Defending a City’s Image
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and Helldorado were particularly effective in conveying an image of Las Vegas
as a frontier town. Almost all the patrons in the hotels and casinos are dressed as
cowboys and cowgirls, and the opening scene in Las Vegas Nights features
singing cowboys on horseback riding downtown in front of the various
gambling clubs. At the end of the opening credits for the film, one reads:
Las Vegas
The Last Frontier Town of the Old West
Where you do as you please
From Sunrise to Sunset
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After that Anything Goes!
Helldorado, besides featuring western movie notables Roy Rogers and Dale
Evans, was shot largely at the Hotel Last Frontier and provided plenty of footage
of the annual Helldorado rodeo and parade.^^ Several of the other films of the
1940s—Flight to Nowhere, Lady Luck, The Invisible Wall, and Once More My
Darling—^portrayed Las Vegas as a wonderful resort town with swimming
pools, nicely landscaped grounds, golf courses, cocktail lounges, elegantly
dressed patrons, and fine shopping.
Increasingly in the 1950s and 1960s, hotels took the lead in negotiating with
producers of situation comedies, dramas, and variety programs on television, as
well as film producers, to give their properties access to ever larger television
and movie audiences. The Sands Hotel was the most successful, with favorable
exposure on shows starring Danny Thomas, Milton Berle, and Red Skelton, as
well as Dave Garroway’s Wide, Wide, World, I Spy starring Bill Cosby and
Robert Culp, and the popular game show Queen fo r a Day. Several films
including Meet Me in Las Vegas, Ocean’s 11, Pepe, and Kiss Me Stupid also
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showcased the resort hotel.
Yet, community leaders and hotel spokesmen were always quick to criticize
films that included disparaging remarks about Las Vegas. For example, lines in
the 1946 films Lucky Lady and ’Till the End o f Time suggested that there were
crooked games in Las Vegas and that it was a place that one could not only lose
all their money, but also get tossed out of casinos. As they would later oppose
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711 Ocean Drive, the chamber of commerce protested these characterizations.
Hotel publicists also were careful to gain control of scripts for programs or films
shot on their properties to catch negative comments about Las Vegas. Sands
Hotel publicist A1 Freeman, for example, persuaded Sheldon Leonard, the
producer of the I Spy television series to delete the following line from a script,
“Think about Las Vegas. If you don’t gamble there’s nothing to do.’ A few
years later. Freeman rejected a proposal from the NBC program The Name o f the
Game to film an episode at the Sands because there was too much violence in
the script and it included “several gangster-type characters.” Other than the
case of 711 Ocean Drive, the strongest action taken by the chamber of
commerce against a production involved the proposed television series Las