"Las Vegas: An Unconventional History" REVIEW
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"Las Vegas: An Unconventional History"
Tonight and tomorrow at 9 on PBS
THE first time I went to Las Vegas was probably around 1995. I had been
both lured by, and assigned to cover, the "Jackson Family Reunion
Concert" - a reunion, it turned out, as fake as any other Las Vegas
illusion.
Since I'd been the first reporter to uncover his unsavory relationship
with the young boy, I was equally curious to see what they'd dream up
to convince the world that Michael was the St. Anthony of moonwalkers.
It took me about 10 minutes to see that they'd picked the right venue
for pulling in the suckers with fabricated reality. Nothing in Las
Vegas is real.
The Rat Pack, I quickly learned, had been replaced by the fat pack.
In place of dangerous mobsters in white dinner jackets, there were
thousands of out-of-control kids riding indoor roller coasters while
their parents were gambling.
This was the new Las Vegas built by Steve Wynn, who'd somehow convinced
people that taking your kids to a gambling Mecca could be a fun,
educational family vacation! And he was right - the new Las Vegas draws
in more people per year than the real holy city of Mecca.
PBS' series and accompanying book, "Las Vegas: An Unconventional
History," tells the wonderfully American story of how a sin-city desert
town rose to become Sucker City, yet still Fun City USA.
It's the city with a crazy illusion of reality, where you can sit in
New York and look at the Eiffel Tower, or walk over to Venice or Lake
Como. Of course, none of those places in real life has any resemblance
to the insane Vegas reproductions, but that's not the point.
This fascinating two-night, three hours documentary begins with the
building of the Hoover Dam (or Boulder Dam), which brought in thousands
of workers who lived basically in lockdown in the city of Boulder. Like
any other city, there was no gambling, no prostitution, no nothin' but
work.
Come payday, however, the workers grabbed their wages and headed down
the highway to Las Vegas, a city that allowed all manner of sin.
>From there, we learn how in 1938, gamblers, mobsters and no accounts
who'd been driven from California settled in Vegas and figured out that
gambling was the wave of the future.
Bugsy Siegel, a soldier for Meyer Lansky, realized that luxury was the
way to go. With mob money he built The Flamingo, a European-type casino
and resort in the middle of the desert. Unfortunately, he went $4.5
million over budget, so they shot him dead. Oh, well.
>From there, we learn about the glamour days of the Rat Pack - how JFK,
once a habitu, of Vegas, turned on them as soon as he became
president.
And on it goes until today. A terrific telling of the history of the
most horrifyingly fascinating, fun and terrible, seductive, addictive,
tacky, terrible, wonderful and mostly hilarious place on earth.