It’s bright. It’s superficial. It’s loud. It’s hot. It’s expensive. It’s a 24-hour debauched party if you happen to be a young, pretty person.
So many of the stereotypes people have about Los Angeles are shared with Las Vegas. And, ironically, those images exist largely because of the ways that Nevada’s biggest city is portrayed in Hollywood movies and TV series.
Kim Spurgeon, the director of filming commission Film Nevada, has come to expect it. “I take the line of all press is good press,” she says. Even though Southern Nevada has unique attributes, she acknowledges that “we do get a lot of the same tropes of storytelling that come to film here. Vegas often plays a character in these storylines, and that character can be very one-dimensional.”
Spurgeon says her organization is happy to help filmmakers create their versions of drunken bachelorette parties or slick gangster heists, but she is also delighted when productions find new and creative ways to use the city. And, this Emmy season, several nominated series did just that.
“Vegas is so intrinsically part of the Deborah Vance story,” says Lucia Aniello, the co-creator, director and writer of the HBO Max Emmy darling “Hacks,” in which the city plays home to Jean Smart’s glass-ceiling-shattering and business-savvy stand-up. “She never really had mainstream success as a comedian in New York and L.A. and she was able to find it in Vegas. And I think Vegas symbolizes a do-it-yourself ethos that Deborah Vance really believes in.”
Through “Hacks’” five seasons, Aniello and her co-creators Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, and their writing and production teams, have shown that even the “boring” sides of Vegas — the staff cafeterias or empty convention centers — can be made compelling in the right hands. In its most recent, and final, season, the comedy turned the city’s annual Housekeeping Olympics — an actual event organized by the Indoor Environmental Healthcare and Hospitality Assn. where the best and brightest vacuumers, moppers and bed makers prove it in various challenges — into a plot point. Another one involves Deborah with a new hotel, called the Diva, that isn’t part of the city’s main drag.
“Vegas is so known for hospitality, and we really wanted to highlight the way the city can take care of people,” Statsky says.
Similarly, she says Deborah’s plan to build something that’s not part of a big conglomerate emphasizes the character’s pluck, as well as her desire to return the city to a time where it felt more like “a neighborhood; or a bit more connectedness.”
“So much of the show is about human connection and how we connect to people through comedy,” Statsky says. “But it’s also about ways you connect through things like creating a space for them to gather. So that was something we felt was important to have her do this season.”
Las Vegas also finds its own ways to commemorate its marks on history and popular culture — another way it’s proved useful for filming. Creator Vince Gilligan’s Emmy-nominated postapocalyptic sci-fi series “Pluribus” focuses on a dozen or so people who somehow held onto their autonomy and did not join the rest of humanity as a collective, single-minded pod. One of them, Samba Schutte’s Koumba Diabaté, has decided this means everything is for his taking. In the episode “HDP,” audiences learn that he now lives in the Imperial Sky Villa, or Elvis Presley’s former penthouse suite, at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. The space came with a sunken bath tub, ornate ceilings and its own pool.
One of the biggest changes that “Pluribus’” Emmy-nominated production designer Denise Pizzini had to make was to bring in a collapsible flat-screen TV and its case. She also worked with costume designer Jennifer L. Bryan and others to turn the dining room into a swinging 1960s poker lounge reminiscent of a classic James Bond film. And they had to do it all within the episode’s tight filming schedule.
“We had to embrace what we had and build on that,” Pizzini says. “But I think what really makes that whole episode come alive is the costumes and the people. So the set falls back a little bit.”
The city is grandiose enough that there are even ways for filmmakers to put their own spin on its more conventional sights and sounds. In telling the story of a mother-daughter bachelorette party gone awry for the episode “Flamingos” in creator David E. Kelley’s “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” Emmy-nominated director of photography Tari Segal leaned into the show’s tertiary color palette of pinks and teals. But since the bride was Michelle Pfeiffer’s Shyanne — someone who had more life experience than the 20-somethings in the pink limo that she and Elle Fanning’s Margo meet on their adventure — Segal says production purposely avoided “the LED of the modern Vegas.”
“The Vegas we wanted to show and explore was Shyanne’s Vegas, which is so specific to her,” Segal says. “It would have that more aged, timeless quality of downtown Vegas, [and] it would have the income bracket of a Vegas that she would be comfortable in.”
There is a bit of Hollywood magic in this episode of “Margo,” though: During their characters’ joyride, Fanning and Pfeiffer stick their heads out of the limo’s sunroof. The scene was filmed at 3 or 4 in the morning, Segal says, when the Strip would be less crowded. But nearby police officers who weren’t part of the production thought they were just two drunks having fun and yelled at them to get down.
Some things shouldn’t happen even in Vegas.
The post Viva Las Vegas! How TV is tossing out old cliches to show a new side of Sin City appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
