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A city that can be "all the things": competing/changing/conflicting images of Las Vegas in mainstream US films

Las Vegas: The Post-Cinematic City and Las Vegas of the Mind

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Introduction Las Vegas' development as a tourist destination occurred simultaneously with the developments of its onscreen depictions. In The Grit Beneath the Glitter, historians Hal Rothman and Mike Davis attribute the enduring success of Las Vegas on its ability to evolve and cater to everyone who wants to spend money.
"Las Vegas, in other words, has become a vast laboratory, where giant corporations, themselves changing amalgams of capital from different sectors, are experimenting with every possible combination of entertainment, gaming, mass media, and leisure. Architecturally, the Las Vegas Strip has become a Mobius Strip where casinos merge into malls into amusement parks into sports venues into residential subdivisions into casinos again. Its fundamental malleability, so essential to its transformation from the peripheral to the paradigmatic, has become an envied trait. "
Las Vegas now exists as a playground for people of all ages and preferences, but the mediated image and popular conception of the city has changed over time in ways that correspond with the larger branding and business strategies of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Mainstream films set on the Strip have been largely shaped by Hollywood filmmakers working in tandem with city officials and casino management to popularize narratives that essentially function as commercials for Las Vegas tourism, especially with regards to depictions of casinos and the gaming industry. For example, Cultural historian Larry Gragg provides a detailed account of a coordinated effort among Las Vegas business associations, casino owners, and city officials to shut down a crime series that was already greenlit and given permission to shoot on the Strip. At the time, any association between gaming and criminal activity was a sensitive area for a city still dealing with organized crime influences in its biggest industry. However, after the Gaming Commission Act was passed in 1968 and more casinos were becoming corporate-owned than mafia-run, powerbrokers in the state began to worry less about the Strip’s association with danger and violence. Then in 1982, the Motion Picture Division of the Commission on Economic Development was established in Nevada to help regulate and formalize business relations between media productions and businesses in the state. However, it would still be another 30 years before a bill to enact a Nevada film tax credit program passed the state legislature.

Although there is less desire to outright shut down productions, and even a desire to promote more productions (as seen in the 2013 establishment of the film tax credit program) casino owners still maintain strict control over the filmed use of their properties. Issues of image and branding are key points of consideration for Las Vegas casinos because popular films that are widely seen can proliferate specific narratives about the city and impact a casino’s future profit potential. In the 1990s, while themed resorts were moving to reposition the Strip as a family vacation spot, family-oriented Las Vegas movies started to shift portrayals of the Strip away from the adult themes that dominated earlier Vegas films. Cynical and unsavory portrayals of the Strip were still being produced, but movies like Casino (1995) and Showgirls (1995) now existed alongside films like Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992) and Vegas Vacation (1997). By taking the genre and plot elements of these films as data for analysis, I want to explore the trajectory of these contradictions of how Las Vegas is portrayed and interpreted over a decades long filmography through digital humanities methods.
What genre is the most prominent in the Las Vegas filmography?

Visualizations focused on the quantity and concentration of genres most commonly encountered across the filmography of movies shot on the Strip raise questions about how Las Vegas is being framed for a larger public and if there are particularities to when different types of stories about the city (designated as "genre" in this analysis) are being produced. Although the primary genres that IMDB users or algorithms assigned to these films may need further investigation into their accuracy, these visualizations yield some unexpected insights that provide interesting directions for further investigation. For example, the Comedy genre stands out as the dominant genre for this grouping of Las Vegas films while Drama and Crime, the genres that might align more with a "Sin City" view of Las Vegas make up a smaller body of work. However, a larger quantity of films doesn't necessarily equal a larger and longer-lasting cultural impact. But, since this dataset was focused on movies shot on-location on the Strip, we can instead ask how a preference for Comedy or other lighter genre stories might align with the brand images that casinos on the Strip seek to project as well as what changes in the gaming and film industries would've facilitated a greater interest in production companies pursuing less gritty projects about Las Vegas.

Historical overviews of films set and shot in Las Vegas tend to designate the films of the 1960s as the starting point where the filmic image of the city and its status as a tourist fantasyland began to inform the creation of each other. Juliet McCannell asserts "Ocean's Eleven was the first film to 'star' Las Vegas itself, and more particularly, its new 'Strip'" and Francisco Menendez comes to a similar conclusion after tracing a longer history of Hollywood films shot in Nevada. In Menendez’s overview, films from the 1920s-30s films mostly used Nevada's desert landscape as a backdrop, while films about Las Vegas from the 1940s-50s were constrained in terms of content due to needing to appease the PCA, so it was only starting in the 1960s that films such as Ocean’s Eleven (1960), Viva Las Vegas (1964), and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) could show "Las Vegas locations [as] an integral part of the fabric of each of these movies. No longer just backdrops, the locations, real or fictionalized, are required in order for these stories to take place." From there, a set of attempts to establish a consistent film industry in Nevada began but ran into difficulty since there was no equivalent of a state film commission. This meant productions that wanted to make use of famous locales on the Strip were left on their own to negotiate those terms. Some productions were successful in opening up the Strip for their needs such as the James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, which featured a Howard Hughes-like character and received approval from Hughes to shoot on the Strip. Other productions that didn’t have the blessing of one of the city’s wealthiest business magnates weren't as lucky. In 1995, Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas (1995) had to shoot its casino interiors in Laughlin, Nevada and capture its Strip exteriors through guerilla filming. Still, there is not a strict rubric that universally determines what can or cannot be shot inside a casino on the Las Vegas Strip as those decisions are largely managed by the staff and executives of the corporations that manage individual properties.

There is also more nuance to the genre breakdown of these films than can be captured in a single category grouping of genre. The treemap of genres and subgenres is an attempt at finding more nuance in the types of stories filmed on the Strip. For instance, the Comedy-Drama pairing occurs frequently and reminds us that not all comedies are necessarily slapstick or family-friendly affairs. Genre is a fluid categorization that is influenced by historical and industrial developments. Further visualizations on plot elements from the dataset of Las Vegas films can help shed more light on the specifics of what types of stories are shot on the Las Vegas Strip.
What elements occur most frequently in Las Vegas movies?
As both Hollywood and Las Vegas Strip executives deal in the business of entertainment and spectacle, they rely on the fantasy appeal of their products to connect with potential viewers or visitors and are very conscientious of controlling the brand and image of their properties. Casinos are a key setting for most films about the allure (and danger) of Las Vegas, so casino executives and movie production staff must come to an understanding not only on the logistics of shooting on-site, but also how the property is being used in the film’s story or how an association with the film might impact the casino’s brand image. However, a text analysis of Las Vegas film loglines (movie summaries often used for marketing materials) and user generated tags from IMDB pages on Las Vegas films shows that audience reception and interpretation also shapes a movie's story and how it relates to the larger cultural meaning and brand image of the Las Vegas Strip. Not everything about a text's meaning can be controlled decisively at the level of industry executives or the creative talent they employ.

Visualizations of IMDB loglines and user generated tags from the same dataset of films reveal a stark split between the draws of a film emphasized in promotional material and the notable characteristics of a film as determined by movie viewers. The most frequently used terms in visualizations of loglines focus on elements that seem targeted toward a broad audience. The terms emphasize the setting of "Las Vegas" and the "casino" while also bringing in associations to common Las Vegas fantasies like "money," "gambling," "friends," and "women." The terms from the loglines are rather innocuous compared to the most frequently used terms that emerged from the corpus of user generated IMDB tags. "Gambling," "casino," and "Las Vegas" also reoccur as commonly used terms, but the visualization of the tags also demonstrates a decidedly more sexualized focus on "women" with the term "female" (which appears the most often across all the tags at 33 instances) attached to descriptors such as as "nudity," "panties," and "sex." Again, these visualizations don't necessarily point to the actual elements of a film's plot or imagery that might be the most significant to the majority of viewers, but they do reinforce the sense that the image and meaning of Las Vegas as shown in these mainstream films are contested and negotiated not just over the course of time, but through audience expectations and desires as well.
Where are Las Vegas movies set and filmed?
The corpus of mainstream films analyzed in this project largely serve to popularize narratives and depictions of the casino and gaming industries that essentially function as commercials for Las Vegas tourism, widely centering on the experiences of tourists. This is a very limited perspective that privileges a corporate projection of the city as a playground for outsiders. An important aspect of the city that mainstream US films rarely depict is the reality that as a tourist destination operating 24/7 throughout the entire year, the Las Vegas Strip requires the work of Las Vegas-area residents. The Strip’s economic existence is sustained by consistent film and media promotion of Las Vegas as a place where tourists can make their fortunes as well as by the labor of local workers. The operation of a casino resort involves thousands of workers at each property and hundreds of thousands across the other forms of labor and material infrastructures that make the spectacle of the Strip possible in the middle of the Mojave Desert.. But, part of what helps to sell spectacle is the ability to make the experience appear effortless, to hide the hard work needed to make something that feels fantastical a reality. By mapping filming locations of Las Vegas movies in relation to where the population of the Las Vegas metropolitan area lives, I seek to enact a broader analysis of Hollywood-produced films about Las Vegas that considers how they relate to the experiences of local casino workers who are often sidelined in these narratives. Casino workers are of outsize importance to the functioning of the Strip—and wield significant power in the overall economic and civic life of the greater city of Las Vegas—compared to their heavily minimized presence in the fantasy version of the city that is produced and promoted by the film and gaming industries. Shifting focus from the people who visit to the people who live and work in Las Vegas opens up new potential readings of popular film depictions of the city.

In Media Heterotopias, Hye Jean Chung proposes that viewing films through a heterotopic lens can act as a "deconstructive research methodology and interpretive strategy" which reconnect mediated onscreen environments and entities with the material presence of production spaces and laboring bodies." Overall, Chung’s conceptual framework pushes us to understand media images as a negotiation of different layers of materiality, temporalities, geographies, and labor. Chung's project in particular is referring specifically to the digital labor of special effects artists, however, I believe the concept of a heterotopic analysis can be applied to how we understand a Las Vegas casino, both as it exists in reality as a type of heterotopic space and as a mediated location for a significant filmography of US films. As I continue to work on this project, I will see how else digital humanities resources can help with finding the material traces of unseen or unacknowledged labor of the diminished or largely invisible figure of the casino worker in Hollywood films shot on-location on the Strip.
What genre is the most prominent in the Las Vegas filmography?

Historical overviews of films set and shot in Las Vegas tend to designate the films of the 1960s as the starting point where the filmic image of the city and its status as a tourist fantasyland began to inform the creation of each other. Juliet McCannell asserts "Ocean's Eleven was the first film to 'star' Las Vegas itself, and more particularly, its new 'Strip'" and Francisco Menendez comes to a similar conclusion after tracing a longer history of Hollywood films shot in Nevada. In Menendez’s overview, films from the 1920s-30s films mostly used Nevada's desert landscape as a backdrop, while films about Las Vegas from the 1940s-50s were constrained in terms of content due to needing to appease the PCA, so it was only starting in the 1960s that films such as Ocean’s Eleven (1960), Viva Las Vegas (1964), and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) could show "Las Vegas locations [as] an integral part of the fabric of each of these movies. No longer just backdrops, the locations, real or fictionalized, are required in order for these stories to take place." From there, a set of attempts to establish a consistent film industry in Nevada began but ran into difficulty since there was no equivalent of a state film commission. This meant productions that wanted to make use of famous locales on the Strip were left on their own to negotiate those terms. Some productions were successful in opening up the Strip for their needs such as the James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, which featured a Howard Hughes-like character and received approval from Hughes to shoot on the Strip. Other productions that didn’t have the blessing of one of the city’s wealthiest business magnates weren't as lucky. In 1995, Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas (1995) had to shoot its casino interiors in Laughlin, Nevada and capture its Strip exteriors through guerilla filming. Still, there is not a strict rubric that universally determines what can or cannot be shot inside a casino on the Las Vegas Strip as those decisions are largely managed by the staff and executives of the corporations that manage individual properties.

There is also more nuance to the genre breakdown of these films than can be captured in a single category grouping of genre. The treemap of genres and subgenres is an attempt at finding more nuance in the types of stories filmed on the Strip. The Comedy-drama pairing occurs frequently and reminds us that not all comedies are necessarily slapstick or family-friendly affairs. Genre is a fluid categorization that is influenced by historical and industrial developments. Further visualizations on plot elements from the dataset of Las Vegas films can help shed more light on the specifics of what types of stories are shot on the Las Vegas Strip.