Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Angeles to the casinos. From that he developed a small airline, which he sold in 1968 in a deal that eventually brought him $104 million. That money helped him build and then sell ever larger Vegas hotels, a sequence he capped with the 1993 opening of the $1 billion MGM Grand, with its 5,005 rooms, 15,000-seat arena and 33-acre theme park...
Debt doesn't scare Kerkorian. There is always something you can sell to pay it off. After he bought MGM in 1969, he sold off the studio's choicest assets, from its immense library of old films to warehouses filled with props and other paraphernalia. Later he added United Artists, but for him it has always been the deal, not the business. In one famous Ping-Ponging transaction, he sold MGM/UA to Ted Turner for $1.5 billion in 1986, then bought back everything but the film library for less than $800 million, and then sold it all again...
Except that EFX isn't on Broadway. It's 2,240 miles off Broadway, at the MGM Grand, in a desert stopover called Las Vegas. Well, somebody has to put on musical spectacles, and Vegas has a dozen or so. This year, while Manhattan's mainstream theaters could find only a single original tune show--and that, Lloyd Webber's Sunset Blvd., was an import from London and Los Angeles--Vegas' casino hotels are proving that the old form still has sass, vibrancy and audience appeal. And size. And how! Four big productions will have opened by Memorial...
Well, Vegas has already done that for Eisner. The town is Disneyfied in two important ways. One is that its shows have the Good-Lord-what-next? suspense of a Disney World thrill ride. Or as Tom Bruny, the MGM Grand's director of advertising, explains the challenge of creating EFX: "We knew we had to produce a 'gee whiz' show, but we didn't want it to be just a 'gee whiz' show...
...when MGM auctioned off a good part of its priceless heritage, Reynolds was there to buy costumes worn in some of the studio's famous films, including Leslie Caron's plaid suit from Gigi and Clark Gable's uniform from the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty. "I just started buying on an emotional level," she says. "But after I had bought all this stuff, it struck me: Wouldn't everybody love to see this?" For years, without avail, she tried to interest moguls in financing a movie museum in Hollywood. Then she rolled sevens in Vegas...