bad crazyness in las vegas and rhyolite

Last week I was in Las Vegas, Nevada shooting some film for the Future So Bright project. It was cheap to stay over a couple nights in Vegas on my way to New York, and since Vegas sports an amazing array of old dilapidated motels, road-side attractions and is only a couple hours from the very photogenic ghost-town Rhyolite, I figured it would be worth a stop. Austin filmmaker/photographer/writer Elizabeth Skadden was recently pegged to write an article about me for an upcoming issue of Cinemad Magazine, and knowing that all good journalists make their way through Vegas at some point, she decided it would be best if we conducted the interview in a fancy casino steak house. We met at the airport and went straight to a downtown casino where we immediately lost six dollars in quarter slots. Luckily, it wasn’t long before we discovered the one-dollar margaritas and the rooftop swimming pool at the Horseshoe Hotel.
Las Vegas is a strange place. It is hot and weird and always seems to smell like fried chicken. In some ways it could serve as a poster-child for the long list of what is wrong with America. But while it is a grim reminder of how bad things are, there is also an inherent honesty to the city. The town’s mayor, Oscar Goodman, is a former defense lawyer who represented some of the biggest names in organized crime, and at a recent speaking engagement at a local elementary school and asked by a fourth-grader “if you were stranded on a desert island, what is the one thing you would want with you,” his answer was a confident “a bottle of gin.” Later, when asked about the comment, he replied that the kid should not have asked him the question if he wasn’t prepared to hear the truth. Las Vegas is a sick place, but instead of hiding it like the rest of the country does, it reveals in at and allows the world to see just how nasty it really is.
It didn’t take us long to get completely bored with the casino scene, so the next morning we packed up the (rented) mini-van and drove to Death Valley in search of ghost towns. About 150 miles up highway 95 and then off on some desolate back roads we found the amazing ghost-town Rhyolite, an old gold-rush boom town that sprung up in 1904 and by 1907 had a population of 10,000. But the town’s success was short lived, and by 1920 it was all but abandoned. Today all that remain are the stone and concrete ruins of a few old buildings and a couple signs that warn of rattlesnakes. The town is as quiet and isolated as anywhere I have ever been, and with the exception of a few jackrabbits there is no signs of life. The only sound was the wind hitting your eardrums and the occasional airliner passing overhead. There were no crickets, no grass to blow in the wind, and no nearby highway with semi-trucks lumbering by.



In the 1970s a small group of eccentrics attempted to form an art colony a few miles south of Rhyolite, and in the early 80s a group of Belgium artists built an open air “art situation” consisting of several large sculptures. The sculptures include a surreal, life-size depiction of the last super and a 25-foot cinder block sculpture of a naked woman. Like Rhyolite, the sculpture yard seems to be completely abandoned, with no sign of life or markings indicating what is going on or who is in charge, but apparently a non-profit group is trying to raise funds to restore it all.

the (abandoned?) goodwell open air museum, just south of rhyolite, nevada, is very exciting.
Back in Vegas the next day, things seemed even more bizarre. It was as if we had just seen the impending apocalyptic doom facing the city, and only we knew that it was just a matter of time before Las Vegas went down like Rhyolite. But neither of us really felt any need to tell anyone, figuring they’ll all find out soon enough. The ghost-town of Las Vegas would be an interesting sight, but I am not sure how you would classify its ruins, especially the recreations of old ruins such as the Sphinx, the Luxor pyramid, and Caesar’s Palace. Ruins of fake ruins, perhaps, but something tells me that the forces of nature will not be as kind to the newer, plastic and fiber-glass ruins as it has been to the ancient stone ones.
Vegas is an interesting place to go when you have no real interest in gambling. I was there to aim my camera at the places waiting to be bulldozed. Besides the cheap drinks and the blue-plate-specials, the only real highlight of Las Vegas is the Neon Museum, also known as the Neon Bone-Yard. The neon museum is a non-profit group that is trying to save as much of the cities historic neon signs as possible. They have successfully restored several old signs that are on display on the Old Vegas strip, but more intriguing is their expansive bone-yard of old signs yet to be restored that they will let you mill around in if you make a modest donation.

neon bone-yard, las vegas nevada
The next day Elisabeth and I parted ways, and something tells me that the article will end up being more about prime rib, lobster tails, and accidentally running over snakes with the mini-van on the back-roads of Nevada then it will be about my current film project, but I suppose that is probably a good thing.