Tuesday, March 2, 1999 | 10:18 a.m.
Observant readers of the New Yorker might have noticed a short piece in the Jan. 11 edition pertaining to the Las Vegas News Bureau and the Rat Pack.
Seems that buried within the bureau's piles of 750,000 stills and countless reels of film lay a 16 mm roll of film that captured what is known fondly as "The Meeting at the Summit" -- the legendary month that the Rat Pack played the Sands showroom during the filming of "Ocean's Eleven."
This elusive "lost footage," featuring a rare glimpse of all five Rat Packers -- Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop -- on one stage, came to light last year after an ambitious A&E producer came to Las Vegas to research a "Biography" special on the troupe.
In 1997, producer Carole Langer was poring through the bureau's vaults, dissatisfied with the sound quality of dubbed tapes. She enlisted the help of Jerry Abbott, a lead photographer at the bureau. The veteran photographer realized that films he recalled capturing himself weren't turning up in the dubbed three-quarter-inch tapes they were viewing.
"(Jerry) had been here 35 years," explains Bureau Chief Myram Borders, when asked of how the tale came to be told in the New Yorker. "He was the corporate memory of this office. He remembered because he was involved in the shooting."
Returning to the stored-and-forgotten vaults, Abbott pored over reels of old 16 mm film until he found the missing link: rare, original footage that had been overlooked for 35 years.
Langer gratefully took the new footage to use in her special, which aired in January and will be rebroadcast beginning April 26. Calling a few days after the discovery to thank Abbott, she discovered, to her shock, that he had died in his sleep on Nov. 2, 1997.
"What really hit Carole was that Jerry took the extra step and came up with some extra footage," Borders says. "She was calling back to talk to Jerry, and he's gone. If he hadn't taken that extra step, she wouldn't have gotten to use it -- and neither would anybody else."
Abbott's contribution to the preservation of Las Vegas history has not gone unappreciated in some circles.
A "Rat Pack" historian talking to the New Yorker compared the resurfacing of the film to the Rosetta Stone and the Holy Grail. But here in its city of origin, the finding has hardly created a stir.
Borders downplays the importance of the discovery, perhaps inured to it by being surrounded by historical artifacts on a daily basis.
"It's not really that different than the rest of the footage that's there," she says with a shrug. "What was unique was there was more footage. What Jerry did was go back to the original source and found more."
Still, the financial significance is not lost on Borders.
When asked to estimate the film's value, she says: "There's no way to evaluate it, it's one of a kind -- a lot of the things in the news bureau are that way," she adds.
Today a primary source of archival material, the bureau, originally called the Desert Sea News Bureau, was founded 50 years ago by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. Its original mission was to serve as a promotional tool for the casinos. Each casino paid to support a staff of more than a dozen photographers who would cover their activities, then place the photos on the national wires to serve as a booster for the city.
Photos that were taken at the time were stored in folders almost as an afterthought, although they mutated into irreplaceable archival material 20 years later. The current staff frequently turns up unlabeled photos of former Las Vegans, filed and forgotten, each one growing more difficult to identify as the years go on, memories fade and eyesights weaken.
By the '90s, casinos had formed their own in-house publicity divisions, and financial support for the bureau had dried up. In 1992, the Chamber of Commerce was forced to sign the bureau over to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors' Authority -- as well as rights to all its irreplaceable property.
Big mistake. Now, the LVCVA owns all rights to the property, including this re-discovered Rat Pack footage, which may logically be considered priceless.
But true to its promotional heritage, the material is still provided for a relatively minimal research and copying fee to legitimate media outlets.
So, since this finding was announced in a national magazine, one could assume that the bureau has been swamped with requests for the rare tapes.
One would be wrong.
"As far as the quote 'lost footage,' no, nothing specifically has come across asking for that," she says. "Not that many media read the New Yorker," she adds with a sniff.
The discovery hasn't exactly resulted in staff poring through the rest of the 16 mm, dust-covered canisters for more rare finds.
"It's inspired us to do so, but unfortunately, you can be inspired and still not have more hours in the day or more staff," she says.
"There's things you have on premise that you don't look at that frequently," Borders adds. "Technically, it's almost impossible to look at them anymore, and you don't realize the treasures are there."
Won't they eventually go through all those tapes?
"I don't really know," she replies. "We're making small inroads in a lot of things we need to do. But it's very slow, tedious work."
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