Friday, May 9, 2003 | 5:17 a.m.
The story could appropriate the title of the underappreciated John Dahl noir, "Red Rock West," a tale with twists and turns, at least one femme fatale and money at the dark heart of the tale. But many other titles come to mind.
Little is what it seems in the story of developer Jim Rhodes' plan to erect thousands of homes not far from the Red Rock Conservation Area. In this "Blue Velvet" of a world, there are no white picket fences (at least not yet) and there is a lot of slithering beneath the surface.
Is Rhodes an evil, impossibly rich magnate manipulating everyone he can for his own ends, a la Noah Cross in "Chinatown"? Or something not quite so noir?
Is ex-Commissioner Erin Kenny really the femme fatale of this tale, like Katherine Turner in "Body Heat," luring poor, naive Mark James, her handpicked replacement, into a vortex from which he cannot escape? Or is James simply a man who thought he could control the events and people around him but instead finding he's really in a remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice"?
And are the government officials -- from putative Red Rock savior Dina Titus, the state senator, to county commissioners to Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign -- really just pawns of more sophisticated, devious actors and relegated to being bit players in this noir?
These musings occur to me as I pen this the day before that hearing Saturday in Las Vegas on Titus' bill to do what Clark County commissioners did not try to do until the media attention forced them into action -- prohibit any development in the Red Rock environs. But I assume that the hearing, like most of the plot devices in this noir, was a facade, with Titus and Team Rhodes pressing a gaggle of extras to come and perform for the cameras. If something significant occurred at the Sawyer State Office Building Saturday, I would be shocked.
After spending some time with Rhodes, both at the site and on "Face to Face" last week, it is clear that like Cross, the John Huston character in the Roman Polanski classic, he has grand development plans. And he has had them for some time -- he disclosed on the program that he has owned the land for a couple of years. He later said he signed a letter of intent in December 2001 for the property and didn't close escrow until March of this year.
Rhodes wants to build -- of that, there is no doubt. But is he keeping open the possibility of a land exchange to still make an astronomical profit with a lot less controversy? Absolutely.
No one should begrudge Rhodes' desire to make lots of money or build lots of homes. The county already has given him the right to do so. The local officials who now sound outraged can't escape the fact that the land already is zoned for houses -- albeit only one for every two acres. That is, the county has sanctioned -- until recently -- homes being built that close to Red Rock.
But the serpentine plot twists this has taken in the space of one week make "Chinatown" easy to understand. For instance, it is patently insane for Rhodes, through an ad campaign, to now claim he is the friend of the common man while Titus is standing up for the wealthy.
Yes, he is fighting spin with spin. But while Titus may have seized on a populist cause here, she also happens to have a record on such issues -- remember the ring around the valley, the development boundary so demonized by the building community?
Of course what is forgotten is how sad it is that the state is trying to usurp a local government function. But Titus has long known that Southern Nevadans see development in the valley as a mutual back-scratching netherworld, a place, as Orson Welles might have said, with a touch of evil.
If local government folks hadn't so often acted as if they were frolicking with big developers such as Rhodes, perhaps the cynicism Titus has tapped into would not exist. But it does and she has.
As for Kenny, she can sound as innocent as Gene Tierney in "Laura," and yet act as deviously as Jane Greer in "Out of the Past." Look no further than her scheme to screw her own party and hand her commission seat to James. And her hair-splitting on whether she broke the cooling-off guidelines is the kind of story that even Robert Towne, the "Chinatown" screenwriter, could not have concocted.
As I said, there are few sympathetic characters, including politicians reacting to the frenzy Titus has catalyzed without ever visiting the site or trying to understand the underlying issues. And their duplicity may end up costing them in the denouement, especially if Rhodes gets to reap much more than the $55 million from the government.
So do we ever think the time will come when these elected officials will realize they should not be sleeping in the same bed with developers?
To paraphrase what his friend advised J.J. Gittes at the end of "Chinatown," perhaps the greatest film noir, which also, ultimately, was about incest:
Forget it, folks. It's Las Vegas.
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