Page 54 - 2019 Las Vegas & San Miguel Co. Visitors Guide

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Meditations on Las Vegas Film History by Elmo Baca
Ever since silent movie stars Romaine Field- ing and Tom Mix discovered ready-made sets in Las Vegas for four and five reelers in 1913,1914 and 1915, the town has embraced the movie in- dustry in strange and surprising ways.
Romaine Fielding’s work is nearly lost to history - his epic masterpiece The Golden God exploded in a warehouse fire - but his weird and fascinating interpretations of the West in Hiawatha’s Cross and The Rattlesnake, shot beneath the balconies and rocky ledges of the Montezuma Hotel, glow and flicker from a mag- ic photoplay.
Tom Mix arrived on the heels of Fielding’s romance with Las Vegas, and what a heroic pro- file he cut!...in contrast to the dandy Romaine. Ramrod straight, handsome, and easily bear- ing his trademark Montana highbrow hat, Mix always saved the girl (his real-life sweetheart and wife Virginia Forde) from runaway trains or tough hombres at the Vegas railroad depot or his movie yard on Gallinas Street (site of the former Gallinas Elementary school).
Then...movie darkness for fifty years, until the hippie ballad Easy Rider blew through town
in fall 1968. Las Vegas slept through some fab- ulous Western epics during the midcentury, as Gallup and its proximity to “Indian Country” branded many Hollywood productions, even though Las Vegas could make a claim to some of the rowdiest outlaw legends of the frontier. The Dodge City Gang, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid and sheriff Pat Garrett created many “cine- matic” episodes in Vegas, with shootouts, lynch- ings, and jailhouse interviews still begging for the silver screen.
Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Bil- ly (Jack Nicholson) played postmodern biker drifters in their brief Las Vegas interlude, but their symbolic defiance has left a searing mem- ory in the city and old-timers who remember the dudes on motorcycles weaving through a marching band on the old town Plaza. The in- nocence of Fielding and Mix was shot to smith- ereens.
Finally the real life stage set for badasses and showdowns was being discovered for what it was by a slew of filmmakers in recent decades. Many a movie star, screenwriter and director have been lured by Las Vegas’ varied streets-
ed his sweetheart on the porch of a red stone cottage at the southwest corner of Lincoln Park, nearly a century after New York Governor The- odore Roosevelt camped there with his beloved cavalry regiment at the First Rough Riders Re- union of 1899.
As the Twentieth Century closed, two pro- ductions based on Southwestern literary clas- sics came to town. Santa Fe author Cormac Mc- Carthy’s border romance All The Pretty Horses (2000) captured scenes in nearby San Miguel on the Pecos River. Max Evans’ The Hi-Lo Country (1998), a memoir set in the hi-lo geography of northeastern New Mexico, featured a great cast including Oscar winners Penelope Cruz and Pa- tricia Arquette, and heart throbs Woody Harrel- son and Sam Elliot.
Another well-known international star won an Oscar for a role he played in the 2007 pro- duction of No Country for Old Men. As the ruthless and efficient assassin Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem roamed the streets of Las Vegas in pursuit of Josh Brolin’s character. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel, the film won a slew of Academy Awards including Best Picture.
In the decade since No Country...., Las Vegas has become popular for television productions, most notably going on six seasons of Longmire. Bridge Street was transformed into its Nevada namesake in the pilot of Vegas (2012-13). House of Cards shot scenes in the vacant Castaneda Hotel last year. A new pilot called Midnight Texas premiered in 2016 portraying a small town where the real world and the supernatural collide.
2017 and 2018 welcomed the cast of Long- mire back to Las Vegas for final seasons and some final scenes, including a dramatic shoot- out on Douglas Avenue. Cast members posted friendly notices on their social media pages de- claring their affection for a well-known filming location.
The Las Vegas country still resonates with film and television productions, providing clas- sic Southwestern frontier scenery for the 2017 sleeper hit Hostiles, starring Christian Bale and Wes Studi. In a ironic twist, Las Vegas was transformed into its neighboring city of Roswell for the television series Roswell, New Mexico which aired on the CW Network in January 2019. The year closed out with extensive film- ing of Sir Ben Kingsley’s series Perpetual Grace, LTD scheduled to air later in 2019.
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capes, historic buildings, epic landscapes and pic- turesque charms.
One of the most mem- orable productions shot here was the 1984 cold war fantasy Red Dawn, where a courageous if implausible guerrilla re- sistance group of teen- agers including Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, and C. Thomas Howell sabotage a Soviet inva- sion of America. The large cast and crew, in- cluding other screen legends Powers Booth, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ben Johnson spent weeks in Las Vegas and min- gled frequently with the locals. Memorial Middle School, the Ft. Union Drive-In and Douglas Avenue had their cameos in Red Dawn.
Kevin Costner as Wyatt Earp (1994) court-
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54 | Las Vegas & San Miguel Co. Visitors Guide 2019