Popular Culture Review
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there. In the end, Seltzer was unable to shoot on location in Las Vegas.
Instead, he built a set in Los Angeles to simulate a downtown rooftop and a
casino at a cost of $77,000.^^
So, whose story is the closest to the truth, Frank Seltzer’s or that of the Las
Vegas Chamber of Commerce? This much is clear. The chamber leadership
rejected Seltzer’s script and refused to cooperate with him in any way. Much of
the rest—Seltzer’s charges that he was initially threatened, then accepted by a
couple of community leaders, and then threatened by a hotel owner and, finally,
that three “torpedoes” threatened his film crew—cannot be confirmed. In
Seltzer’s favor, his director, Joseph Newman, later said in an interview that the
production company sought to shoot scenes at all the locales mentioned in the
film. However, he said they “were thrown out of Las Vegas. They told us to get
out and be out by midnight. We started to work in the casinos, and the powers in
Las Vegas didn’t care much for the type of picture we were making, which
showed the wire tapping and so forth that was going on.”^^ On balance,
however. Seltzer’s decision to go to the Kefauver committee and the press with
his story just days before the opening of his film, no matter what the credibility
of his claims, was little more than a “publicity trick” as chamber of commerce
president Vem Willis aptly characterized it.
The more important question, however, is what the episode reveals about
the community’s efforts to control the images that viewers saw of their city in
the post-war period. Seltzer released his movie at a time when civic leaders and
hotel owners worried about the connection many Americans were making
between organized crime and their city. On June 20, 1947 an unknown gunman
killed the celebrated gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel in the Beverly Hills
home of his mistress Virginia Hill. Siegel was just beginning to enjoy a
profitable run with his recently opened Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Yet, he
remained heavily in debt to a syndicate of organized crime figures including
Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky who had provided most of the
funding for the construction of the property. Contemporaries assumed syndicate
leaders had ordered the hit on Siegel because of his extensive cost-overruns and
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the possibility that he or Virginia Hill were skimming some of their money.
Stories about Siegel’s murder usually included photographs of his bloody,
bullet-ridden body and, according to Time magazine, “the tabloids of Manhattan,
the sensational papers of Los Angeles and, to a lesser degree, papers all over the
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U.S. played it high, wide & handsome.” Inevitably, the hundreds of newspaper
and magazine stories about the Siegel murder noted his link with Las Vegas, and
it was this connection that caused chamber of commerce leaders like Maxwell
Kelch to oppose Seltzer’s original script which would have moved the Siegel
murder scene to Las Vegas. Even in the revised script for 711 Ocean Drive,
there is a character clearly modeled on Siegel. The national syndicate sends
Larry Mason to southern California to gain control of local gambling operations.
In many accounts of Siegel’s career. Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky dispatch