SoapFest attraction washed up until ‘98

Nichole Davis

Friday, July 18, 1997 | 9:11 a.m.

Only a soap opera romance could have changed faster than plans for a convention-like event featuring 15 of daytime television's top stars that was slated for late September.

Despite hosting a glitzy press conference in May showcasing "Days of Our Lives" star Deidre Hall, producers of SoapFest Las Vegas '97 have recast the event as SoapFest '98, rescheduling it from Sept. 19-21 to June 12-14, 1998.

The main difficulty has been in booking blocks of hotel rooms, organizers say.

Organizers relied upon occupancy figures from 1996 when they picked the late September dates, which they thought would be light. Instead, they discovered there were only 2,000 hotel rooms available for the 10,000 predicted fans, officials said.

With the full support of Las Vegas Events, the nonprofit special-events arm of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority that committed $200,000 to the project, the producers, Black Mountain Studios, moved and renamed the event.

Dates aren't the only things that have changed. Black Mountain Studios has partnered with Scenic Technologies, a local stage design company, to put on the event. Ticket Master was dropped as the distributor.

Event producer Doris Keating said the changes will be good. The extended date gives producers more time to put together a bigger, better production, she said. The price tag for the event has already risen from $1 million to $1.5 million, she said.

It will also give them more time to sell tickets. Despite the local media blitz, sales had been soft. Less than 100 tickets were sold, and most of those were over the Internet, Keating said.

The group is in the process of contacting ticket holders to make sure they know the dates have changed and that tickets will be honored.

"We've had a lot of contact with fans, and they were all right except they were a little disappointed," Keating said.

The move did not come as a surprise to officials at Las Vegas Events, who pledged their continued support of the first-time event despite offering different explanations for the date change.

LVE Special Events Manager Shannon Landers, who had not seen the press release announcing the date change before the interview, cited scheduling difficulties with the stars.

"They wanted to bring in the top entertainers. They wanted to bring in the top stars," Landers said. "They had gotten such a good response from them, but I guess the fall is just a busy time for soap stars."

Ed Crispell, chairman of the LVE Board of Trustees, clarified that too many stars had responded to participation requests. "Baywatch," for example, offered to send its entire cast.

"Las Vegas looks for events like this to fill our rooms and bring in a good caliber of customers," said Crispell, who is also general manager of the Imperial Palace hotel-casino. "This event attracts the person who controls the purse strings: the housewife."

He said the primary reason for the move was not having enough planning time to put on the event, a symptom of which was the difficulty in garnering rooms. This can be fixed in the coming months, but the group will not be receiving any more than the $200,000 previously committed.

In fact, "we are questioning if we're going to give them the whole amount they requested," said Crispell, who added that such a move is unlikely if the event is successful.

Keating wasn't worried by that prospect. The event will be put on if the group didn't give them another dime, she said. Her partners are a $100 million company, she said.

Travel and ticket information is available through Imperial Travel at (800) 229-9791.