The digital photography not only provides a remarkable depth-of-field, to truly "see into the night" as Mann has described, but an abstraction of a narrative that has long been re-worked to satisfy the formal qualities of the photochemical process. Michael Mann respects the intelligence of his audience - this is an 135 million dollar blockbuster for adults, with a specific angle of professionalism that explodes in moments of brutality and passion. An economy manifested in a language of illegal tasks and intel, of which the audience is tasked to figure out and decipher. What stuck out on this viewing is the commitment to realism: how a car and the people inside are torn to shreds by a 50 'cal sniper rifle, or blood splashing on the lens in the final shootout, or the in-depth mechanics of the drug trade. The flowers were sent by the enemy, and the carnal romance is merely a snapshot of truth within a game of lies and deception. There is no future for these characters in this line of work. How fractured identities and lack of trust provide the fundamentals of an occupation in constant flux, each moment operating in the now, with time and probability forever in play. The sensory overload is an expression of the vividness of undercover work. These are but a few of Michael Mann's calculated images given a feverish intensity in the first fifteen minutes - a hyper-real display of life on the edge, with the environment as immediate as the job. And the smear of blood on the asphalt after a suicide on a stretch of highway. Then, a nightclub rooftop illuminated by a magenta sky. In the director's cut, he begins the film with a boat race torn between layers of water and air. It's so enrapturing, you just want to throw your arms forward and jump head-first into the screen. Whenever I revisit Miami Vice, my love for cinema is rekindled, ignited like a cool-blue flame.