Whilst vigorously pretending that Everything Is Better Than Ever in Sin City, Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has been busy behind the scenes. He gone back to the LVCVA’s favorite well, R&R Partners, to spool up a new TV onslaught to rebrand Las Vegas. But wait, it’s not a campaign, fellow yokels, it’s “a recommitment to the extraordinary spirit of Las Vegas.” Somebody ought to be committed, all right …
The tone-deaf message is that Sin City is—wait for it—”fabulous,” a place of “unmatched hospitality.” Well, knock us over with a feather. Nobody, Mr. Hill, is contending that Las Vegas isn’t remarkable or unique (though in danger of becoming less and less so). The problem is that it has become insanely expensive and insensitive to the needs of the average customer. The lyrics to Hill’s new ditty, by the way, are awful beyond description.
The TV spot met with instant derision. Scott Roeben of VItal Vegas led off, calling it “aggressively terrible” and “one of the most horrific attempts at destination marketing in recorded history,” just for openers. If we could sum it up in a word it would be “vapid,” as banal as the commonplaces that spew daily from Hill’s brain. Aside from a briefly seen “17.99 Lobster/15.99 Prime Rib” marquee, try finding ONE value message in these 61 seconds of dreck. Roeben is right: There ought to be sackings at the LVCVA, starting at the top, and its sweetheart deal with R&R needs to go. Now. The ad fairly screams “OUT OF TOUCH!!!”
Hill, of course, remains in deep denial (his default setting), saying the ad tested well with focus groups (were they drunk?) and ignoring metrics that show that Las Vegas is—except for strong convention attendance—down by significant numbers. Even the LVCVA has been compelled to disclose that visitation is -12% (we believe the technical term is “in the crapper”) and hotel occupancy is -10.5%, despite fewer rooms being in the market. No, according to Hill and UNLV spin doctor Amanda Belarmino, there’s nothing wrong in town that a few Las Vegas Raiders games won’t fix.
Belarmino, who we sometimes interview for Question of the Day, may have a particular incentive to paint a pretty picture. She made her name by predicting in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a second Trump administration would be a Sin City windfall. How’s that working out? No two ways about it, we’re in a hole, and Big Gaming, its handmaidens at the LVCVA, the R-J and, yes, Belarmino all helped dig it. Their collective response to the problem seems to boil down to two words: Keep digging.
Wizard of Id. God knows from whose drug-addled cranium The Wizard of Oz at SPHERE (as it is bombastically slugged) sprang from. It’s certainly in keeping with the contemporary Las Vegas mantra of giving less quantity for more cost, much more. Tickets to this cinematic abomination will set you back $110, plus at least $20 for parking. In return, you get a More Is Less experience in which the beloved classic (the missus’ favorite movie) is downsized from 102 minutes to 75, undoubtedly to fit more shows in per day. That alone is a telltale, cynical move that panders to shrinking attention spans. “Those are 27 minutes people could spend gambling!” (One wishes casinos would think of that when their showroom extravaganzas typically start at least at least 25 minutes late.)
We’re not particularly attached to WoO ourselves but reading descriptions of what has been done to the Victor Fleming/King Vidor-directed masterpiece is like getting a blow-by-blow account of a rape. It’s brutal. Or, as one Vegas-based critic put it, “a top-to-bottom, beginning-to-end computer-generated remake. It’s an AI-assisted photo-realistic cartoon masquerading as a live-action film.” Most damningly of all, the newfangled WoO is likened to Robert F. Zemeckis‘ motion-capture creature feature, The Polar Express, one of the creepiest confections to have ever emerged from Hollywood.
Since nobody involved with making the movie, 86 years ago, is around to defend it, it has evidently been second-guessed to death, not to mention being subjected to such dubious enhancements as flying monkeys in the auditorium and a rain of apples. Predictably, the Las Vegas Weakly [sic] lauded this radically truncated transformation. Those who are appalled at what Sphere hath wrought are airily dismissed as “cineastes and people who’ve internalized The Wizard of Oz to the point that these cuts and changes may feel too dear.” No, it’s intellectual-property sodomization and a misrepresentation of a film cherished by millions. Perhaps the person who wrote that won’t mind when his IP is misappropriated, rewritten, slashed to ribbons and republished as holy writ. But we think not.
Gridiron Grumbles: Congratulations to the new-look Las Vegas Raiders, who inaugurated the Pete Carroll/Geno Smith era with a defeat of the retooled New England Patriots. Elsewhere, the old-look New York Giants proved to be the same bunch of losers. Kudos to the Green Bay Packers, who appeared to be on a mission, routing a strangely listless Detroit Lions squad.
Better news tomorrow, we hope.