Northwest Las Vegas resident says life inspired movie character

Les Grossman grew up on the East Coast watching television westerns such as "The Roy Rogers Show" and "The Lone Ranger."

"I was always thankful that I grew up in ... Alexandria, Virginia," he said. "It was horse country; I still dream about the wide-open spaces."

Since then, the longtime concert promoter and entertainment executive's life has galloped at full speed.

One might say it was wild horses that brought him to Nevada. In the late 1980s, he took an interest in the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It protected the approximately 42,000 wild horses in 10 western states, many of them in Nevada.

"I worked over the telephone with the gentleman who ran the agency out of Washington," Grossman said. "He connected me with the people who ... ran the adoption center north of Reno, to the people who ran the federal prison in Cañon City, Colorado, where prisoners 'gentled' horses for (adoption). I was impressed with the dedication of the federal employees and only witnessed excellent treatment of the horses."

He officially moved west to Nevada in 1998, not long after purchasing 320 acres of land in Diamond Valley, just north of Eureka.

"It was a huge parcel of raw desert in the middle of nowhere," he said. "Everyone thought I was totally nuts, including the lawyers (handling) the transaction."

Wild horses roam that area and are a natural part of the landscape. He is developing the land into large parcels that are less apt to affect the horses.

In the early 2000s, his wild horse interest morphed into a dog fancier passion. Grossman regularly drove out to the Lone Mountain area in his Jeep to train his bird dogs for American Kennel Club field events.

His first flat-coated retriever, Trooper, became an AKC confirmation champion the spring of 2001. Because of that success, Grossman was approached by breeders who were completing a 25-year breeding program for their "pick bitch" out of their retirement litter. The result was Angee, a dog who took the 2005 Best in Show Award for the Flat-Coated Retriever Society of America National Specialty and later became a Hall of Famer.

Grossman made a name for himself in 1969 when he promoted a landmark concert, matching Led Zeppelin with The Who at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md.

"The reality of producing shows like that is just like taking an injection of stress," he said. "Keep in mind, I'm still only 21 at this point, and it was Led Zeppelin's first tour. They are being interviewed backstage before going on by the Time magazine interviewer, and I'm observing this ... and all of a sudden, the interview stops. Everybody looks up at me. And they see that I'm kind of observing them and ask me who I was. And I said 'Oh, don't worry about me. I'm just the guy paying you.' And I walked off."

Back then, his youth meant that not everyone saw him as a powerhouse promoter, so he took on a facade as a tough negotiator, given to outbursts of rage and F-bombs.

"More often than not, I was dealing with business people who would typically be considerably older than me, and that's where I would be this persona of being 'the man,' " he said. "I would be hardcore, just in the sense that, 'Here I am, and, yeah, don't mess with me.' "

His maniacal style led to Tom Cruise donning a bald cap and body padding to play a character of the same name in the 2008 comedy film "Tropic Thunder." Grossman said he had no idea he was to be portrayed in the movie when he went to see it.

"I'm seeing a character that's using my name that looks so close to me it could be a clone and doing what I did in my original profession as an adult," he said. "And there it is. So, I had in the back of my mind, you know our minds will tell us a lot of things if we give it the chance, (wondering) how this all came together. It was a cameo thing. Typically, cameos come and go, and they're forgotten about. They can be cool while they happen. But that one took on a life of its own."

Cruise later played the character at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, appearing on stage in a segment with Jennifer Lopez. Between the double exposure and the movie becoming a sort of cult favorite, things grew from there.

Hollywood screenwriter Michael Bacall is working on a script based on the character of Les Grossman.

This March, Bacall told The Hollywood Reporter that he was transforming Cruise's character into a multidimensional person for the leading role.

Craig Means, a Las Vegas public relations agent, called his client a vibrant individual and said Cruise captured "the essence of Les. He's not as extravagant as Tom Cruise portrayed it, of course. He's refined himself quite a bit these days, studying the Kabbalah and deep into his religion ... There's nobody who lives close to him who doesn't know who Les is. He's a very outgoing person."

Now that the producer/promoter lives in the northwest part of Las Vegas, he's busy with new projects and keeping an eye out for the wild horses whenever he goes to his land near Eureka.

One of his projects is detailing his life in his new book, "The Mystery Of Les Grossman: A Real Hollywood Fable... Or Is It? Told By Les Grossman; NOT Tom Cruise or Ben Stiller." It's available at amazon.com.

Contact Summerlin/Summerlin South View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 387-2949.