Lee Marvin’s Las Vegas
Joe on May 10th, 2010 | Filed under Travel
Vegas has a peculiar effect on anyone who has a memory, and access to a reservoir of visual images from a multitude of pasts. There are constant flows of iconic images, all designed to catch the eye and make the average person excited, consciously or not. It is a vastly exciting place, and there are certain moments when the images match the reality of the moment. If anything that happens here can be called reality proper, although perhaps one of the big lessons of Las Vegas is that the term is rather ambiguous in the first place. This means that it’s possible to reinvent the self at every turn, and it’s a gorgeous place to do it.
There are legacies here of tough guys who come for any number of reasons. Sometimes it’s to gamble and enjoy a show, sometimes it’s to forget about something or someone, and sometimes it’s to do work. There are plenty of good actors in town, young women and men attending UNLV and working toward a state of emotional concentration on the stage and the screen. There are also plenty of terribly interesting people who come through here, famous actors looking to make good performances on film.
Anyone happening by the Pioneer on Fremont Street will no doubt notice the big neon cowboy, Vegas Vic . There is a fantastic apocryphal story about this glowing icon of the old west, and like everything that happens in Vegas hotels , it really doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, because the legend is worth printing.
Lee Marvin , icon of an impossible myth of masculinity, was filming “The Professionals” here in 1966, and was sleeping in a room with Vic right outside the window. The neon cowboy was constructed so its arm would constantly wave up and down, and he would greet the tourists, saying “Howdy Poh-nuh!” every thirty seconds.
For a band of drunken part-time actors and full-time toughs, this got to be a little taxing, and the story goes that Marvin decided to shoot it until the voice box was stopped forever. Other versions have it that all the actors in the film took part, and some versions even involve flaming arrows. The best story, perhaps, is the one where they just complained to the management. That’s not the stuff of legends, however, and it gets lost in the files of history, waiting for another reinvention.
Related posts:
Leave a Comment