Home
Nicolas Cage departed it, Mars Attacks! destroyed it, but as a big-screen setting, Las Vegas just keeps coming back. Already Matthew Perry has found love there in Fools Rush In, and Chevy Chase, craps in Vegas Vacation. And there's more to come. Bob Hirsch, director of the Nevada Motion Picture Division, says all or part of 29 features were shot in Las Vegas last year, a trend that surprises even the trendsetters. Vegas Vacation director Stephen Kessler was ''shocked'' to see so many film crews: ''What's really hard is finding locations that haven't been shot already.''
What sends filmmakers to the desert? ''Las Vegas is the American dream at its most mutated,'' says Stephen Nemeth, executive producer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which begins filming in April. That's certainly applicable to Hunter S. Thompson's story, on which Fear is based: Johnny Depp stars as the gonzo journalist let loose on a drug-enforcement convention.
''Icons like Las Vegas are immutable,'' adds Jerry Bruckheimer, whose next macho action pic, June's Con Air, does its best to change the city's signature. It features the crash landing of a plane on the famed Strip.
Lest anyone think Sin City is getting overexposed, there's the just-released Hard Eight, in which Gwyneth Paltrow hits the Nevada casinos -- in Reno.
