Defending a City’s Image:
Las Vegas Opposes the Making
of 711 Ocean Drive, 1950
On June 14, 1950, movie producer Frank Seltzer told reporters a remarkable
tale. Seltzer related that the previous week he had informed Senator Estes
Kefauver’s Senate Crime Investigating Committee that “gambling interests” in
Las Vegas had prevented him from shooting scenes for his movie 711 Ocean
Drive in their community, and that they also had tried to prevent him from
filming at Hoover Dam. Seltzer explained that when word got out the previous
year that he was planning a movie with the original title of Blood Money,
someone from “a public relations firm doing work for the city of Las
Vegas . . . offered to clear the way for filming certain sequences at a well known
hotel and gambling casino on the city’s famed ‘strip’.” Only then. Seltzer
contended, did he learn why William Bums, who headed the Los Angeles
gangster squad, had informed him that he would be “walking into a bear trap” if
he became involved with the gambling center. The public relations firm
unexpectedly retracted their offer to assist him, and the publicist at the hotel
where he had hoped to film “asked him why he didn’t make some other picture
instead.” However, when Seltzer met with a city councilman and a member of
the chamber of commerce in Las Vegas, neither of whom found anything
“objection