‘Reality’ TV Shows Strip the Vegas Facade

Michael Tata, a dark-suited fireplug of a man, could be a visiting senator, judging by the way two TV cameramen and a boom-mike operator are chasing him around the grounds of the Green Valley Ranch, straining to record his every observation.

But Tata is merely the fussbudget director of hotel operations at this 200-room upscale resort-casino a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip. In the middle of a daily walking inspection, he is fixated on an ashtray -- a strategically placed ashtray, the first ashtray you see when you leave the lobby and head for the pool -- that contains 10 cigarette butts. Unacceptable.

Never slowing his speedy gait, Tata punches housekeeping on his cellphone. “Who’s responsible for this area?” he demands. “They need to check it every hour.”

The producer in charge of the TV crew pulls Tata aside for an interview, using the same post-game gravitas sportscasters employ while asking Kobe Bryant about Laker team morale: “Michael, talk to me about why it is so hard for some of the staff to grasp the finer details.”

Is this the stuff of successful TV? The Discovery Channel, which has been shooting such mundane moments at Green Valley 18 to 20 hours a day for the last five months, has at least one reason for gambling that it is: The show, “American Casino,” is part of a boomlet in Las Vegas-themed programming that is about to make Sin City as ubiquitous a backdrop as New York became with “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order.”

Evidence of Vegas’ small-screen popularity is stacking up like tourists at a cheap buffet. Ten days after tonight’s “American Casino” premiere, Fox will introduce its own casino-reality show, “The Casino,” the newest offering from “Survivor” producer Mark Burnett. It follows two dot-com millionaires who try to glamorize the Golden Nugget in Vegas’ fading downtown.

A new cable network devoted exclusively to the culture of gambling is seeking investors for a December launch (and promising liberal public-service ads for gambling addicts). A new CBS fall comedy, “dr. vegas,” starring Rob Lowe, was inspired by the life of a Vegas casino doctor (and shot at Green Valley). And three other networks -- ESPN, Bravo and Discovery’s Travel Channel -- will continue airing poker tournaments.

All that is piled atop two established network hits: CBS’ “CSI,” whose forensic cases are set in Las Vegas, and NBC’s “Las Vegas,” a drama about life inside a Vegas casino (although it’s filmed in a Culver City soundstage that replicates the look of the Mandalay Bay resort).

TV is geographically fickle. Remember when Miami was the hot setting? New shows this fall are set not only in Vegas, New York and L.A. but Boston, Hawaii and Kansas. Still, Las Vegas’ emergence in TV comes at an interesting time in the city’s life. Beyond its spectacular population growth, Vegas has in recent years attracted numerous luxury hotels and restaurants, legitimizing it as a celebrity playground, not just a popular destination for Middle America. The city’s marketing campaign to rekindle its “adult” credentials (“What happens here, stays here”) has penetrated the nation’s psyche. And, to some observers, Vegas’ mystique is perfect for TV -- especially in troubled times -- because people flock here for many of the same escapist yearnings that make them turn on the set.

“TV and Las Vegas are a match made in heaven,” said Robert Thompson, who runs the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “The two of them were made to go down the aisle of a little chapel with Elvis singing and walk into the desert distance.”

How long TV’s infatuation with Las Vegas will last is anyone’s guess. Likely, many of the new offerings will end up the way most people do after a trip here -- broke and headed home.

Discovery’s “American Casino” figures to be outshone by Fox’s casino show. It’s not just the presence of Burnett, whose track record with “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” makes him one of the most influential people in TV. Fox is seen in three times as many households as Discovery; its show uses far more and better cameras, and Fox has the advantage in lead-in programming.

Yet the Discovery project, which will spend seven months shooting compared with Fox’s six weeks, provides an intriguing window on Las Vegas’ style of reality. Only in Vegas, for example, would Tata’s underling, the Green Valley Ranch’s hotel manager, be the former Miss Nevada 1997. Her name is Ninya Perna and her relationship with Tata thrives on giving and receiving barbed comments. Think Catherine Zeta-Jones versus Tony Randall.

In the first episode, Tata threatens to fire Perna if her staff doesn’t give high rollers better service. He becomes so upset when she leaves to take care of her dog that he wishes it dead, and says so with a tight smile. When she boasts that a newspaper was delivered to a high roller, Tata sarcastically congratulates the bellman who did it.

Co-executive producer Russell Muth saw that dynamic when filming began in January, “and I said, ‘Get the cameras in there. Those two have something goofy going on.’ ”

In fact, the two had worked together at Las Vegas’ Four Seasons hotel before coming to Green Valley when it opened three years ago, and they say they have a deep professional respect for each other. But viewers are more likely to see moments like the one last week, when Perna phoned in on her off day and, during the conversation, let Tata know she had just bitten her lip.

“Your collagen-injected lips?” Tata sneered good-naturedly.

The cameras caught that on speaker phone because they follow Tata everywhere he goes, hoping tension will simmer or boil over. Employees seem used to a camera barging into their conversations. (A segment producer, Alex Campbell, boasts that after five months he knows most of the 1,200 employees by name -- and proceeds to walk through the casino, saying hi at random to a couple dozen.) The producers spend countless hours killing time with security personnel long after midnight, hoping that a drunk will get into a fight that they can record.

When a high roller wants to take his girlfriend by helicopter to the Grand Canyon for a catered lunch, the cameras capture the plight of the waiter who accompanies them and becomes nauseated by the flight. (“You know, I could have been a doctor if I wanted,” the waiter says to the camera in a private moment. “I actually had the grades.”) When the newly hired general manager, poker-faced Joe Hasson, who has left his family in Reno, does algebra homework by phone with his daughter in the evening, a camera captures it. (“You cannot script that,” said executive producer Craig Piligian, a former “Survivor” producer. “We were just following him at the end of the night.”) When a 4-foot-high Valentine’s Day sugar sculpture that kept an assistant chef up for two nights collapses, a camera captures it. When a marketing executive nearly sobs at the news he’s been transferred to another hotel -- which proves to be a practical joke -- the camera captures it. When a high roller chases after his dog on a street outside the casino, the camera captures it.

Old-style casino owners would have shut down before they gave TV cameras this kind of access. But Green Valley executives Lorenzo Fertitta, 35, and his brother, Frank Fertitta III, 42, are part of a generation that grew up with TV and realized the promotional benefits outweighed the risks.

“I think people will see that things aren’t always good behind the scenes,” said Lorenzo, a muscular man who wears tight T-shirts and holds a master’s degree in business from New York University. “What we strive for, though, is that ultimately, to the guest in front, things are good.” Both sides say that the camera operators can roam anywhere and that the resort cannot ask for any editing with the exception of material that would threaten its state gaming license.

The brothers’ dad, Frank Fertitta Jr., came here from Galveston, Texas, in the ‘60s, learned to be a dealer, built a tiny bingo parlor in the ‘70s and kept expanding it. The sons took over in the ‘90s, built a chain of low-budget Vegas hotels, then, with another gambling family, opened the lavish Green Valley Ranch. The brothers amuse themselves by promoting a series of “ultimate fighting” matches.

A few years ago they sought out Piligian to produce some of those matches, but no deal was struck. Then last summer, Discovery executives in Maryland proposed that Piligian add a third chapter to his series on family-owned businesses, “American Chopper” and “American Hot Rod,” by documenting a family-owned casino. He sought out the Fertittas, figuring the resort’s relatively small size (it has one-twentieth the number of rooms of the MGM Grand) would make the 13-episode project workable.

Most unscripted TV consists of some manipulation. Fox’s casino show, for example, advertised for gamblers and other Vegas visitors interested in being part of the “cast,” then chose its favorites.

Piligian swears no such recruiting was done on his casino show. “We get what we get.” That made it harder to get interesting footage of gamblers other than elderly slot-machine winners. (High rollers tend to avoid scrutiny, which forced Discovery’s first episode to feature an eccentric Marina del Rey salesman who gambles at Green Valley every other week and has a penchant for annoying commentary.)

Last Friday morning, the cameras shot Tata checking his voicemail and talking to a high roller who wanted a corner balcony suite because he couldn’t stand noise from an adjoining room. They caught him lecturing Perna when the top two managers in housekeeping took the day off -- the first day of the Memorial Day weekend. They caught him checking whether the men’s steam room had been repaired, whether lampshades were straight, whether pillows were properly fluffed. (“Some people don’t fluff the pillow completely the right way, so you have to go back and say, ‘If you fluffed it one more time and gave it the old karate chop, that’s the standard we want here.’ ”)

Tata walked through the lobby, opened the door to the pool and examined what he now calls his favorite ashtray. There were only five butts, half as many as on Thursday. This time he did not call housekeeping. He picked each butt out of the sand and put it in the ashtray’s trash slot. This was progress. This was a good day. Whether it will be good TV remains to be seen.