Sunday, Nov. 20, 2005 | 7:33 a.m.
The broadcast of Stephen Ives' "Las Vegas: An Unconventional History," which ran last week on PBS, got me to wondering why it is that out-of-town filmmakers and journalists can't get Las Vegas right. An unconventional history? This film could have been made by the Travel Channel.
There isn't an original thought in it and it repeats every hackneyed cliche about Las Vegas that has ever been uttered. How hard can it be to see Las Vegas on its own terms? Why can't they get it right?
Ives is a lesson in and of himself. He brought to the project an East Coast sensibility, which led it astray from the beginning. He and his staff never listened to a word anyone here had to say. In September at UNLV he introduced me to his friends as a senior consultant on the film, but as I told him and those around him, I'd rather be a Junior Mint.
The program was so bad it's almost funny. A bunch of people who don't know Las Vegas arrogantly serve as narrators; the people who really know something get bit parts. We are forced to endure the pompous film critic David Thomson and the smug architectural critic Paul Goldberger giving us our city's history.
Nicholas Pileggi repeats the same fictions told him by Lefty Rosenthal that make "Casino" such a good story, but such bad history. The continuity narrator, Mark Cooper, looks like a stereotype of a Las Vegas lounge lizard; he gives us his personal outsider's view, the result of coming here since he was a child. Does he know anything about Las Vegas? Has he captured its essence? Hardly.
The film uses Cooper, a left-wing journalist, to tell Las Vegas' history, while excising excellent historians such as Michael Green, a history professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada, and reducing the eminent Eugene Moehring, a history professor at UNLV, to a secondary role. No wonder "An Unconventional History" is such a disappointment.
It's not only filmmakers. The High Country News, a respected regional Western newspaper, recently ran a story about the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the efforts to negotiate water rights in rural Nevada. Fifteen years after the creation of SNWA, reporter Matt Jenkins still believes that "whiskey's for drinkin' and water's for fightin'," just like it was in the theoretical good old days.
Since 1991 the world of water has changed in mostly positive ways. Stakeholders now negotiate use instead of dumping water in the streets to preserve their claims. But a respected newspaper, or at least one I used to respect, missed that entirely and focused only on the potential for conflict.
Anyone with their heads screwed on straight well knows that groundwater is a side issue; the real battle is over the redistribution of the Colorado River. And here's a newspaper, the High Country News, that claims to cover the West.
So why can't they get it? What is it about us that is so hard for the outside world to grasp?
The first mistake is being unable to distinguish between myth and reality. Las Vegas is a city of illusion. It is designed to pull the wool over your eyes, to make you suspend disbelief, to pull you into the illusion so completely that you honestly believe it's true.
That's a remarkable feat and we do it incredibly well. We also catch journalists and filmmakers here like flies on flypaper.
The Las Vegas that people such as Ives visit is 5 miles long and eight blocks wide. It is not the city at all. It is a resort zone designed to provide you with anything you'll pay for. The rest of us live somewhere else and we are glad to show it to filmmakers and journalists. The problem is that they can't see the reality for the baggage they bring with them.
Even more, they lack the tools to understand a city devoted to service. Most bring the ideas and constraints of industrial culture to Las Vegas.
James Howard Kunstler, the former rock 'n' roll critic turned acerbic conservative architecture critic, spews venom at Las Vegas with every word. He thinks that we will be the first to suffer if energy prices rise so high that it is hard to move goods by truck. He forgets that in America, "if you got it, a truck brought it," entirely true of his home of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and everywhere else.
More likely, Las Vegas would pay higher rates for almost anything, and because visitors suspend their economic sense when they are here, we would likely pass on the cost. But what would compel a truck to bring something to Saratoga Springs? Because it always had?
Las Vegas remains a canvas for American neuroses. Visiting filmmakers and journalists come prepared to see the city and its people in a certain way, and in a place devoted to illusion, it is not hard to find what you came looking for. Often they suspend their best judgment when they get off the plane.
Some love us, others hate us, but all we do is reflect back on to them who they already are. No wonder they cannot get us right. They simply can't face their own reflection in the mirror.
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