Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...love and hate a city so crazily go-go that three different, colossally theme-park-like casino-hotels (the $375 million Luxor, Steve Wynn's $475 million Treasure Island and now the $1 billion MGM Grand, the largest hotel on earth and the venue last weekend for Barbra Streisand's multimillion- dollar return to live, paid performing) have opened on the Strip in just the past three months? How can you not love and hate a city so freakishly democratic that at a hotel called the Mirage, futuristic-looking infomercial star Susan Powter and a premodern Mennonite family can pass...
...updated the notion of Vegas amusement since it opened in 1989. The general Las Vegas marketing spin today is that the city is fun for the whole family. It seems to be an effective p.r. line, but it's an idea that the owners of the new Luxor and MGM Grand may have taken too much to heart...
...blackjack tables are, astoundingly, quite separate from and mostly concealed by the Disneyesque fun and games. The bells and whistles are more prominent and accessible than the casino itself, and are not merely a cute, quick way to divert people as they proceed into the fleecing pen. The MGM Grand has gone further: it spent hundreds of millions of | dollars extra to build an adjacent but entirely separate amusement park, cramming seven rides (three involving fake rivers) and eight "themed areas" onto 33 acres, less than a 10th the size of Disney World...
...overpriced," says J. Kendrick Noble Jr., who runs his own media consulting firm. "But here you have enormous egos who think they can work wonders with this company; so anything goes." Sometimes the egos get it right: Wall Street hooted at Ted Turner for paying $1.2 billion for the MGM film library in 1986, but today that price is considered a bargain...
...George Balanchine's classic 1954 production, performed entirely by New York City Ballet dancers; children from the company's crack training ground, the School of American Ballet; and starring none other than former student Macaulay Culkin, who settled for $10,000 (he recently made an $8 million deal with MGM) so that he could play the nutcracker prince...