Sheldon Adelson and Cinetex

I’ve written about honoring brave dissident filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, one of film history’s greatest heroes. I’ve written about a fateful evening at the motion picture academy with Harvey Weinstein, now one of cinema’s most notorious real-life villains. But this is the first time I’ve written about one of the most colorful characters I’ve ever known, the casino mogul who got himself hooked gambling on film festivals. The man, those festivals, and that whole end-of-the-Eighties era were over the top, brash and boastful. It’s history—in Vegas and Hollywood—hidden in plain sight.

Disney once had a movie called The Happiest Millionaire. If they ever make a movie about Sheldon G. Adelson, they’d be eminently justified in calling it The Stubbornest Billionaire. He transformed the cityscape of Las Vegas, bought four jumbo jets to fly in elite Asian clients, and then, as if he had nothing else to do, came to the rescue of a Los Angeles film festival. There must be other versions of this story out there but they haven’t surfaced. This is mine.

Around the end of summer 1986, an article about our film festival got good placement in The Hollywood Reporter. (There’s a sidebar involving the paper’s owner and a 1985 train ride from Moscow to Leningrad. But that’s not important now.) One keen reader was a friend of billionaire trade show impresario Sheldon Adelson, who was curious about a possible deal and contacted us. With some regret, we turned it over to our new bosses, as the film festival was now part of the much larger and vastly more political American Film Institute. Using that bureaucratic muscle, AFI Legal hammered out a five-year sponsorship contract. The fax machines were humming.

Adelson’s home base was The Interface Group in Needham, MA. From there, they planned each Comdex, the largest computer trade show in the world, and a myriad of other, also lucrative Vegas conventions. Sheldon got in the papers again when he bought the Sands Hotel, one of the crowning symbols of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack era.

In mid-1986, the deal that leaked into the trade papers was clearly close, very close now, and everyone knew it. But head games were still on the menu when we had a critical meeting to resolve what we hoped were final details with Sheldon, as his guests at the old Le Hermitage restaurant. Then still on Melrose Place, this was the great-granddad of generations of California restaurants and new celebrity chefs, one of the very most expensive places in all of Eighties L.A.

Even studio heads seldom went there—they preferred the more down-to-earth prices and cuisine of Dan Tana’s and Chasen’s—so we knew that Shelly was in full showoff mode. To get his way, he could choose to be as crude as fictional producer Marvin Acme in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but when he turned up the deal-closing juice, he was intent, focused and impressive. As an example of his showmanship, he had one of his execs join us at the table briefly to get his ostentatious signature on the lease of yet another Lockheed L-1011. The exec solemnly promised to put it to good use on the Macau run and departed. Once business was done, Shelly was not much into small talk.

The Sundance Film Festival did not exist yet; the US had some big city film events, most of them in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, but no dominant or national film festival. Adelson wanted to change that, and he had the money. A sticking point at the dinner meeting was the scale of his ambition: he wanted to outclass, outplay, and outlive the Cannes film festival, the most prestigious one in the world.

To do that, even L.A. wouldn’t be enough. Ultimately, Vegas, and the hotels he owned, had to be the global film showcase, even if it took a few years to emerge from L.A.’s shadow. We were more than happy to produce his annual Cinetex Festival in Las Vegas at a price of a million bucks for AFI Fest in Los Angeles, but we didn’t like the prospect of our own Hollywood event being merely a first-stage booster rocket.

At this point, Sheldon switched negotiating tactics. He pushed his chair back from the table and addressed the director of the AFI, a rather proper lady. “Jeannie, Jeannie,” he said in his Boston accent, “You know what it takes to put on a show like this? It takes these—” (he gestured expressively at his crotch) “—And they gotta be this big”, he said while spreading his arms wide.

She was so shocked. I’m amazed the deal got signed.

That first Cinetex opening was cursed by Sheldon’s stubbornness, but also bad luck regarding timing that couldn’t have been anticipated when the hotels, screening rooms and convention halls were booked: mid-1988 had the longest postwar screenwriters’ strike up to that point. It was settled little more than a week before AFI—Interface Group, Cinetex and Sheldon expected to make big splashes on the front pages of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. With a new TV season opening and a deep backlog of months of work to catch up on, leaving town for Las Vegas was the last thing on Hollywood’s mind.

If you recall the stunned silence of the horrified opening night audience in The Producers, you get an idea of how Adelson’s brash welcoming speech went over with whatever elites we could bring to the event. It didn’t faze him at all.

The big tribute events in that first year of 1988 were actors Telly Savalas, Gene Hackman, and Whoopi Goldberg; and directors Louis Malle, Stanley Kramer, and John Schlesinger. Hackman in particular took his evening very seriously, reviewing every clip we sent him.

We survived that first Cinetex. Shelly’s dough landing in our account took a lot of the sting out of a few bad reviews. At least, nobody was blaming us. The creative end was starting to go well. Starting in year two, the film screenings became an international comedy film festival, a good fit for a Las Vegas audience. And Adelson’s people finally listened to us about integrating some of Comdex’s media and computer graphics exhibitors into Cinetex’s studio tech presentations about CGI, then in its infancy.

Cinetex ’89 surprised a lot of people. Apple came on board in a big way, as did Bose. Sony heavily promoted their analog HDTV system, Hi-Vision. A television picture that detailed was a startling sight back then.

By the third Cinetex, in 1990, the festival was a well-oiled machine, filling seats and getting good reviews. Better yet, from Interface’s point of view, the conference tracks, their expertise, were now aligned with the interests of the TV industry and got the decent response they’d hoped for when we opened in ’88. In 1990, the main tributes went to Garry Marshall, Teri Garr, and Elliot Gould. Each of them had a cheering section of loyal pals who flew out from L.A. to cheer them on.

Buck Henry was a longtime friend of Teri’s, so she invited him to moderate her tribute show. Buck was friendly and every bit as funny as you’d expect. Cinetex furnished him with a stretch limo and seemingly unlimited credit, so he became a favorite of festival staff for always being willing to fill the car for a fully sponsored midnight strip club run.

Amid the good vibes, there were a few clouds. The country was in recession, hurting Vegas revenues. Adelson was forced to postpone his redevelopment of the Sands Hotel. (He finally demolished the old one in 1996 to build The Venetian.)

I’d always wanted to show Ocean’s Eleven in Las Vegas; the 1960 heist comedy was then almost forgotten. Then Sammy Davis Jr died, giving us an excuse to schedule it as the tribute closing event of Cinetex ’90. The Cinemascope film played in a giant, high-ceilinged ballroom that we’d converted into a theater.

The end credits rolled, and bluesy music played as Ocean’s ten defeated con men strolled out onto Las Vegas Boulevard. At the final fadeout, workers opened the airplane hangar-sized doors. Sunlight streamed in, and backlit cigarette smoke drifted out.

And that, as it turned out, would be Cinetex’s last breath.