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Sunday, November 30, 1997
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
The Silver State on the Silver Screen
By CAROL CLING
Review-Journal
FADE IN: EXTERIOR -- CARSON CITY -- DAY ... St. Patrick's Day, 1897. In an outdoor stadium, British challenger Bob Fitzsimmons and America's own James J. "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, the reigning titleholder, square off in Nevada's first legally sanctioned prizefight. At stake: the heavyweight championship of the world.
And, as it turned out, the Silver State's future on the silver screen. Movie audiences first glimpsed Nevada in filmed footage of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. (For the record, Fitzsimmons knocked Corbett out in the 14th round.)
Nevada's second turn before the cameras came in 1910, when Jack Johnson, the first black fighter to win the heavyweight crown, defeated ex-champ James Jeffries.
Then as now, boxing may have sparked public interest in Nevada.
But the movie medium's pioneers soon widened their focus to include other aspects of life in Nevada.
The state's third movie, made in 1913, re-created "The Tonopah Stampede for Gold" -- complete with guest appearances by then-Gov. Tasker L. Oddie and Jim Butler, who discovered the Mizpah and Butler mines.
Southern Nevada got into the act two years later with "The Hazards of Helen," a cliffhanger serial in which dauntless heroine Helen Holmes dodged danger from the fledgling town site of Las Vegas to "wild and romantic" desert expanses near Bard and Sloan.
In the decades since those wild and woolly days, Nevada has played host to hundreds of movies and television shows searching for prehistoric sites (1940's "One Million B.C."), 24th-century planets (1994's "Star Trek Generations") and virtually every setting in between.
Historical plaques commemorate many of those projects in the FilmWalk program organized by the Motion Picture Division of Nevada Commission on Economic Development.
Fittingly, the first FilmWalk plaque -- at the Carson City Sheriff's Department -- marks the site of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons bout.
Las Vegas' first FilmWalk marker, at the Fremont Street Experience, commemorates 1946's "Heldorado," a musical Western starring Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and the city's annual Helldorado rodeo celebration.
There's plenty more to commemorate throughout the state, from Best Picture Oscar winners (1988's "Rain Man,") to science-fiction spoofs ("Mars Attacks," 1996). More than 50 plaques have been sponsored by private donors so far; hundreds of other sites are available for sponsorship. A planned guidebook will list the sites, providing a Nevada movie tour covering the state's first century on screen.
That century includes a number of milestones.
The American Film Institute's 400 candidates for the top 100 movies made in the medium's first century include such Nevada-connected titles as "In Cold Blood" (1967), "The Godfather" (1972), "The Godfather Part II" (1974), "Melvin and Howard" (1980), "Rain Man" and 1995's "Casino" and "Leaving Las Vegas."
Cowboys and crooks, Martians and mobsters, secret agents and showgirls, divorcees and dreamers -- all have played major roles in almost 500 movies bearing the made-in-Nevada brand.
Through the years, however, Hollywood's attitude toward Nevada has shifted.
Initially, most filmmakers regarded Nevada as a convenient backdrop for wide-open Westerns -- unless they were focusing on Reno's rapidly growing divorce industry.
But with the construction of Hoover Dam and Las Vegas' increasing prominence as a "Sin City" playground for anything-goes pursuits, made-in-Nevada movies began to more directly reflect their setting.
Or, at least, Hollywood's often distorted views of Nevada.
The views could be postcard-pretty, as when Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret lead a scenic tour of Southern Nevada, from Glitter Gulch to Hoover Dam, in 1964's "Viva Las Vegas."
Or they could be brutal, as when "Casino" mobster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) explains the lay of the land, Las Vegas-style: "It's the desert where lots of the town's problems are solved. Lots of holes in the desert. And a lot of problems are buried in the holes."
Sometimes Nevada movie characters take the time to bask in the state's natural splendors, as when "Melvin and Howard's" unlikely highway buddies, blue-collar dreamer Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat) and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes (Jason Robards), roll down the windows of Dummar's battered truck after a sudden desert shower and inhale the intoxicating aroma of greasewood and sage.
"Nothin' like the smell of the desert after the rain," Hughes muses.
Occasionally, movie characters actually express the ambivalence that seems to come with the territory -- when the territory is Nevada.
In a key scene from the 1961 drama "The Misfits" -- written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, featuring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in their final screen roles and regarded by many as the quintessential Nevada movie -- a sardonic Reno divorcee played by Thelma Ritter toasts her home state.
"Here's to Nevada, the leave-it state," she says, hoisting a drink. "You got money you want to gamble, leave it here. You got a wife you want to get rid of, get rid of her here. Extra atom bomb you don't need? Blow it up here. Nobody's going to mind in the slightest. The slogan of Nevada is `Anything goes.' But don't complain if it went."
That cynical viewpoint crops up frequently throughout Nevada movie history.
Robert Redford, for example, has two made-in-Nevada movies to his credit: 1979's "The Electric Horseman" and 1993's "Indecent Proposal."
Both depict Nevada in general and Las Vegas in particular as a "huge, negative example of American consumerism, greed and waste," Redford said while on location for "Indecent Proposal."
Las Vegas' prevailing image is "often like a rich dessert dumped in your lap," Redford said. "But, when you think of it, that is very American."
The delicious temptations Nevada dangles in front of movie characters, residents and visitors alike, transform the state into "a moral testing ground," said Francisco Menendez, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who traces the trend in a chapter of "The Grit Beneath the Glitter," a book about Las Vegas to be published next year by the University of California Press.
When filmmakers set a movie in Nevada, the location provides "a special world," Menendez writes, "in which a movie character's fidelity, integrity and family are challenged by power, gambling and greed in a variable landscape of neon, desert or science-gone-wrong."
The moral tests can be comedic ("Honeymoon in Vegas' " reluctant groom-to-be Nicolas Cage "losing" fiancee Sarah Jessica Parker to crafty James Caan in a poker game) or dramatic (Cage, in an Oscar-winning portrayal, as a suicidal alcoholic who finds last-chance love in 1995's "Leaving Las Vegas").
Whether it's a smug yuppie (Albert Brooks) vainly trying to persuade a casino boss (Garry Marshall) to return his gambling losses in 1985's satire "Lost in America" or "The Amazing Colossal Man" (1957) battling the hideous consequences of above-ground atomic testing, Nevada provides a compelling setting for conflict.
Not to mention great images.
When writer-director Bert I. Gordon needed a larger-than-life locale for "The Amazing Colossal Man," Las Vegas was the logical choice.
"It was either that or Broadway," Gordon said. And Las Vegas' proximity to the Nevada Test Site made his main character's growth spurt not only topical but "very believable." (Or at least as believable as any movie about a 60-foot protagonist can be.)
Almost 40 years later, the makers of "Con Air" turned to Las Vegas rather than Washington, D.C., for the movie's climactic plane crash.
"It's a worldwide icon," producer Jerry Bruckheimer said of Las Vegas. "It attracts a lot of interest -- and it's exciting."
That built-in excitement reached its peak in "Ocean's Eleven," the 1960 Rat Pack caper that also ranks high on any list of quintessential made-in-Nevada movies.
Playing two shows at the Sands every night, filming every day, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop generated a "contagious" spirit of fun during the production, Bishop remembered.
"Somehow or other, you don't get tired when you're looking forward to it," Bishop explained. "That was the reason for the Rat Pack -- to not take things so seriously, to have a good time."
For millions of moviegoers, that good time helped make Las Vegas not just the entertainment capital of the world but the swingin'-est place in the universe.
In the beginning, however, filmmakers came to the Silver State "for every reason under the sun," said Gary DuVal, a master control engineer for a Reno television station who started researching Nevada film history for a TV news feature -- and, 10 years later, has compiled an as-yet-unpublished reference book on the subject.
Some came because "Nevada had more sunny days" than frequently foggy Los Angeles, DuVal noted. Some came because they "knew someone who had a ranch and said, `You can use it for free.' " Others opted to film in Nevada "because of the scenery."
Legendary director John Ford, for example, chose desert locations near Pyramid Lake for his 1924 Western "The Iron Horse" in part because "the area around L.A. had been saturated -- you couldn't look around (Southern California) without seeing scenery that had been in this movie or that movie," DuVal said. "And this was in 1924!"
Nevada's distinctive desert topography has stood in for hundreds of alternate sites in movies, representing this planet and others. ("I seen a picture of the moon once," battered "Misfits" rodeo rider Montgomery Clift muses. "Looked just like this.")
Every now and then, however, a movie captures a genuine slice of life on Planet Nevada.
Sometimes it's a starry-eyed dreamer searching for the pot of gold at the end of the neon rainbow. As hard-luck Melvin Dummar observed, "They didn't burn Rome down in one day -- you gotta keep plugging."
And sometimes it's a grizzled old-timer who knows when it's time to cash in.
"Misfits" cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable), for example, who hangs up his rope after one last, soul-shattering mustang hunt.
"It's like roping a dream now," he ruefully concluded. "I just gotta find another way to be alive -- if there is one."
In Nevada -- or, at any rate, the movie version of Nevada -- there's always another way.
And, no doubt, filmmakers will continue their quest to depict it as Nevada rides into its second century on the silver screen.
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