Question of the Day - 21 May 2024

KCLV-TV is a creation of the City of Las Vegas, a public-access channel, as you said. The series is titled “The City of Las Vegas,” aptly enough, and chronicles the evolution of Sin City. It began in 2020 with “The Early Years” and has worked its way forward, decade by decade, meaning that the 1960s are up. Indeed, that video premiered on Saturday and you can watch it here; all of the 75-minute episodes are available through YouTube, the flagships of the KCLV video feed.

Jennifer Boyd of Boyd Productions directs the series, most of which has been written by Ken Chowder. Boyd Productions describes itself as a “company that prides itself on creating films that spark curiosity, connectivity, and societal change.” 

We spoke with Ms. Boyd (no apparent relation to the Boyds of Boyd Gaming), who told us, “Basically, I’ve been a producer/director/writer for over 25 years now, mainly documentaries, mainly with PBS and Connecticut Public Television for a while earlier in my career. More recently, what I do is the history or call-to-action documentaries. I have a team of folks that I work with, that I’ve been working with for about 20 years, most of them.”

“It is a little complicated,” she says of how Boyd came to chronicle Las Vegas. “I've done a lot of history docs on all sorts of other topics -- the Blizzard of ’78, history of different decades, all sorts of topics. But I learned about the call for producers who could possibly work with the Centennial Commission. So we presented to the Centennial Commission — and we got the first project! 

“From then on, we’ve had a great working relationship and we’ve to do the series, even all the way through COVID. Now we’re continuing to finish out the century. When we’re done, it will be a total of 10 feature-length documentaries on the first 100 years of Las Vegas.

“It’s a lot of work, a lot of detail. Even now as we’re getting ready to release ‘The 1960s,’ we’re in color-correction sound-mixing mode and putting on captions. There are so many steps involved in the process.

For instance, while today we're actually outputting ‘The 1960s’ and putting on the captions to send it over to everyone in Las Vegas, at the same time we're doing research on the 1970s. That means we’re looking for stories. We work with our experts on the Centennial Commission and local historians and figure out the most important things of that decade.

“Then we go out and find other experts, people who can tell stories, and footage. Right now, we have thousands and thousands of images from all these decades in a virtual library. We don’t own these images, but we can call them up from the cloud at any certain moment to help us tell the story.

“It takes months of just that part of it: finding images, old archival film, creating an outline, developing a preliminary script. That’s probably the first five months, then we keep going from there. Our director of photography is out in Vegas, our audio engineer, our gaffer, a location producer, and other researchers who help us along the way.

“Then we have advisors. Some of them are photo advisors, like UNLV. A person helps us with oral histories and another who might be attending to an aspect of the archives that helps us tell the stories. We also have local historians who make sure that we’re really accurate.

“Of course, the experts check our work all along the way. It’s probably no surprise, but we call it our Central Cast of Characters. Those are folks like Bob Stoldal, Michael Green, and Geoff Schumacher …a whole bunch of folks familiar from other history projects.

“The next episode is coming out, as always, on the anniversary of the founding of Las Vegas. This year, it will be released on the weekend of May 18. Very soon!"

Of course, it's available now. We highly recommend all the decades; they're some of the best depictions of the history of Las Vegas extant.