Viva lost Vegas

Paul Jay's view of the city where everything's a con

BY JASON ANDERSON

Paul Jay was sitting in a dentist's chair when he heard the ad for Legends in Concert. The Las Vegas extravaganza, where amazing lookalikes performed as beloved celebrities, had come to Toronto's Sheraton Centre. How fabulous! How incredibly lame!

A curious Jay -- the director of several documentaries, including the much-acclaimed Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows, and the creator of CBC Newsworld's CounterSpin -- headed down with the intention to scoff.

"Before the show," he says in an interview via email, "I'd had a kind of snobbish attitude toward impersonators, very much how I felt about wrestling before I made Hitman Hart. I went to see the show and was surprised by how much fun I had and how much the audience enjoyed it. If the impersonators were good enough, people were willing to buy into the fantasy and pretend these performers were the real deal."

Jay met the performers and was impressed by two Toronto musicians, Wayne Catania and Kieron Lafferty, who did the Blues Brothers. He found them "bright, funny and down to earth." They were about to audition for Legends' main show at Las Vegas' Imperial Palace, and a gig there could mean they'd be able to give up the stress of touring and move their families to Vegas. But can anyone make a home in a city so sinful? And Jay wanted to know what would happen to, as Kieron says, "two guys from Canada impersonating actors who play two fictitious characters in a town where everything's a replica of something else."

Thus was Lost in Las Vegas born, Jay's funny, sometimes fantastical rumination on what Vegas embodies and possibly anticipates about our culture. As he did in Hitman Hart, Jay uses a wild battery of techniques to wrest all the possibilities from a juicy scenario. That includes dreamy shots of Wayne and Kieron driving in the desert and even a fantasy sequence based on the church scene in the original Blues Brothers movie.

Jay also uses Wayne and Kieron as his surrogate, on-camera researchers who ask other entertainers, community activists and academics about Vegas life. By having his subjects question other subjects, Jay sought to give "what are inherently static, 'sit-down interviews' a feel of verité filmmaking, being part of an unfolding story moving through time. For it to work, it has to be justified by something in the 'real' story, so it was quite genuine that Wayne and Kieron were struggling with the question of whether they would want to raise their kids in Vegas if they got the job. This justified a quest to find out what makes Vegas tick."

What they discover are corporate casinos reinvesting little of their billions back into a rapidly expanding city and an underclass of underpaid performers struggling to keep their smiles on. "In Vegas you find so many talented people going to waste," says Jay. "One of the dancers in the film talks about living a dream, dancing professionally, and then describes his role in the casino as a 'write-off' meant to attract people to the tables. Some of the victims of Vegas are the people who go there to work in the entertainment industry. People of talent, who mostly find the way to earn their living -- as another character says -- selling their ass, one way or the other.

"Unless you're a star," says Jay, "performers get paid dirt and treated like fodder. A Legends dancer working two shows a night, six days a week plus rehearsals, makes $600 a week. Other dancers make less. Remember, dancers have a limited working life and are often off injured, without pay. There is such a large pool of talent attracted to Vegas that without a union, competition keeps wages down. The casinos take advantage of the fact that talented people 'need' to perform, to express themselves."

Yet Lost in Las Vegas finds much to celebrate in these people's lives, especially as we experience more of the music that really affects Wayne and Kieron. Another intriguing contrast develops, this time between the ersatz blues of their act and something more raw and true. "The Blues Brothers act is an homage to the blues," says Jay, "but also a caricature. Genuine blues is about sorrow, about the heart. It's about losing the ones we love and facing the harsh realities of life -- everything that Vegas culture isn't. Vegas is a con, a fantasy to make people part with their money."

And, as in Hitman Hart, circumstances soon spin out of Jay's control, with Legends impresario John Stuart scheming to bring a "happy" ending to this troubling tale and events forcing the director to take a place in front of his camera.

"In the end, I couldn't avoid it," he says. "There was no other way to truthfully tell what was going on. The subjects turned the filmmaker from an observer into an active player. Perhaps we filmmakers always play this role. In a film about layers of reality and fantasy, I was happy I could expose the extent to which a documentary film itself is contrived and artificial. In fact, I played with this notion throughout the film. Whoever heard of a dream sequence in a documentary?"