Big-screen images of Vegas not always the real deal

Seeing's believing. Unless, of course, you think you're seeing Las Vegas on the big screen.

That's because a lot of movies that purport to be made in Vegas are anything but.

In the most recent example, the current road-trip comedy-drama "Bonneville," the title Pontiac pulls up to the Strip's venerable Riviera. Yet the movie's starring trio (Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Joan Allen) filmed their casino scenes far from the Strip -- in the northeast Nevada town of West Wendover, just west of the Utah border along Interstate 80.

But at least they visited the Silver State. That's more than we can say for the recent, Oscar-nominated "Charlie Wilson's War," in which star Tom Hanks -- playing the '80s good-time-Charlie congressman of the title -- is seen frolicking, and not alone, in a Strip hotel fantasy suite. But did any part of the scene actually take place somewhere in the vicinity of the Strip? Of course not.

To quote the movie's press notes: "On the Paramount Pictures back lot, (production designer Victor) Kempster designed a debauched Las Vegas hotel suite, with a giant hot tub and panoramic view of the Strip that visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund would create. Black, gold, mirror and crystal -- with Greco-Roman motifs -- the design embodied Vegas as the heyday Sin City."

Inevitably, some movies have to create their own private Las Vegas. Last year's "Resident Evil: Extinction" had to construct its own Strip in Mexico -- because the movie's set in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, mostly reclaimed by the desert, where familiar Strip landmarks emerge, "Planet of the Apes"-style, from the shifting sands.

But that's far from the only attempt to re-create Las Vegas for cinematic purposes. The 2001 remake of "Ocean's Eleven" showcased Bellagio and other Las Vegas locations. But when it came time to shoot last year's "Ocean's Thirteen," the cast and crew spent less time in Las Vegas and far more on a Warner Bros. soundstage.

"It was beautiful," producer Jerry Weintraub says of "Thirteen's" palatial casino set. "We hated to take it down." But the paparazzi-magnet appeal of the movie's all-star cast -- led by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino and Matt Damon -- "made it difficult to shoot here," Weintraub explains. (Not only in Las Vegas, he added, but "in Pittsburgh.")

Crowd control isn't the only reason for a Vegas movie to avoid Vegas, however.

The budget to shoot 1995's Oscar-winning "Leaving Las Vegas" was so low ($4 million) that director Mike Figgis shot local exteriors without a permit -- and filmed casino interiors on the cheap in Laughlin.

Another 1995 release, the notorious "Showgirls," spent time at Vegas locations from Cheetah's to the now-imploded Stardust. When it came time to shoot its jaw-droppingly over-the-top production numbers, though, "Showgirls" shifted to Lake Tahoe.

A similar split occurred in 2003's much-better "The Cooler." Except for some exterior and aerial shots, the role of the Shangri-La, the movie's fictional fading casino, was played by Reno's shuttered Golden Phoenix.

Anytime you shoot in Las Vegas, "it's difficult 'cause they're running the floor," explains "Cooler" co-star Ron Livingston. With "the lights, the cameras, the noise, it's tough to shoot in a casino." At least an operating one.

Sometimes a movie can't film in Las Vegas because Las Vegas doesn't look like that anymore, as when the 1986 coming-of-age-in-the-Atomic-Age drama "Desert Bloom" had to re-create 1950 Las Vegas in Tucson, Ariz.

The same thing happened to 1991's "Bugsy," featuring Warren Beatty in the title role of mobster (and Vegas visionary) Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. "Bugsy's" Oscar-winning art direction included a full-scale replica of the fledgling Flamingo -- constructed in the California desert near Palm Springs. (Another 1991 movie featuring Siegel as a character, "The Marrying Man," fashioned an ersatz El Rancho from an abandoned restaurant in Lancaster, Calif.)

But let's not overlook Beatty's first Vegas-movie-not-filmed-in-Vegas: 1970's "The Only Game in Town," which starred Elizabeth Taylor as a world-weary showgirl who falls for a piano-playing gambler (or should that be a gambling piano player?). Beatty replaced Frank Sinatra in the role.

Lucky Frank. Because Taylor wanted to be near then-husband Richard Burton (who was shooting another movie in Europe), "The Only Game in Town" wound up filming not in Las Vegas but in Paris (the real one, in France), where 20th Century Fox spent a bundle building detailed Vegas sets for the almost three-month shoot.

After all that, however, the production still had to leave the City of Lights and come to the City of Glitter for another 10 days of production.

"The Only Game in Town" tanked big time, but at least the studio survived. (You'd think Fox would have learned its lesson after Taylor and Burton's "Cleopatra" -- which began filming in 1960, hit theaters in 1963 and finally broke even in 1973-- almost bankrupted the studio.)

No, that dubious honor is reserved for "Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 musical "One From the Heart," which racked up such massive debts Coppola was forced to declare bankruptcy.

An almost heartbreaking attempt to revive the innocence of the great American musical, Coppola shot the eye-popping "One From the Heart" entirely in his newly acquired American Zoetrope studio. As Teri Garr, Frederic Forrest, Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski fall in and out of love in a glittering neon Pair-a-dice that frequently looks more real than the real thing, Coppola conjures a dream Vegas, a shimmering fantasyland that could never exist, except on film.

Of course, I didn't know that when I saw "One From the Heart" in London in 1982 -- more than a year before I moved here to join the Review-Journal staff. It was my first vision of Las Vegas -- and I've been looking for that Vegas ever since.

Then again, it seems strangely appropriate for filmmakers to fake it when portraying a town that so lovingly embraces artifice and illusion.

Contact movie critic Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0272.