Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1349602
9 2 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 2 1 Las Vegas Stephen King wanted The Stand to be his take on The Lord of the Rings, a battle of good vs. evil. If America was to be his Middle Earth, then Las Vegas would be his Mordor. The Inferno Exterior Over several trips to Las Vegas, the production scouted nearly every casino on the strip looking for the best view from what would become Flagg's penthouse. Eventually, the production was granted permission by Caesar's Palace to use our first choice, the Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino. But we didn't want to just shoot the hotel as it was, we wanted something familiar, but with a dark difference. The casino exterior needed to feel brutal yet glamorous. I had been inspired by the parasitic architecture of Daniel Libeskind and decided that was the approach the film should take. I wanted to feel a slash of glass tear through the facade and a thrusting gesture coming from the top of the older casino. This was meant to reect not only Flagg's parasitic repurposing of the Vegas strip, but the way he inserted himself into the souls of the vulnerable and bent them to his will. I invited everyone in the Art Department to sit at the big table in the center of the room and sketch out ideas. Once we found the look that clicked, Lindsay Ledohowski set to work building a 3D model in Solid Works. The Casino How would the film get the scale of a Vegas casino but without actually going to Vegas? Several options were scouted but as one would guess, closing an entire casino for what would be at least four weeks of shooting is not an economically viable option. A stage build was considered, but aside from the fact that there were no stages big enough available, to scratch build a space of that scale was just not an option. Just about all the local options were exhausted when location manager Matt Palmer called me one day nearly breathless with excitement. There was a hotel right near the US border that had been recently closed down and had a large atrium. We quickly got in the car and headed down. Immediately, I saw the potential. It was ugly, the layout was odd and it was pink…but it was big enough that it could work! It was essentially a blank canvas. The production just had to convince the property managers to let us gut it, tear out some walls, build out new rooms and paint every single surface. A. THE EXTERIOR OF THE INFERNO CASINO WAS FIRST CONCEPTUALIZED IN A PENCIL SKETCH, THEN MODELED BY LINDSAY LEDOHOWSKI. B. CONCEPT MODEL FOR THE INFERNO CASINO, MODELED IN SOLIDWORKS AND RENDERED IN ENSCAPE BY LINDSAY LEDOHOWSKI. A