Drake’s Strip Club Docuseries Will “Walk A Fine Line” When It Comes To Nudity
Producer Drake’s docuseries on the evolution of Atlanta’s famed Magic City strip club, Magic City: An American Fantasy, made its debut Monday (March 11) at SXSW in Austin, with fellow producer Cole Brown and director Charles Todd fielding questions following the screening.
“Was there anything too explicit to put in the documentary,” they were asked of the project, with Brown revealing they had to “walk a fine line” when it came to nudity, even with the doc’s subject matter being risqué by nature. They were also sure not to make the series excessively vulgar.
“We wanted to walk a fine line with nudity, in particular — where you can’t make a documentary about a strip club and not have any nudity, it just isn’t true to form — and you’re trying to tell the true story,” Brown said, as per Variety. “At the same time, we didn’t want it to be salacious, gratuitous. We wanted to use it in such a way that you’re getting an image of what this place is. But if you go to Magic City, you see all the anatomy.”
The logline for the series — which has yet to lock down a distributor or platform — reads as follows: “In 1985, phone salesman Michael Barney — friends call him Mr. Magic — puts his slick-talking gift to work, opening a small strip club in Atlanta. He plays DJ, bartender and bouncer while his only dancer separates men from their money. But soon, the celebrities arrive. Athletes from Michael Jordan to Shaq clamber to the club, DC The Brain Supreme mints an iconic hit record from the DJ booth and Outkast tests songs by watching the girls dance. Within a few years, Magic City would become the most famous strip club in Atlanta, and soon, the world. But when Mr. Magic gets sent away to federal prison, the empire he’s built may crumble.”
The doc is also produced by Jermaine Dupri, who is also attached to another docuseries based on Atlanta culture, Hulu’s Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told.
Like Brown, Dupri emphasized that the salaciousness associated with the event shouldn’t’ be the main focus, telling Tamron Hall, “My vision of Freaknik is really a story about the South and Atlanta. It’s not really a story about what everybody keeps talking about. I don’t like that part because I feel like it’s a little disrespectful because I’m just telling a story of Atlanta, right? And how Atlanta was built into the place that it is today. People came to Atlanta through Freaknik and they stayed. I say that in ‘Welcome to Atlanta.’ … and that’s how Atlanta has become this multi-cultural place. Freaknik plays one of the biggest roles in that period.”
Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told is set to premiere on Hulu March 23.
More from VIBE.com
