FILM SPOTLIGHT

CASINO ROYALE

Photographs by MARTIN SCORSESE

Martin Scorsese returns to his roots with Casino— a kind of Mean Streets meets GoodFellas in Las Vegas— reteaming Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, and casting Sharon Stone as the moll. Shooting exclusively for Vanity Fair, Scorsese shows he has learned the cardinal rule of Vegas: never split aces

Martin Scorsese's new film, Casino, represents an about-face from the gilded Whartonia of his 1993 The Age of Innocence. The new movie, which will be released by Universal Pictures this fall, is set in the Las Vegas of the 1970s, a seedy, amber-tinted nightscape of vestigial Rat Packers, aging mobsters, and on-the-make chip hustlers reveling in what Scorsese calls “the city's sense of exaggerated luxury.” Robert De Niro stars as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a small-time gambler who rises up to be come a pillar of “Vegas society.” Sharon Stone plays Ginger, his ro mantic interest, and Joe Pesci plays Nicky Santoro, a restaurant owner, enforcer, and Rothstein's best buddy.

America's gaming capital has become so theme-parkish and family oriented, Scorsese reports, that he had to look hard for locations that still resonated with the old-time, adult Vegas-a challenge akin to filming Mean Streets in today's yuppie-encircled, overtouristed Little Italy. “It was difficult,” he says. “The Dunes was already blown up, so we shot in the casino of the Riviera, which still has the look of the 70s. We also shot in the Landmark, which is about to be torn down.” As for casting authenticity, the director enlisted Don Rickles to play the De Niro character's right-hand man—a straight role—because “he's got the Vegas look, the way the real pit bosses and casino managers look.” Other real-life Vegas veterans who made the cut: Alan King, who plays a lawyer, and glamour couple Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows.

While Scorsese acknowledges that Casino has “the trappings of Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas”—he once again collaborated with GoodFellas co-screen-writer Nicholas Pileggi on the script—he insists it's “not really a Mob film. It's about people in Vegas at the end of its heyday. It was almost like the end of the Wild West, the end of the frontier towns of the 1880s”—in other words, the end of organized crime's lock on the city. Scorsese visited Vegas often in the 70s, “not gambling,” he says, but taking in nightclub shows and soaking up atmosphere. He hesitates to call Casino a paean to seediness lost, though. “To a certain extent there's a romance there,” the director says of the Vegas he has lovingly re-created, “but the price for it is paid in blood.”

“There's a romance there,” says Scorsese of the heyday of Las Vegas, “but the price for it is paid in blood.”