Celebration of feminine beauty or ‘stupid nudie show’? Pamela Anderson’s new film captures the dying art of the Sin City spectacular.
“But wait, you guys, our show is legendary,” says Pamela Anderson’s character Shelly in The Last Showgirl, after she learns that Las Vegas no longer needs her particular brand of entertainment.
“It is, but Le Razzle Dazzle is old,” replies the man bearing news of the show’s imminent closure.
“It’s the last show of its kind on the Strip.”
With that, this glittering vision of beautiful 3m-tall women in heels and headdresses fades into history.
Played by the former Baywatch star in Gia Coppola’s new film, Shelly is a dancer facing the end of her dream, with its feathers and rhinestones and all eyes upon her. Its glamour is “undeniable”, Shelly tells one of the younger showgirls. “I could deny the glamour,” the girl shoots back.
Le Razzle Dazzle could stand in for any of the showgirl spectaculars that have disappeared from Las Vegas in recent decades.
All the major hotel casinos used to have one.
There was the Folies Bergère at the Tropicana; the Casino de Paris at the Dunes; the Lido de Paris at the Stardust; and Hallelujah Hollywood at the original MGM Grand. Screenwriter Kate Gersten drew inspiration from the last big showgirl revue to disappear from the Vegas Strip, Jubilee!, which opened at the Grand (later Bally’s Las Vegas) in 1981 and finally closed in 2016.
Gersten tells me how she’d got a “random little job” while studying playwriting – “writing the patter between songs for a one-woman show in Las Vegas”. The show was taking over the Thursday, Friday and Saturday night slots that had belonged to Jubilee! – “and I could sort of see the writing on the wall, that Jubilee! was going to close”.
Jubilee! was the US$10 million production of another Las Vegas legend, the choreographer Donn Arden, who brought the showgirl tradition from Paris to the Nevada desert at the beginning of the 1950s.
Arden had been a vaudeville hoofer himself: he’d danced with Ginger Rogers as a youth; put on shows for GIs during the Second World War; and was employed by the Lido de Paris on the Champs-Elysées after the war ended.
There, he came into contact with the remarkable Margaret Kelly.
Kelly, born in 1910 to Irish parents, had been adopted and had grown up in Liverpool, where she was nicknamed Bluebell on account of her blue eyes.
She would go on to dance in the cabarets of Weimar Berlin, and then, after the Nazis took power, in Paris, where in 1934 she formed her own high-kicking troupe, the Bluebell Girls. She was still training them when the presenter Alan Whicker visited her at the Lido de Paris in 1970 for ITV’s Whicker’s World.
Kelly had moved to the Lido from Paris’s Folies Bèrgere and was joined there by the entrepreneurial Arden. They ran the show together, and in 1950 he exported the concept of the showgirl revue to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.
He had costumes designed by Pete Menefee and Bob Mackie – who would go on to dress Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner and Cher. (The filmmakers discovered the Jubilee! costumes were still intact and used them in the film.)
Cabaret showgirls had deeper roots. Parisian nightspots had attracted audiences for risqué dancers since the middle of the 19th century.
Some of the most famous performers would become immortal – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was painting the cancan dancer “La Goulue” (The Glutton, named in tribute to her appetite for food and life) at the Moulin Rouge in 1891.
Gersten notes how that lineage informs the way Shelly views her profession. “This is a tradition passed down from France, so it’s very classy, just by being French, and it has its roots in this grand culture that’s about the beauty of the female body.
“The women in the show, they think it’s really beautiful, and they don’t have an issue with it. I don’t think that they realise that there might be some people who think this is just entertainment by men for men.”
She certainly doesn’t believe that is Shelly’s perspective.
The film’s consultant, Diane Palm, is herself a former showgirl who was with Jubilee! from the start (having arrived in Las Vegas from California as a teenager). In November 1980, the show was in rehearsal to replace Hallelujah Hollywood when fire ripped through the casino floor of the MGM Grand, killing 85.
“It was a terrible tragedy, a lot of people perished,” Palm says.
In 1995, she became the company manager of Jubilee!
“We did two shows a night, three on Saturdays,” she recalls.
“They ran for close to two hours. We worked very hard.”
Back then, the city was still associated with the mafia, and when Palm first went to the Stardust, she says, “the entertainment director was the real person that Robert De Niro’s character in Casino was based on”.
(In Scorsese’s 1995 film, De Niro played Sam “Ace” Rothstein, inspired by Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who ran gambling operations for the Chicago mafia.)
Palm choreographed Casino’s showgirl sequences and actually appears on camera standing next to De Niro.
However, Palm says that when she first arrived in Vegas, she paid no heed to that side of things.
“There was a lot of stuff going on, evidently. I just wasn’t involved in it or terribly aware of it.”
Yet, she adds, “If you talk to longtime residents of Vegas, they always say it was much better when the Mob ran Vegas.”
At the time, she notes, the big showgirl productions had “anywhere from 50 to 100-plus performers; then there were smaller shows with maybe 30 or 40 people in them.
And then you had shows in the lounges that had maybe 12 to 15 people.” As a dancer, she says, “you could go from show to show, so you could really make a living here”.
Of course, there were physical requirements.
“You had to be tall. I was actually a short dancer, because I’m just under 5ft 9in. And that’s the bare minimum.” (Anderson, at 5ft 6in, wouldn’t have made the cut.)
Partly that was because of the size of the costumes, Palm says: “If you had a very small, petite female in them, she would basically look like a hat with legs.
“Some of the big showgirl costumes could be anywhere from 3ft to 4ft high on top of your head, and you’d have accoutrements like necklaces and bracelets.
“Add all the poundage up, and you could be walking around with a good 12kg of costume on you, between the jewellery and the headdress and the back piece and the skirt and the feathers.
“So you had to be physically a rather big person to carry that weight, and, of course, you’re dancing in this, too.”
As for beauty, “you had to have regular features, I guess, and there was a certain look with the make-up”.
In the film, Le Razzle Dazzle is being replaced by a more openly licentious form of entertainment – a “dirty circus” in which a topless performer in boots and a red-latex skirt spins a plate on a stick apparently inserted in her vagina.
I wonder if Palm believes the showgirls were superseded by seedier entertainment, and if it reflects how tastes have changed in the age of online pornography.
“You have to remember that, at the time, the Vegas shows were quite shocking, because of the topless showgirls,” she says.
“You could hear the audience for Jubilee! gasp when the curtain came up and the first topless ladies came out. And, even back in the day, they had other smaller shows that were a little bit racier.”
In The Last Showgirl, Shelly’s daughter confronts her mother with the idea that Le Razzle Dazzle is just a “stupid nudie show”.
Palm, who describes how the performers were divided equally into “what were called dancing nudes and Bluebells” – the latter never performing topless – admits the line “hit me a little bit... I was very proud of the show and all the talent and hard work that went into it.”
Kate Gersten initially wrote The Last Showgirl as a play, but it was never staged.
“We workshopped it and workshopped it for London and for Broadway, but we didn’t have the right actress playing Shelly. There were actresses who were Oscar winners and Tony winners and Broadway stars and movie stars trying to fit into this role.”
Finally, during Covid, she put the script in a drawer, thinking, “I love this so much, but if this isn’t meant to be...”
It was Gersten’s husband, the writer Matthew Shire, who suggested showing it to his cousin, Gia Coppola. Coppola’s grandfather is Francis Ford Coppola; her aunt is the director Sofia Coppola; and the actress Talia Shire, Matthew’s mother, is also her great-aunt.
With her famous forebears, Coppola says that filmmaking had never been “something I really wanted to dive into. I felt a lot of pressure and intimidation.”
She studied photography at college, but would turn to directing in her late 20s, with the film Palo Alto (2013). When people started bandying around the “nepo baby” epithet for anyone in her position, she felt hurt.
“It’s tricky, because I love my family. I’ve been raised in a very kind of bohemian, creative way,” she says. “There’s a lot of perks, but there’s also a lot of disadvantages, and I still have to prove myself.”
Yet in The Last Showgirl, family plays a huge role: Coppola’s mother, Jacqueline Getty, did the costumes; one of her aunts – Jennifer Furches, wife of the producer Roman Coppola – was the script supervisor; and, she says, “all my friends from high school were the heads of department”.
The tightness of that circle came into play in what was almost a guerilla shoot on location in Las Vegas, lasting just 18 days.
For both Gersten and Coppola, finding the perfect Shelly in Anderson – after watching 2023’s nakedly affecting Netflix documentary Pamela: A Love Story – was what turned the film into a reality.
When Jamie Lee Curtis came on board as Shelly’s friend Annette, a former showgirl working as a cocktail waitress, the production gained new momentum.
Coppola adds that Curtis, Bafta-nominated for her performance, “gets down and dirty. She shows up on time. She’s there for other people’s scenes, and she’s moving gear, if she has to, to get your movie in the can”.
Coppola shot on 16mm film, which one of the producers would drive to Los Angeles every weekend to get processed, but even so, she knew, “if the film didn’t come out, then we were going to be screwed”.
Meanwhile, Palm says, Las Vegas fashions can be cyclical, the future borrowing from the past, as when “Michael Bublé was very successful here, singing the old standards, from the 1940s and the 1950s”.
So she hasn’t given up hope that “there might be a point where people say, ‘I really want to see a great Las Vegas showgirl show’” again.
Gersten felt that draw herself, “I was always like, ‘Oh, I just want to put the costumes on,’” she says.
For one small scene, she did just that, to play “the character of Francine that Jamie Lee Curtis talks about being such a terrible dancer”.
She wore “a black-and-red Pete Menefee dress – it covered everything, but it was a really fabulous sequined dress that I was so excited to put on – with some big lashes and red lipstick”.
The scene didn’t make it into the final film. Showbusiness can be cruel like that.
The Last Showgirl is coming to NZ cinemas on March 20
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