You are correct! Both themes were posited for the former El Rancho Casino (not to be confused with the El Rancho Vegas) site.
"Anytime that you've got a property that's closed and a group comes up with an idea to create two huge cowboy boots that are hotel towers, then you certainly have a place that's going to be full of character," said Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith about Countryland USA, a concept dreamed up in 1993 by Las Vegas Entertainment Network, which had just purchased the El Rancho for $36.5 million. Plans included an amusement park and a rodeo arena, plus a 24-hour cable channel, to be produced on-site.
Longtime Caesars World veteran Harry Wald was tapped to head the redevelopment. "It will promote all the events taking place at ‘Countryland U.S.A.,’ and other gaming/resort properties, which will range from concerts by top name music entertainers to sports, gaming, news and daily variety productions," Wald said of the mooted cable channel. Other attractions were to include a shopping mall, 2,000-seat entertainment venue, a dance club and 55 lanes of bowling. "Everything will have a family oriented and country theme [sic]," Wald said.
But LVEN was so hard up for funds that, when it defaulted on a $12 million mortgage in November 1994, it refinanced it at punitive 18 percent interest. At the time, the defunct El Rancho was bleeding LVEN to the tune of $300,000 a month. However, LVEN managed to attract the interest of financier John Bryan, the man whose primary claim to fame was have been photographed kissing the toes of a topless Duchess Sarah Ferguson. An investment broker named Kazi Hasan was also enlisted to try and scare up the funds through a public offering to make Countryland USA happen. LVEN was so confident that souvenir merchandise was produced for the Countryland-to-be. That’s as close as Countryland would ever come to reality. Not even the infusion of $35 million from a Dallas investment bank – with the promise of $150 million more -- was enough to get Countryland off the drawing boards.
Potential financier Watley Investments pulled out in mid-1995 and, later that year, it was reported that Bryan was clashing with LVEN executives. The Las Vegas Business Press wrote that the project was so desperate for investors that it was allegedly offering them cocaine and prostitutes. No official reason was ever given for the abandonment of the Countryland, as LVEN quietly handed the reins to the property to International Thoroughbred Breeders.
ITB, the creation of penny-stock operator Robert E. Brennan, notorious for his pump-and-dump tendency, took out a $30 million loan in 1996 to retire a mortgage on the site, which it had purchased for $43.5 million. ITB subsidiary Orion Casino Corp. envisioned a $1 billion, 36-acre megaresort across the Strip from Circus Circus, on what would eventually become the site of Fontainebleau.
ITB’s expertise, as its name would suggest, was in horseracing. It owned tracks in Cherry Hill and Freehold, New Jersey. The company’s Vegas entry was viewed with skepticism by some casino analysts like USA Capital’s Joe Milanowski. "I don't think they have the expertise or the financial wherewithal," he said presciently. "Who are they? They haven’t run anything. They have a couple of race tracks back in New Jersey."
Fellow analyst Harry Curtis also asked the billion-dollar question, "Where are they going to get the money? If you’re Steve Wynn, Wall Street will fund you until you’re blue in the face. But that’s the question I’d have." "There's nothing here that gives me the least bit of belief that this, in fact, will take place," predicted Las Vegas Investment Report Editor Russ Roth. ITB founder Brennan was in hot water with the federal government at the time, as well, having been found guilty two consecutive times of securities fraud, including the concealment of assets that included a half-million dollars in casino chips. (Brennan would later go to federal prison from 2003 to 2011.) He had to step aside from ITB operations.
ITB’s scheme was to build seven casinos (each approximately 30,000 square feet) in one, each of which would be sublicensed to a different operator. The latter group would chip in $100 million each toward the construction cost in return for their casino concession. According to project Vice President Francis X. Murray, point man for the project, it would also have "an Alien Circus, Galactic Theaters and various interactive simulators, alternative reality and motion based entertainment experiences and theaters." The casino, mall and 1,000 "passenger cabins" would occupy a vast, ring-like ‘spaceship’ structure, propped up over a ‘lunar’ landscape by giant struts.
Showbiz veteran Stan Irwin – who had brought The Beatles to Las Vegas in 1964 – was named executive producer, in charge of coordinating entertainment. Pete Karamitsanis, senior vice president of Studio E in Orlando was charged with visualizing the project, whose cost had escalated from the originally budgeted $800 million. (Yet another red flag.) "We wrote a whole story for it -- about people in outer space, in a place with a lot of virtual reality, and you go into craters to gamble."
A 65-story hotel tower (The Emerald) with 2,400 rooms was also planned, with project completion slated for April 1998. However, when the October 1996 deadline for funding the project came due, ITB revealed it had been unable to drum up any funding for Starship Orion, a casualty of the shift away from ‘family friendly’ Las Vegas, as well as of Wall Street’s skepticism. (It was at this time that MGM Grand abandoned its theme park and Circus Circus Enterprises stopped charging admission to Grand Slam Canyon, later to become Adventuredome.) "We thought we’d have seven heads of seven companies say they’d all work together, and this may not be the right time for them to do it. No one has come forward to put up any money," said ITB Chairman Joel Stern, insisting that Starship Orion "theoretically … remains a good idea."
Previous owner LVEN – which was to have been one of the seven casino operators -- tried to reassert control over the property, without success. Meanwhile, ITB tried to dust off the Countryland USA theme, with 1,700 hotel rooms and a 100,000-square-foot casino. ITB could still find no takers. ITB and LVEN patched up their differences in 1998, and tried to raise interest in reopening the El Rancho in its existing incarnation. In July 1999, LVEN reported that a "partner company" named Countryland USA had $354 million on tap to renovate the El Rancho and that a sale of the property would soon follow. It didn’t. (ITB was the owner of record but LVEN stood to gain a commission on any sale.)
In December 1999, as the El Rancho sat vacant, local channel KVBC-TV infiltrated the property and discovered exposed wiring and asbestos, not to mention rats, bugs, and a bank of slot machines on loan from Bally Gaming. The health-related discoveries brought an OSHA fine down on ITB’s head. Six months after the KVBC expose, ITB sold the El Rancho for $45 million to Turnberry Properties, which imploded the aging hulk in October 2000, putting paid to Countryland and Starship Orion in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, its successor, Turnberry Associates’ $2.9 billion Fontainebleau went bust, too, and was purchased out of bankruptcy by Carl Icahn, who is presently sitting on the property, waiting for the real estate market to improve sufficiently that he can flip the property. Whereupon the El Rancho/Countryland/Starship Orion/Fontainebleau site becomes somebody else’s problem.
And as to those readers who wrote in with regard to our unplanned "Vegas space trilogy" and pointing out there have been two notable cosmically themed casinos that did make it off the drawing board, indeed there have been, namely the much-lamented Stardust and the less-lamented but equally characterful Vegas World, the latter being a typically outlandish product of the late Bob Stupak's imagination. You can read about both, and check out some images, in the QoD Archives -- just click those links.
