To the best of my knowledge, it is indeed a fact (not counting any celebrities or whales who may have secretly stayed longer in the Palazzo Suites high roller accommodation, where we recall Celine Dion resided for awhile, perhaps while house-hunting prior to relocating here for the A New Day shows at the Colosseum in 2003, but headliners and high rollers don't count, right?)
It was back in 1999, in my previous incarnation as a TV-documentary maker, when the UK company I worked for was commissioned to make a show for TLC called High Stakes: Bet Your Life on Vegas (which aired in 2001). It followed on the back of a successful three-part mini-series we'd made in 1997 called The Mysteries of Magic, when magicians were all the rage and you couldn't throw a stick on the Strip without hitting a prestidigitator. The Lance Burtons and Penn & Tellers of this world had been a breeze to work with and we figured this gambling film would be an easy sequel. How naive and wrong we were.
The problem was, back then filming in casinos was a huge no-no: Steve Wynn outlawed it categorically in all the properties he still controlled and other casinos were equally camera-shy. For one thing, no one wanted to do anything that might risk upsetting their gamblers, while even more crucially no one wanted to be involved in the lawsuit when the angry wife sued for divorce having spotted her husband on prime time, shooting craps with his secretary in Vegas when he was meant to be at a boring convention in Atlanta. In addition, there was the whole issue of professional gamblers not wanting their identity to be known to the casinos, and we found ourselves with a huge logistical problem on our hands.
As the researcher/AP, I was sent out in advance to scout for willing participants and locations and promptly found myself sitting in a lonely room at the then Las Vegas Hilton, with not a soul returning my phone calls for seemed like an eternity and was actually something like a week. To cut a long story short, I got one fortunate break, courtesy of the Gambler's Book Club, which led to a meeting with (a very reluctant) Anthony Curtis at a bar at the Golden Nugget. Evidently, I made a favorable impression (I'd just read Ken Uston's Million Dollar Blackjack and was incensed at the plight of card counters, plus I probably paid for the beers on my expense account) and so with all his gambling buddies and Huntington Press authors at my disposal, the prospects began to brighten.
However, while we were getting some great contributors on board, there was still the whole issue of where the hell we were going to film them. Then one day I got lucky again, and to be honest I don't recall exactly how it went down, but a brave PR representative for the Rio stuck out her neck and agreed to give us access (hello Tyra, if you're out there!). So, I jumped on a plane in advance of the crew to set everything up -- and there was a lot of setting up to do, what with contributors to schedule and film permits to obtain (not just for the Rio, but for the Strip, downtown, and anyplace else we wanted to plant our tripod).
I landed in Sin City a couple of weeks prior to the others and, for the next five-plus weeks, I seldom left my suite (other than to venture down to the bottom of the elevator shaft for a much-needed cocktail at the Masquerade Bar) and lived almost entirely on a diet of room-service chicken Caesar salad, while staying glued to the phone night and day, juggling schedules and keeping this whole very fragile edifice afloat. (When I say "glued to the phone," I'm not kidding: When I finally checked out my phone bill was 35 pages long and took more than an hour to print. Not only that, but although I'd been using an international calling card, which entailed dialing about 26 digits every time I made a phone call--especially back to the UK--when the bill finished printing, it totaled some $2,500! This was because it turned out that there was a mandatory $1 charge each time I made a phone call anywhere, even though the call itself was billed to my credit card. To the Rio's great credit, no pun intended, they took one look at this monstrous pile of paper and were so embarrassed, they quietly threw the entire thing straight into the trash!)
Anyhow, I digressed. The crew had joined me and had been filming for a couple of weeks when I received a call from the front desk, informing me that I needed to change rooms. If you picture the fact that at this point, my suite had been HQ for a month, and was awash with white boards, dollies, boxes of video tape, multiple filing systems, and miscellaneous piles of cables, not to mention my own personal luggage and laundry, and you can imagine my abject horror at the thought of having to uproot, even if only to the suite next door.
The staff explained that it was a legal requirement since, to quote a previous QoD (10/7/05) "most of the city’s hotels are licensed for transient commercial use, defined by NRS 116.31123 as 'the use of a unit, for remuneration, as a hostel, hotel, inn, motel, resort, vacation rental or other form of transient lodging if the term of the occupancy, possession or use of the unit is for less than 30 consecutive calendar days.'" What is more, in theory, if I stayed in the same room for longer than 30 days, I would become entitled to residency rights! (This is why many hotels err on the side of caution and limit guests' stays to 12 or 14 consecutive days, maximum -- read the rest of that QoD for the lowdown.)
Fortunately, in another act of largesse on the part of the Rio, they felt my pain and decided to ignore the statute in this particular instance (perhaps in light of the fact that they knew I was from overseas and had to go home to edit a film!). I believe I remained in the same hotel room for 51 days altogether which, in-room refrigerator and coffee maker notwithstanding, had come to feel more like a cell by that point. For many years afterward, I could still recite the room number in my sleep, but it's been a long time now and while I seem to recall that it was on the 19th floor, I'm hazy on the exact digits (19012, perhaps, if such a suite exists, or am I getting this confused with a Hollywood teen soap opera?) I asked if they might consider putting a plaque on the door when I finally checked out, but in this instance the hotel apparently demurred.
So, there's the story of how I wound up "living" at the Rio for awhile.
But you asked for "juicy," so here's a little post script: As I mentioned, there was more than a little paranoia with regard to filming in casinos back then, so none of our shooting took place without our PR and security escorts, not to mention the copious posting of advance signage all around the casino floor and a fastidious insistence on the signing of appearance-release forms by anyone who might even have breathed within camera range. So, it was more than a little amusing when, toward the end of our shoot, our PR chaperone disclosed, off-the-record, that her boyfriend had recently been up late one night watching porn, only to inform her the next morning that the entire movie had been filmed on-property at the Rio, and on her watch!
In another post script, evidently we didn't do anything to upset the apple cart, because a year or so later I was back in my London apartment, fast asleep, when my phone rang at 3 in the morning. Very reluctantly I crawled out of bed, fearing some emergency, only to find that at the other end of the phone was the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas! It transpired that they had a hot-shot film executive from New York staying and he was in urgent need of a producer who knew something about Las Vegas, so they were calling me to see if I'd be interested in the gig: Yes, I had a Las Vegas casino acting as my (unpaid) agent and yes, I was on a plane to New York five days later, from whence I flew to Vegas and spent the next 18 months filming two series of a (then) popular reality series for Discovery Channel called Casino Diaries. But that's another story, for another day. (Actually, come to think of it, just check the Question of the Day archives 6/21/2011.)
Now that I work for Huntington Press, my office is located directly behind the Rio and although the old bird's seen better days and is up for sale, I will always have a soft spot for the one Las Vegas casino that had some balls and which played a large part in launching my TV career.
