|
|
Article: Filming Las Vegas. (Hollywood movies featuring Las Vegas, Nevada)
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- July 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Society for the Advancement of Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
MORE THAN A FEW cultural critics have suggested that Las Vegas may be the ultimate U.S. city, a citadel situated in the desolate center of the American frontier, constantly undergoing renovations to adapt itself to the vagaries of taste, always a repository not of our best hopes and aspirations, but of their glitziest, most distasteful simulations. When author Henry James foresaw the "rise of mediocrity" in America, he might have prophesied Las Vegas as its capital. The admonition attributed to showman P.T. Barnum that one never went broke overestimating the bad taste of the American public is canonized in Vegas' cartoonish sphinxes and pyramids.
Americans somehow ...