Vegas courts a magnet for reality TV

By Brian Eckhouse

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Televising stories about how crime doesn’t pay in Vegas apparently does pay off for the community.

Court officials say they have been besieged in recent years by outside media, and we’re not talking about those who parachute in for a few days of O.J. coverage. That type of occasional celebrity trial coverage has been augmented in the past six months by eight newsmagazine and documentary crews that have all but camped out in the courthouse.

The explanation probably won’t surprise you: The valley’s crimes are perceived by the rest of the nation as particularly seedy and twisted.

This is the “ ‘CSI’ effect,” Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson says, referring to the TV series watched by 25 million people each week. “The show’s a boutique of bizarre and fetishized crimes.” Thompson is the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.

Earnings, not statues won, are the chief measure of TV and studio executives, so it’s to be expected that Vegas, Southern California and New York — the most gossiped terrains — are favored. Flyover country need not apply.

In any case, many cities might be irate if their stereotyped underbellies saturated the airwaves. Not Las Vegas.

“With Vegas, there’s the sense that kind of anything goes,” says Sarah Bontfrager, spokeswoman for the Nevada Film Office. “It’s been (documented) enough, and it hasn’t hurt us.”

Image is one thing; dollars are another.

The Nevada Film Office estimates film production generated $103 million in the state last year. Of that, nearly $7 million was derived from documentaries and reality TV. About 95 percent of the money was generated in Clark County. Mainly the money went to hire workers for production and pay for hotels, rental cars and food. None of the money dropped directly into the coffers of the county.

If a TV or film crew needs to rent space, the county charges the production company for time and space. That isn’t so for documentarians and television producers filming reality TV — or some version thereof — at the courthouse.

“This is the cost of being a public facility,” says Dan Kulin, a county spokesman.

Local TV affiliates require scant preparation time, less than 30 minutes. But the specialized technology of filmmakers often demands hours of setup, meaning a court or county official must be present, says Michael Sommermeyer, spokesman for District Court and the Las Vegas Justice Court.

“You just can’t walk away from that,” he says. “You have to help them out.”

Sommermeyer views the extra workload as a public service.

“It’s a small way to get inside a real courtroom as opposed to (watching) ‘Judge Judy,’ ” he says. “Then folks will get to understand it. Perhaps they’ll be better prepared when they come to court. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.”

Video crews recording “news as it happens” in the courthouse are supposed to get film permits from the county’s Business License Department, says Film Administrator Nancy Hancock. Few, however, actually go through her office. The permits are free, but the crews are responsible for costs incurred, including if police officers or electricians are needed during shooting.

Sommermeyer hasn’t tracked the number of requests, but he knows, empirically, that they’re surging annually.

And it seems as though they are increasingly setting up shop in the courthouse for longer periods of time.

“Sin City Law,” for example, which aired as an eight-part documentary on the Sundance Channel last year, involved comprehensive coverage of four cases.

The company that produced the series, Maha Films, is back at the courthouse. On June 6, its crew shot a hearing in the courtroom of Judge Michelle Leavitt; two cameramen joined a couple of grips to record it. It was one of many hearings preceding the August trial of a couple accused of killing the woman’s 3-year-old daughter and leaving her body in a Dumpster.

The case has some Vegas elements — the man allegedly gambled away the family’s money just prior to the girl’s fatal beating — and it attracted a measure of national attention after authorities enlisted the help of “America’s Most Wanted” in the effort to identify the child.

Still, most of the cases that are being followed by the film crews at the Regional Justice Center are not all that different from cases that can be found “in Oklahoma City, in Arlington, Texas,” Sommermeyer says.

But those cities, he adds, “are not riddled with the mystique. They’re not getting the attention.”

That’s because Vegas is a brand unto itself, Thompson says. “There is a real sense that Vegas carries with it all these mythologies.”

Las Vegas “makes for compelling TV,” says Dan Slepian, who produced eight hours of coverage in the valley for NBC between the late 1990s and 2005. Seven of those hours were for the newsmagazine “Dateline NBC,” which produces about 100 hours of content each year. (One hour of TV often requires at least three months of filming.)

“The backdrop of Vegas, as a transient town, makes it that much more interesting to me,” Slepian says.

Felicia Caplan, a Los Angeles-area supervising producer for a production company, says one of her reality TV shows that was recently pitched, unsuccessfully, to Fox chose the Vegas courts for its “characters,” not for the valley itself. But the location “definitely enhanced” the show.

Las Vegas, she says, “is a good cinematic example.”