Those insights are part of a fascinating historical look at Sin City's first 100 years in the two-part, four-hour "American Experience: Las Vegas An Unconventional History."
Public Broadcasting Service producer/director Stephen Ives' look at the Nevada town's rise from an obscure Mojave Desert outpost to a place that draws more than 37 million visitors a year says much not only about Las Vegas but about America.
"Las Vegas has changed over the last 100 years," said Ives in a phone interview Monday. "Vegas has changed and become more like America. And America has changed and become more like Las Vegas. . . . Las Vegas, once an isolated part of the fringe of American society, has moved toward the essence of the mainstream."
Ives traces Vegas' growth from tiny desert town to its modern era of rampant commercialization, through the Depression when the Hoover Dam was built, Nevada's legalization of gambling in the 1930s, the following two decades of mob rule and the Howard Hughes era of the '60s.
In the documentary, Vegas mogul Steve Wynn smiles when he talks about today's Sin City.
"It is a great example of a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, violent hand-to-hand commercial combat," said Wynn.
Wynn is joined by historians and other Vegas figures, including media mogul Brian Greenspan, local newspaper columnist John L. Smith and various architects and artists who add context to an examination of America's fastest-growing city.
The project was sponsored by, among others, the Las Vegas Visitors Convention and Visitors Bureau and was named the official centennial history of the city, but Ives' work pulls no punches.
He looks at the Vegas underbelly, complete with an interview with a gambler so far in debt that he has to rob a bank, tattooed strippers, segregation and the mob's influence. This is no public-relations whitewash.
"If we hadn't made a film that made some of the boosters in Las Vegas a tiny bit uncomfortable, we wouldn't have done our job," said Ives.
In fact, the documentary might make more than a few Americans uncomfortable.
"My sense is that Vegas has always represented the other side of our nature," said Ives. "Americans love to condemn Vegas five days a week and then head straight out there for the weekend. It is a sign of the need we've always had in our culture to find an escape valve. The West has always had that in American history. Vegas being in the middle of the Mojave Desert taps into that potent Western myth. Vegas has figured out better than any place what Americans want when they run away from home. That is the key to its success."
---
Contact Tom Wharton at wharton@sltrib.com. His phone number is 801-257-8909. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
Sin, sex and money: It's all there in "American Experience: Las Vegas: An Unconventional History," airing Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KUED Channel 7.
