Fun Facts

• When marketers came up with the city motto “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” they did double duty and provided a title for a 2008 Cameron Diaz film.

• In “The Hangover”, during the first scene involving Las Vegas, the Danzig song “Thirteen” is played. The room number the characters stay in is room “2452”, which added together separately equals “13”. Thirteen is a very unlucky number in Las Vegas, hence the movie’s entire plot.

• The protagonist gambles on fatherhood in 2007’s Knocked Up, using a trip to Las Vegas for another entertainment enjoyed by many – a chance to see the Cirque de Soleil production of Mystere at TI.

• The Transformers provides revisionist history for Nevada. Apparently, Hoover Dam – rather than Area 51 – was actually built to house aliens.

• Sean Penn traveled many places to go Into the Wild, including hitting downtown Reno when thousands of bikers were in town for Street Vibrations – a wild experience. He’d been to Reno before for The Pledge and filmed Las Vegas for other Wild scenes.

• In “The Hangover”, three sets of twins and a dummy were used to portray the baby.

• The original Oceans 11 stopped at one, but the remake has been so successful that it inspired an Ocean’s Thirteen, a boxoffice hit in 2007. Stars have joked about setting up their kids in an eventual follow-up they think should be called Oceans: The Next Generation.

• West Wendover is rural Nevada’s record holder for hosting film and television crews. Summer, 2006 brought the team for Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard and others from Don’t Come Knockin’ shot there in summer 2004. Anthony Hopkins arrived a few months later for The World’s Fastest Indian.

• Hoover Dam has been in movies since before it opened in 1935, and continues to appear regularly including Transformers, Miss Congeniality 2 and Tony Scott’s 2005 flick Domino.

• In Don’t Come Knockin’, Sam Shepard plays a movie star with hometown roots in Nevada. Several current up and coming performers have roots in the state, and Charlie Chaplain’s frequent leading lady Edna Perveyance was from Nevada.

• The William H. Macy starrer The Cooler is his second film in northern Nevada; he had a small part in Things Change in 1988 with Don Ameche and Joe Mantegna.

• Three Nevada films have won “Best Picture” Oscars: Rainman (‘88), The Godfather(‘72) and The Godfather, Part II (‘74).

• Frank Sinatra’s cameo in Cannonball Run II, was his final acting role in a theatrical film, although he would later appear in one television movie and several documentaries and retrospectives.

• Frank Sinatra once owned the Cal-Neva at Lake Tahoe’s Crystal Bay. David Mamet’s Things Change and Ron Shelton’s Cobb shot scenes there.

• In “The Hangover”, no effects or prosthetics were created for Stu’s missing tooth. Actor Ed Helms never had an adult incisor grow, and his fake incisor was taken out for the parts of filming where Stu’s tooth is missing.

• Misfits Flat off U.S. 50 near Stagecoach takes its name from the John Huston film, The Misfits, with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift.

• Nevada has about 50,000 miles of paved road, much of it featured in films like The Visitors, Lethal Weapon 4, Vanishing Point, Breakdown, and Rain Man.

• Gabbs, one of the locations in Melvin and Howard, at the time was Nevada’s smallest incorporated city until it got smaller and was disincorporated in 2001.

• Nevada tribes include the Shoshone, Washo and Paiute. Tribal lands have been used in such projects as Misery, The Doctor and Trail of Tears.

• Leaving Las Vegas could also be called Leaving Laughlin since that’s where much of the Mike Figgis movie was filmed.

• The mysterious “Area 51” is near State Route 375 which was officially christened “The Extraterrestrial Highway” in a ceremony with the director and cast of Independence Day. The highway runs between Alamo and Tonopah, with a food stop at the Little Ale’ Inn at Rachel.

• The Nevada Film Office has yet to find the topless pancake house featured in NBC’s Las Vegas.

• In “The Hangover”, while most events that happened the night before the guys’ hangovers are figured out during the course of the movie, the chicken in the hotel room is never explained..........