Penn & Teller have pulled off another illusion: Through the magic of cinema, they have made Casino Center Drive appear to be the Fremont Street Experience. (Hence, no kiosks or street vendors to shoo away.) FSE’s director of marketing, Thomas Bruny, says, "In that particular case, it involved shutting down Casino Center in the middle of the night and the production company gained a permit from City of Las Vegas and worked with Metro for traffic control."
According to Bruny, there’s no fixed cost for shooting on the FSE, where he says photo and movie shoots run into the "hundreds … Both a film permit with the City of Las Vegas and a location agreement with Fremont Street Experience are needed. Fremont Street Experience charges production companies based upon how much space is needed, the size of crew and how much equipment is brought onto FSE, what FSE security and maintenance staff are required, and of course, the number of hours/days of the shoot." So, as you can see, it’s quite a complicated equation, not something that can easily be boiled down into a flat rate.
"We have done everything from still photo shoots that take 30 minutes to major motion pictures such as Hangover 3," Bruny continues. "If major disruption of FSE normal business is required, then we normally have the film shoots done in overnight hours between midnight [and] 6 a.m."
Bruny adds that the Mazda commercial "is certainly getting a lot of national air time, which is great exposure for Las Vegas." You might well say it’s free advertising for Sin City and especially for its resurgent downtown area. It’s hard to put a dollar figure on that, too.
