Tag Archives: films

Naked in Las Vegas

Greg Friedler is a fine art photographer.  Translated, he has a passion for capturing unique still photo scenes.  But his other finely honed artsy ability is taking photographs of willing people posed clothed and naked in front of a studio canvas. 

Las Vegas, undisputed City of Sin, was squarely in his camera’s viewfinder years ago and is now part of a documentary film, “Stripped: Greg Friedler’s Naked Las Vegas,” by David Palmer, which will premier in March 2010 and is planned to be on Showtime for two years. 

Their creative effort started in 1973, working from scratch and with no confirmed photo subjects nor even a confirmed location to shoot, Denver, Colorado-based avant-garde photographer Friedler and Los Angeles-based filmmaker David Palmer embarked on a multi-dimensional and highly emotional 30-day Las Vegas roller coaster ride, that would eventually bring together 173 naked human beings of every shape, size, and walk of life. 

Participants in the project entered a small white room with a red curtain and opened themselves up, literally, for what eventually became “Stripped: Gred Friedler’s Naked: Las Vegas,” baring not only their naked bodies, but, equally important, a bit of their inner souls. 

In 2008, with a pre-release copy of Greg Friedler’s book “Naked Las Vegas” in hand, David Palmer would journey back to Las Vegas and follow up interpersonally with 40 of the book’s true-life characters whom he had documented during Friedler’s initial Las Vegas shoot.  What would become apparent was that not only had the city of Las Vegas gone through very drastic changes, so too, on multiple levels, did the people whom Friedler and Palmer had photographed. 

Through Palmer’s discerning lens, which at times becomes so humanizing that even clothed, the film’s characters feel more naked than ever; viewers are privileged to see what happens when everyday human beings stripped of clothing, comforts and society’s judgments discover an even playing field of beauty, humanity and ultimately self love. 

The variety of visual candy is amazing.  From a homeless man who strips himself of his past regrets to find employment, a home of his own, and along with it his dignity; to a hermaphrodite couple exposing the truth that beauty and love can be shared beyond social stigmas; to an Elvis impersonator nakedly confronting his own lack of trust in society and finding faith in others by keeping his own commitments, “Stripped” prevails by sharing an honest, true story of ultimate triumph over what may seem like insurmountable social and personal odds. 

In our society that is overwrought with an obsession for money, fame and beauty, this collective of unique and sometimes bizarre individuals, living in one of the world’s most infamous cities, shows all of us it is possible to grow from crisis, to find the betterment of humanity through vulnerability, and ultimately be uplifted and inspired by the triumphs of coming to terms with who we all really are.

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The Road to ‘Fame’ Stops in Las Vegas Tonight

Tonight, Thursday, Sept 24, at 6 p.m. there will be a special “Fame” movie screening and red carpet at the Paris Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.  

Confirmed talent includes Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Debbie Allen.  Portraying a dance teacher in the original, Allen graduates to Principal Simms in the current film.       Additional cast planning on attending are Kristy Flores (Rosie), Walter Perez (Victor), Asher Book (Marco), Paul McGill (Kevin), Paul Iacono (Neil), Kay Panabaker (Jenny), Kherington Payne (Alice) along with director Kevin Tanchareon. 

A retelling of the original Oscar-winning hit film, “Fame” follows a talented group of dancers, singers, actors and artists for four years at the New York City High School of Performing Arts. 

If you’d like an article, interviews or professional photography with these stars for your publication, please fill out a comment to this post and Las Vegas Backstage Access will get back to you later today.

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Nevada Films Goose State Revenue

Although Nevada tourism slumped in 2008, producers and directors of film and television projects spent $110 million shooting and finishing shows in Nevada in 2008.  The results surpassed the $103.3 million the Nevada Film Office counted in 2007, when a writers’ strike in November and December brought production to a nationwide halt. 

Among the film projects in Nevada in 2008, were such major movies as “The Race to Witch Mountain,” released in March, and “The Hangover,” a paean to Vegas-based bachelor parties, scheduled to open this month.  

But the real revenue bang accruing from Nevada filming comes from television shows.  Programs including “America’s Next Top Model,” “American Idol,” “My Super Sweet 16,” and “Bridezilla” all were taped in Nevada in 2008.  “The Jerry Springer Show” and primetime dramas including Fox’s “Prison Break,” and CBS’s “CSI:  Las Vegas” were all filmed in Nevada, as well as countless music videos, commercials, student films and other media projects. 

Approximately 95 percent of the Nevada filming has occurred in Las Vegas. 

Since 2000, producers and directors have filmed or taped more than 4,500 projects in Nevada, for an economic impact of more than $1 billion.

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Stars of “The Hangover” Hijacked in Las Vegas Orgy-fication

Actress Heather Graham plays a single mom stripper in the new Las Vegas-filmed comedy movie “The Hangover,” which opens today.   During a break in filming, Graham went to see the Cirque du Soleil hot and naked “Zumanity” show in Las Vegas with co-star Bradley Cooper and director Todd (“Old School”) Phillips. Heather Graham

Every night, for the finale, cast members toss unsuspecting audience members onstage for a sexless orgy.  The night they visited, the Zumanity cast slipped Copper into the orgy, took off his shirt and rubbed him all over, according to Graham. 

Bradley CooperCooper was not only unsuspecting, but before the show, Cirque workers assured him, Graham and Phillips they would not be orgy-fied. 

“They were like, ‘We’re not gonna take you guys up onstage,’” Graham says.  “We were like, ‘Oh good’ – and then they grab Bradley, take his shirt off, and he’s like, ‘Ohhh!’ Really freaking out.” 

But it was all apparently in fun as they just laughed the incident off.

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Plenty of Lights, Camera and Action in Nevada

Lights, camera, action! Producers for feature films, reality shows, commercials, and other film projects are flocking to Nevada in droves, despite the sluggish economy. 

One reason that Nevada continues to draw film crews from around the world is that the locations are nearly impossible to economically replicate. 

“It’s hard to recreate the Las Vegas Strip in front of a green screen,” says Dannette Tull of the Nevada Film Office. “And the gaming – we’re obviously known for that. And we have unique locations, which is what makes Nevada so special.” 

The Nevada Film Office’s slogan is “Your Imagination, Our Locations.”  Nevada continues to be an industry leader in attracting film projects – despite the failure of a recent tax incentive bill to get out of the state legislature. 

Film projects in Nevada have accounted for more than $100 million in revenue for the past nine years in a row.

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Top Chef Filming in Las Vegas?

If the Tweets on Twitter are to be believed, the sixth season of Bravo TV’s Top Chef has reportedly begun filming on location in Las Vegas.  top-chef And apparently Los Angeles Times reporters are believers too, saying that filming for Season Six will begin today.

Las Vegas has already been an integral part of Top Chef history. The Season One finale took place at the MGM Grand and most of the season’s shows have found Las Vegas chef’s represented in the kitchen including Season One runner up Tiffani Faison, Season Two runner up Marcel Vigneron, Season Three winner  Hung Huynh, and Season Five chef Eugene “Gene” Villiatora.   

Althought the host site has not been officially named, the newly opened M Resort in Henderson, Nevada is rumored to be the site of the chef-on-chef competition.  

Other reports have Top Chef filming in Seattle, Washington.  However, it’s possible that both stories are true.  Bravo TV has announced both a “Top Chef Junior” and “Top Chef Master” series – spin-offs of the original TV show that targets a different caliber of culinary king and viewer. 

“Top Chef Master” will begin airing June 10 and will feature 24 prominent Las Vegas chefs, including Hubert Keller, Rick Moonen, Roy Yamaguchi and Ludo Lefebvre.

Keller has Fleur de Lys restaurants in San Francisco, his home, and at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas; Moonen co-owns rick Moonen’s RM Seafood at Mandalay Bay; Yamaguchi has two Roy’s Restaurants in Las Vegas and Lefebvre recently left Lavo at The Palazzo in Las Vegas to open Ludo Bites in Los Angeles.

Stay tuned to Las Vegas Backstage Access for more Top Chef details.

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Robin Williams’ Comedy Featured at CineVegas Film Festival in Las Vegas

Robin Williams is always a tough act to follow.  But at the 11th annual CineVegas film festival in Las Vegas from June 10 through 15 at the Palms Casino & Hotel he’ll be the last act. robinwilliams

His dark comedy “World’s Greatest Dad” directed by Bobcat Goldthwait will close the six-day film extravaganza.  The film features Williams as a high school poetry teacher trying to connect with his teenage son (Darryl Sabara) and an art teacher (Alexis Gilmore) – until a freak accident triggers both tragedy and opportunity. 

The very popular annual Las Vegas festival features a “Pioneer Documentaries” section featuring seven non-fiction films including the world premier of the poker documentary “All In.” 

“Diamond Discoveries” section spotlights new independent films available for distribution, among them “Palermo Shooting,” starring CineVegas chair Dennis Hopper, and “Vegas:  Based on a True Story,” about a compulsive gambler and his blue-collar family living on the outskirts of Glitter City. 

The festival’s “Area 52” is devoted to midnight showings of underground and cult films. 

A special section will also spotlight features and shorts produced in Nevada, or by Nevada filmmakers, including the world premiere of “Thor at the Bus Stop,” which follows a mythical creature on his final journey. 

More information is online at www.CineVegas.com

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Iconic Porn Star Marilyn Chambers is Dead, Las Vegas Memories Live On

Porn star/actress Marilyn Chambers is dead at 56. She was found April 12 in her Southern California home by her 17-year-old daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor.  Chambers is also survived by her brother, Bill Briggs, and her sister, Jann Smith.   marilynchambers1

But, sadly, news of her death barely made a blip on the Las Vegas virtually anything goes  entertainment news radar. 

Las Vegas Backstage Access waited and waited for something to appear, then decided an article was in order on the verge of her birthday.  After all, she is credited for bringing pornographic films into the mainstream and, in so doing, substantially added to Las Vegas’ colorful and alluring mystique. 

Born Marilyn Ann Briggs on April 22, 1952 in Providence, Rhode Island, Chambers was an attractive, effervescent young woman who had begun her career as a mainstream model and actress, finding fame as the smiling blonde cuddling a laughing, nappy-clad baby on Ivory Snow ads, a popular brand of detergent. When she then appeared in an adult film featuring hard-core inter-racial sex, Procter & Gamble, whose products were claimed to be “100% pure,” quickly pulled the boxes from the shelves. 

Though the manufacturer quickly replaced her,  it was later discovered that she also had a small role in the 1970 Barbara Streisand film “The Owl and the Pussycat.” 

Chambers traded her wholesome image as an all-American pin-up girl for notoriety as a porn star, credited with bringing hard-core adult films into the mainstream consciousness when she starred in the explicit very low-budget 1972 movie “Behind the Green Door.” 

Chambers was the first crossover adult movie star. 

Chambers, also known as Marilyn Ann Taylor, and then-husband/manager Chuck Traynor were fairly high-profile Las Vegas residents during the 1980s, when they co-owned a local gun and survival store, The Survival Store, backing operating partner Bob Irwin in the gun store and shooting range at Interstate 15 and Spring Mountain Road in Las Vegas. 

It was Chambers that popularized the “machine gun and bikini” image used to promote the store – a similar ploy used even today by gun stores around the country – for several years before she separated from Traynor, who was controversial for his earlier marriage to porn star Linda Lovelace (Linda Susan Boreman) and her allegations of abuse. 

Chambers and fellow actresses Linda Lovelace and Georgina Spelvin skyrocketed to fame and stardom at this time when both American social mores and the quality of hard-core sex films were changing. 

For the first time, films like “Behind the Green Door” and “Deep Throat” (also released in 1972 and starring Lovelace) had decent acting and legitimate, albeit fairly thin plots. As the audiences for them grew to include couples, they also began to take on higher production values and to be seen in places other than sleazy theaters. 

She followed the “Green Door” film with other hard-core films “Resurrection of Eve,” in 1973 and “Inside Marilyn Chambers” in 1975. Then she announced in 1976 that she was giving up adult films to pursue other interests. She starred in the 1977 horror movie “Rabid” and to put together a song-and-dance show that played Las Vegas and elsewhere.  After this, the rest of her career she spent shuffling between sex and horror flicks. 

In October 1974, Chambers performed in the dinner-theater comedy “Mind With the Dirty Man” at Las Vegas’ Union Plaza (in reference to the Union Pacific railroad station that originally stood at the site now known as the Plaza Hotel and Casino).  It was at this period she was attempting to spin her notoriety into non-porn endeavors, with plaza owners including the likes of prominent Las Vegas businessmen Sam Boyd, Howard Cannon and Jackie Gaughan.  She returned to the Plaza stage in early 1978 for “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” 

But by 1979, Chambers was back acting in sex films and onstage for a short-lived engagement in the one-woman show “Sex Surrogate” at the Jolly Trolley casino in Las Vegas. The show drew the quick ire of Las Vegas officials because full nudity is banned in casinos with unrestricted gaming. 

In 1981, Chambers became a fulltime Clark County Nevada resident and known well-known enough that a routine summons for jury duty caused a courthouse stir and generated newspaper coverage. She was dismissed after explaining to the judge, “I’m an entertainer and I have to be in Cleveland Wednesday for an engagement.” 

Chambers, married and divorced three times, remained in Las Vegas through the 1980s after her separation from Traynor, who died in 2002. She also dated Bobby D’Apice, who later made headlines as the Crazy Horse Too shift manager in Las Vegas that was sentenced to prison for breaking the neck of a customer. 

In an online chat with AdultDVDtalk.com in 2000, Chambers attempted to explain what caused her to take such a radically different career path after “The Owl and the Pussycat” and her modeling work. 

“Back then in my naive brain I was thinking that something like ‘Behind the Green Door’ had never been done before and the way our sexual revolution was traveling I really thought it was going to be a stepping stone which would further my acting career,” she said. 

She learned afterward, she said, that wasn’t the case. “There will always be a stigma on people who do adult films,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that that’s the way society has made it.” 

She returned to adult films in 1980 in “Insatiable” and through the rest of her career went back and forth between explicit movies and R-rated ones. Hirsch noted that one of the most striking things about Chambers’ career was its longevity in a business where stars quickly fade. She still has a photo gallery on the Web site Adult Video News and the Internet Movie Database credits her as recently completing a film called, “Porndogs: The Adventures of Sadie” with Ron Jeremy. 

Although Chambers was quick to point out in 2000 that she had done more R-rated films that X-rated ones, she made no apologies for the latter:  “I have to say that the adult films have been a total pleasure,” she said. “They were like getting paid to live out my greatest fantasies. The rest of the stuff … sometimes got to be a real grind.” 

Marilyn Chambers was ranked by Playboy magazine as one of the top 100 sex stars of the 20th century and was named among the top 10 adult film stars of all time. 

Her Southern California death currently remains under investigation.

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Ne-Yo has come a long way . . .

While studying at the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies as a performing and visual arts major, Shaffer Smith neyolearned that it’s okay to be different.  Today, 29-year-old Ne-Yo – Shaffer was renamed after Matrix movie character Neo – doesn’t need to be concerned at all about being different.  He appears to be quite comfortable in his role as a three-time Grammy-award winning singer/songwriter, actor and record producer. 

Ne-Yo has accepted his fourth acting gig, being part of the cast of George Lucas “Red Tails” – a film about the World War II Tuskegee pilots.  Yes,  it’s that George Lucas and it’s those Tuskegee pilots.  

This will also be the feature film directorial debut for Anthony Hemingway.  In addition to Ne-Yo, the ensemble cast includes Terrance Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bryan Cranston, Nate Parker and Method Man.

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Nevada Film Industry Weathers Economic Storm with Gusto

While most segments of Nevada’s economy have been shrinking, if not temporarily disappearing all together, there’s one area that not only met budget projections but those projections earned more than $100 million dollars for various Nevada coffers.  witchmountain

The Nevada Film Office (NFO) announced that film related production revenue for 2008 totaled $110,552,900, making it the 9th year that the NFO has met their $100 million benchmark. 

“The figures from the last decade confirm that Nevada is at the forefront of the film industry as a production destination.” said Luis Valera, Commissioner for the Nevada Commission on Economic Development. 

The NFO assists a variety of productions including commercials, television series and student and feature movies.   The movie “21” and CSI: Las Vegas are favorites that come to mind.  But already in 2009 the reality program The Locator, comedy show Howie Do It and the news program ABC Primetime have all completed Las Vegas filming segments. 

In 2008, the current box office smash Race to Witch Mountain spent several weeks filming in downtown Las Vegas- and it didn’t just spend time under the glitzy neon glamour lighting.  As with other productions, non-Strip Las Vegas facilities served as useful and realistic filming locations.   The Fergusons Motel on 10th street was the home of down on his luck hero cabbie Jack Bruno (aka Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson).  The El Cortez Hotel and perennial filming favorite, Planet Hollywood, was featured prominently.  And in addition to filming on the Strip and through Fremont Street, the Race to Witch Mountain crew spent time working at Red Rock Canyon – which once again appears to be the perfect setting for another far, far away and very arid planet. 

With a growing list of Las Vegas film projects already approved and permitted for 2009, this is sure to be another banner year for NFO revenues.  That should translate into more revenue in the bank for hotels, caterers and equipment rental agencies.  And, of course, Las Vegas residents who earn extra bucks playing extras, will continue to bring Nevada to life on plasma TVs around the world.  

With this amount of money spent by film crews each year, Las Vegas won’t even mind if the hero makes a grand exit through the side door of the Tropicana and walks out under the blinking winking lights of the Fremont Street canopy (Angel – Season 4 – The House Always Wins).   

After all, the buck stopped in Las Vegas, right?

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