The Big Screen (41 page)

Because it was film, Desi knew he needed a good cameraman, and he chose Karl Freund, someone we have met before. He shot
The Last Laugh
(1924) for Murnau and
Metropolis
(1927) for Fritz Lang, as a master of shadow and the cold, threatened light. But he was a professional, too, so after he came to Hollywood in 1929 he shot not just
Dracula
(1931) and
Murders in the Rue Morgue
, (1932), but also Garbo in
Camille
(1936), Luise Rainer in
The Good Earth
(1937), and Olivier and Greer Garson in
Pride and Prejudice
(1940). Still, the photographer of
Metropolis
was hired to give America the radiant midwestern domestic bliss of the Ricardo household. Freund shot 149 of the episodes.

That was just one sign of the teamwork on the show. It was not simply the leads who were always there, with Vivian Vance and William Frawley in support. There were only ever three directors, and one of them, William Asher, did 101 episodes. Jess Oppenheimer produced 153 episodes, and he, Pugh, and Carroll did all the writing. They worked about three times harder and faster than the teams that had once made movies. The “situation” in what came to be called sit-com television, or family shows, began with the factory family, and that tradition persists to this day. Television, good and bad, is made by close teams working very long days, often on standing sets and in conditions where the family story they are working on—whether it is Tony Soprano's family or the grouping in
Friends
—may mean more to them than their real families. Television played in domestic places, but its fictional families might be more attractive than your own.

I Love Lucy
was the third most popular show in its first season, and then first in the next three, 1952–55, and then again in 1956–57—in the missing year,
The $64,000 Question
pushed it into second spot.
Lucy
won the Emmy for Best Situation Comedy for 1952 and '53 and Lucille Ball won as Best Comedienne in 1952.

Desi had exceeded his budgets, and CBS was afraid the show was going to be a disaster. But by 1952 the American Research Bureau reported that (with 2.9 viewers for every set),
I Love Lucy
was being watched by one fifth of the nation, or thirty million people. The total weekly attendance at movie theaters that year was forty-three million. Twenty-nine million watched the 1953 inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower, but when the episode of
Lucy
came along in which Lucy had a baby, forty-four million tuned in. And television penetration across the nation was still below 50 percent. We liked Ike but we loved Lucy.

Ball even survived the noisy 1953 revelation that, in the 1930s, to please her father, she had been registered as a Communist. Desi responded, “The only red thing about you is your hair, and even that is not legitimate!”

The show is astonishing, still. Time brings out deeper messages maybe, and it's easier now to feel the dysfunction or the frenzy in the Ricardo household. It comes as no surprise to learn that the Arnaz-Ball marriage ended (in 1960), though this early example of “reality TV” was thriving on impossible distinctions: Lucy was pregnant because Lucille Ball was. Sometimes Karl Freund's high-key lighting is as alarming as anything in
Metropolis
. Lucy is a child going out of her mind in the lead-up to feminism in America, and the conservatism of the household is cast iron enough to feel like a prison. But the comedy is ecstatic, and I refer not just to Ball's extended silent-screen routines but also to Arnaz's mounting skill as a straight man. In the tradition of American comedy,
I Love Lucy
bows to no one, and it has the honor of introducing a woman in the lead role and family as the disaster area. The show must have sold a lot of cigarettes, which is another kind of dysfunction, and a sidebar in what happens to the huddled mass if it looks at the light too long.

Desi and Lucille made so much money that in 1957 Desilu bought out the foundering RKO, the studio that had once doubted Ball's star appeal. Desilu was grossing $25 million a year in the early 1960s. There is no more compelling anecdote in Hollywood business history. Just as Desilu had defined the place of film, a regular crew, and a studio audience, so it became a factory with twenty-six sound stages that made hit TV shows:
I Spy
,
Our Miss Brooks
,
My Three Sons
,
The Dick Van Dyke Show
,
Mission: Impossible
,
The Andy Griffith Show
,
Star Trek
, and so many others.

If this sounds like a stretch, play with the links between Desi Arnaz and Ben Siegel: they gambled and believed their life could be determined and transformed by the courting of luck. One ended up fabulously rich and the other was shot to death in Los Angeles on June 20, 1947, several years before
I Love Lucy
.

Nevertheless, the cut from Hollywood to Vegas is promising. Part of the potential of Las Vegas was its being just “up the road” from Los Angeles. Several years before Vegas became the site of large hotel-casinos, the small Nevada settlement had been an escape for a few movie people, especially the gay community: Liberace first performed in Las Vegas in 1943, when the population of the town was not much more than ten thousand.

The notorious Flamingo was not actually envisioned and created by Siegel and the Mob. Its first owner and visionary was Billy Wilkerson, the owner of
The Hollywood Reporter
and of several nightclubs frequented by the movie crowd in Los Angeles. In fact, Wilkerson was bought out by Siegel and his syndicate, but the famous scene (from
Bugsy
), of Warren Beatty walking out into the desert and having his epiphany in imagining the Flamingo never happened. What did occur was Siegel's extravagant spoliage of Wilkerson's bright idea. (It is a further part of
Bugsy
's movie romanticism that the film is in love with Siegel's creative idea, at the expense of the way he and his mistress, Virginia Hill, were skimming several million out of the venture. That's why he was shot.)

But the Hollywood connection never wavered. On that rainy night when Siegel's Flamingo opened just outside Las Vegas (December 26, 1946, six days after Capra's
It's a Wonderful Life
premiered in New York), Clark Gable and Lana Turner were among the movie stars brought in to give the occasion glamour. One of Siegel's close friends was another actor, George Raft, in a symbiotic alliance—Siegel was anxious to be seen with actors, while Raft was drawn to the thrill and money of real gangsterdom.

The flop of the Flamingo didn't last long. Once the careless Siegel had been removed and organized crime took over management of the business, gambling reverted to its normal ways: it made a profit for the house. In turn, the house and then the houses became attractions for visitors, for star performers, and for the considerable range of craftspeople losing work in the movie business from about 1947 onward. Dancers, musicians, set designers, costumers, and hairdressers, to say nothing of lighting artists, were needed in Las Vegas, where a very large set was about to be built (the Strip), and then remade with startling regularity.

Vegas was a screen thrown up in the desert, as if to prove that America had the technical know-how, the money, and the reckless imagination to do it. It was an assault on nature. There was another light show. By the mid 1950s, guests at the hotels would go up to the roof to watch this sensational projection: the testing of nuclear weapons in the desert no more than a hundred miles to the north. They gasped and sighed, as if at a fireworks show, which doesn't mean they weren't afraid, too, in their hearts. Las Vegas was a new city where there was a violent cut, from the real to the insane, every time you blinked.

In 1900 the entire population of Las Vegas (or the white population) was said to be twenty! By 1931, when gambling was legalized, the state had 91,000 citizens. In 1940 it was up to 110,000, with about 8,500 in Las Vegas. By 1960 the numbers were 285,000 for the state and 64,000 for the city. By 1980, 800,000 and 164,000. Today, the population of Las Vegas is close to 600,000 in a state with over 2.6 million. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the state and the city were unrivalled in their rate of growth in the United States. But with the new Depression (i.e., now), Las Vegas got ready for a magic trick only philosophers and hermits had predicted: going back to being a ghost town, or nothing. The cuts keep coming.

The state revenues from gambling were $21 million in 1946 and $550 million in 1970—that figure does not include the turnover from hotels, restaurants, shopping, and tourism in general. The revenue from the movie industry in 1970 was $1.1 billion. But since then, the revenue from gambling has surpassed box office income. By 1991 the gambling revenue for Clark County (which includes Las Vegas) was over $4 billion.

There are other factors involved: the absence of a state income tax in Nevada encouraging retirees who may never gamble; the early availability of cheap and spacious housing in Nevada; what is called a benign climate; the development of other industries in the state; and then the integration of gambling into so many other parts of the nation so that the unique allure of Las Vegas was diluted. But those factors cannot detract from one kind of fantasy competing with another in the field of American entertainment. Anyone visiting Las Vegas quickly (and few stay long) becomes aware that the city is a light show in which the sun is secondary or superfluous. The Forum shopping area, attached to Caesars Palace, is a beguiling theatrical environment where several times an hour the lighting scheme goes from day to night and back again. It is a vast sky-screen, a listless movie loop that makes us want to purchase.

The structures and the styles of the city were never meant to conform with the rest of America. Instead, they are founded on change, instability—the way in which film sets were built, struck, and then remade—and the larger aim to make their physical world a pliant enactment of desire and dream. Reyner Banham is one architectural historian who saw the crossover from movies to Las Vegas (this is from his 1971 classic,
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
):

Banham added that the studio lots, with their anthology of different sets, were a prelude to the boisterous fantasy enactments of the Vegas casinos. So there have been Parises at every major studio; there is a Paris in Las Vegas; and there is the Paris of films such as
Moulin Rouge!
(2001) and
Inception
(2010), where we are encouraged to believe that real places serve more usefully as backdrops for our imagination.

Las Vegas was noir in neon color before film noir had dared reach that far. It was, in its first decades, a site of brief but deliberate escape for the common, huddled America, a destination where working-class and lower-middle-class tourists could come for a long weekend, inhabit an unimaginably large hotel room at a low rate, gamble, get a hooker (or gaze at women who might be hookers), and believe they were brushing shoulders with gangsters and their dames. It was not so far from being in a movie. The leftover affection from that idyll can be felt at the end of Steven Soderbergh's
Ocean's Eleven
, where the movie just dwells on the lights, the fountains, and the mirage of the place. There were floor shows that aspired to the standards of the Folies Bergère and where star performers could be seen: Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Martin and Lewis, and then the Rat Pack, whose ongoing reality show in the hotel-casinos was more daring and less censored than their archaic movies.

So as Hollywood's own glamour began to decline, and feel the beginnings of shame, Las Vegas offered a remake, a parody, and then a pastiche of it. But the look of the place, even its amber glow in the sky seen from afar, like a vast drive-in, is all circumstantial compared with gambling's extension of the narrative fantasy of movies.

When we went to the movies, our pursuit of happiness was being courted at arm's length. For a very modest outlay financially, we could imagine ourselves in the arms of Donna Reed or Jimmy Stewart (it's a wonderful kiss) and think ourselves into the secure, stable happiness of Bedford Falls, even if we knew we lived somewhere closer to Pottersville (these are the opposed townscapes of Frank Capra's
It's a Wonderful Life
). In theory, we knew we were dreaming, or pretending, and the whole process was given the polite gloss in Americana of offering delight and consolation in hard times. Very few wondered if the play upon fantasy might be addictive or dangerous. It was enough that the cohesion of the growing society was assisted, and its morale helped, by the entertainment.