..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Las Vegas is home to more illusionists per square mile than any other city on the planet. Some make objects the size of a helicopter vanish with the wave of a hand, while others turn doves into crumpled handkerchiefs. Not all of our resident illusionists, however, belong to Ring 257 of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

Croupiers routinely make piles of money disappear, while bevies of beautiful women merely need wave a feather boa over the head of a fat, balding conventioneer to make him believe he’s the current incarnation of Clark Gable or Rudolph Valentino. Then, there’s location scout Maggie Mancuso.

Ten years ago, the former lounge singer and television actress was called upon to perform an illusion worthy of a Lance Burton. In collaboration with director Martin Scorsese and his favorite production designer, Dante Ferretti, Mancuso found numerous ways to reverse time, in support of the director’s epic cautionary tale, Casino. The trio not only made the then-rapidly emerging Family Vegas take a powder, but they also convinced audiences far and wide that this desert oasis could do a great impersonation of Kansas City and Chicago.

As the short version of the story goes, the director of The Aviator -- one of the great movies about man‘s fascination with flight -- is notoriously unenthusiastic about using airplanes as a means of conveyance from one location to another. This steadfast unwillingness to exploit the friendly skies presented a significant predicament for producers of his high-voltage adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s "Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas," which has just been released in a special 10th anniversary DVD edition.

The movie would differ from the book primarily in its need to shroud the identities of real people and places with thinly disguised names and fudged geography. Although the focal point of Scorsese’s crime epic would be the make-believe mid-Strip “Tangiers” hotel, the puppet masters would still manipulate the strings behind curtains in the blustery Midwest. Instead of re-locating mob headquarters to someplace sunny, like Phoenix, Baker or Los Angeles, Mancuso was assigned to find reasonable facsimiles within the borders of Clark County.

The challenge, of course, came in discovering locations whose verisimilitude not only would satisfy Scorsese and Ferretti -- winner of an Oscar this year, for his art direction of The Aviator -- but fool viewers in cities just like Kansas City and Chicago. In addition to tricking out vintage buildings along Main Street and Las Vegas Boulevard in Midwestern drag, other locations required a blanket of fake snow, imported corn stalks and authentic big-city litter.

More than 130 separate locations within a 30-mile radius of the Riviera -- an old-school property standing in for the Stardust, run by Frank Rosenthal in the ’70s -- were used in Casino. These included exteriors and interiors, as well as the broad open spaces provided by the Jean Dry Lake Bed.

The former Goldi of Nevada meat market was deemed suitably Midwestern to double as the Kansas City grocery where mobsters gathered to divvy the “skim.” The onetime headquarters of VFW Post 1753, which resembled a garage sale at a trailer park, made a perfect social club for the Chicago Outfit. The long-vacant lounge of the historic Moulin Rouge served as a watering hole frequented by Nicky Santoro and his Windy City crew. An alley outside Flick O-Rama provided the ideal setting for a good, old-fashioned Chi-town beat-down.

“It’s a great alley,” enthused Mancuso, for whom Casino represented an introduction into the world of Hollywood legerdemain. “Everybody loved it. The trick was to get everything shot before trucks arrived to make deliveries.”

The L.A. apartment of Ginger’s erstwhile boyfriend/pimp/leach, Lester, actually was a Las Vegas cottage once inhabited by Howard Hughes.

“Dante loved it,” Mancuso enthused. “The furniture and colors were perfect, as is, and the television and stereo already were vintage. He didn’t have to change anything.”

The business of Las Vegas wasn’t going to come to an abrupt halt, just to satisfy the needs of some Hollywood sharpies. Even at the height of production, the Riviera’s marquee invited tourists and locals to visit the casino, and provide background authenticity for Scorsese’s cameras.

(Between set-ups, the crew tended to play the slots as enthusiastically as any punter. Indeed, the side action in the movie “pit” made up for any losses sustained by cordoning off the tables and slots from the public.)

Long before getting into the locations game, Mancuso played the “hillbilly girl singer," Charlene Darling, on The Andy Griffith Show. She moved to Las Vegas in the ’60s with her husband, jazz musician Gus Mancuso, and became a familiar face in the Sands’ lounge (“the guys in the Rat Pack called me Bright Eyes,” she allowed).

When that scene evaporated in thin air, the gorgeous blonde took a job with the Nevada Film Office. Among her other duties, she often went out with visiting filmmakers and producers to scout locations. She remembers picking up Scorsese at the Downtown train station (“I was a couple of minutes late, and he was just standing there looking nervous …”) and introducing a dumbstruck Ferretti to the wonders of Las Vegas.

“Dante was fresh from Rome, and in total culture shock at all the schlock,” recalls Mancuso, who later would work on Go, Perdita Durango, Money Plays and Mars Attack! “It was hilarious. All he would say was, ‘I can’t do theeese, I can’t do theeese … all this greeed, greeed.’

“I was the window to Las Vegas for these people. There was a learning curve for Marty, too.”

Mancuso and Los Angeles-based locations manager Michael Burmeister not only were required to disguise 20 years worth of development, but they also needed to unveil a side of the city few tourists ever see. It was in this Las Vegas that wiseguys like Nicky Santoro and Sam Rothstein could blend into the middle-class woodwork by day, and embrace all seven of the deadly sins at night.

Set designers didn’t have to do much to maintain the period integrity of the Riviera’s casino, but some sleight-of-hand was required for other locales. For example, the Tangiers’ brightly lit porte-cochere was a composite of those at Bally’s, the Plaza and soon-to-be imploded Landmark. The Jockey Club provided a makeshift soundstage on which Ace’s futuristic Race & Sports Books and office suite were constructed.

Actually, the faux sports book remains the most anachronistic of all the sets employed by the filmmakers. The concept of the “super-book” -- in which all manner of video monitors and data displays hang on the walls of comfy, cave-like rooms dedicated to sports betting -- didn’t actually come into play until the mid-’80s. By then, of course, Rosenthal was blackballed from the casinos.

Lou D’Amico, who oversees the book at the Plaza Hotel, is a veteran of the scene here. He recalls working for Rosenthal for about a month, after arriving in town from New York.

“He let all of the male tellers go, so he could hire women to write tickets,” D’Amico said, with a smile. “This was before Las Vegas went pari-mutuel. Individual bookmakers set the odds and the casinos took all the risk.

“The books, then, were smaller and far less high-tech than the one in Casino. Instead of simulcasting races, we add re-creations off the wire, and the books were populated by characters right out of Damon Runyon.

“Prop bets, which everyone have come to love, didn’t come in until the Super Bowl in 1985, when we set odds on whether the ‘Fridge’ (Bears lineman William Perry) would score a touchdown. Now, everybody does it.”

D’Amico, after rattling off the names of other legendary bookmakers of the time, feels that Rosenthal did, indeed, possess an uncanny feel for handicapping. Locally, his television show -- during which he discussed upcoming sporting events -- gave him a presence few of his fellow odds makers could duplicate, even if that had sought it … and most didn’t.

“He's a showman … ahead of his time and very knowledgeable,” D’Amico added. “If (Anthony) Spilotro doesn’t come into the picture, who knows what would have happened?”

When Pileggi decided to use Rosenthal as an entry point for his true-crime drama, he was able to draw on a stack of government records 3½ feet high. After poring through that documentation, he said, “I knew what to ask ‘Lefty.’”

Otherwise, most of the paperwork existed in Chicago and Kansas City, where the racketeering trials took place.

“When I started out here, everybody was reluctant to share their stories with me,” Pileggi said. “Oscar Goodman, who’s now mayor, tried to help, but it still was a difficult book to write. I kept trying to get to the Spilotro family, and, instead, relied on Frank Cullotta, who was a close associate and knew that life.”

With the distance of a decade behind him, Pileggi reflected on the infamous “skim”

“It actually was a way of paying off the hundreds of investors in these casinos, all of whom were crooked,” he said. “It was like a fee for handling the loan, and it went straight to the heads of the families. I actually was struck by how small (the skim) actually was.

“They stole a specific amount each time, so it wasn’t until the guys in the count rooms started skimming the skim that they became concerned. They even went so far as to postpone the pick-ups for a few months, so they could measure how much money the casinos actually were bringing in … and, then, they measured it against what they were taking to determine what was being stolen from them.”

For Burmeister, whose responsibilities also included securing clearances and agreements on lease fees -- and an endless stream of logistical concerns -- the production was something of a race against the clock.

“The were lots of locations, and they had to have a ’60s-’70s feel,” he said. “But, many of the best places were being imploded and torn down in 1994. Then, too, a lot of locations fell threw because ‘someone’ didn’t want us to make the movie in the first place.

“Vegas Vacation, which I also did, was much easier to shoot. It was a comedy with Chevy Chase -- not a gangster movie, about real people -- and it was made during the ‘family Vegas’ period, which, at the time, was still the way the city was being marketed.”

For both Mancuso and Burmeister, the real coup de grace came in finding a suitable place for the bludgeoning deaths of the Santoro brothers. Initially, the idea was to find a corn field somewhere in the general vicinity of Clark County and film it there, but, of course, there weren’t any to be found. The next plan required the importation of an acre’s worth of corn stalks from central California in a refrigerated van, and their reposting on rebar on a parcel of desert land at the Rocking K Ranch.

“Marty doesn’t like to fly, so if Vegas wasn’t going to come to Kings County, Kings County would have to come to Las Vegas,” Burmeister jokes. “Those 20,000 stalks of corn had to be tied to the rebar for what we thought would be a one-day shoot. When it extended into another day, we had to replace the stalks in the front rows -- which already were turning yellow -- with fresh ones from the truck.”

Any resemblance between the Rocky K Ranch and the actual Indiana cornfield, in which real-life gangsters Anthony and Michael Spilotro were killed, was anything but coincidental. Making it look that way, though, became a job in itself.

Indeed, other filmmakers have decided that Las Vegas wasn't quite Vegas enough for their standards. Much of Las Vegas and CSI is filmed in Los Angeles, and, back in 1982, Francis Ford Coppola re-built Fremont Street and other landmark settings on a soundstage at San Francisco's Zoetrope Studios, for One From the Heart.

For all of his hard work at making things look just right, critics clouded their opinions of Casino with comparisons to Scorsese's previous wiseguys-are-people-too opuses, Goodfellas and Mean Streets. That Las Vegas wasn't quite as cool, then, as it would become only a few years later, also seemed to work against it critically.

With 10 years' distance between the theatrical release and this special anniversary DVD of Casino, it's much easier for fans and detractors, alike, merely to sit back and appreciate the magician's art ... even if one or two secrets have been revealed along the way.

June 18 , 2005
- Gary Dretzka