Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535796
D. Gragg's book, Becoming America's Playground: Las Vegas in the 1950s, led me to pitch Dan on pivoting to a more recently constructed casino of the mid-'50s, one that exists on Route 91, or what is now known as The Strip. Many of these iconic hotel/casinos were filmed for the original Ocean's 11 from 1959: The Desert Inn, Sahara and Sands Hotel were not only a more reasonable scale model of a casino floor for us to use as design inspiration, but also one that would allow us to fittingly explore the dichotomy of these newer casinos; rampant with selling a cultural appropriation grab bag of exotic possibility while existing in the tight-laced social norms of 1950s America. The book Eyes in the Sky by Karen Leslie, and its one iconic image of a man on the catwalk looking through the ceiling panel below proved to be the essential piece of research for the 1950s casino catwalks. Combined with architectural drawings and archival images of some of the aforementioned casinos, I was able to discern a few key architectural characteristics we would need to give period credibility to the story's fictitious casino. But with the production's limited means, I knew we could not afford to outright build the casino floor or catwalk sets—even if VFX assistance was an option (it wasn't). With our limited prep time, we could only afford to elevate two different existing locations and marry them through design choices, camera frames and the eventual edit. The closed and abandoned AMC theatre in the Promenade Mall of Woodland Hills, with its two-story lobby layout, existing graphic carpet and curved, multi-layered drop ceiling proved to be an ideal base layer for film's casino, the El Karoo. F E G H D I