If your best buddy ever looks up, sees himself magnified into the size of King Kong on the largest screen in the world, turns to you in disbelief and says, “I never saw my head so big,” you can be sure of one thing. Trouble is around the corner.
Maybe things were going too well. One day, Tim was dealing blackjack to the Sopranos, and the next I was being called up to the stage to perform a song with the Barenaked Ladies. We had not only captured the feel of Vintage Vegas with Tony Bennett, we’d also grabbed that elusive buzz that comes when cab drivers are talking about you, and everybody is wondering what you’re going to do next. When a party that we were throwing got a mention in Norm Clarke’s morning gossip column, we knew we’d be jamming that night.
Part of our plan to keep The Nugget on the lips of every cab driver was our reality TV show. There have been many other shows about casinos over the years. But most had been set up to mimic reality. We were opening our doors to something new. We were allowing the cameras access behind the scenes. Like everything else we did at The Nugget, we were making it personal.
From the moment we linked up with Mark Burnett, I figured all he had to do was point a camera at Tim, and the show would be a huge hit. When you’ve got your own Joe Pesci, how can you miss?
A few days before Tim, even met Burnett, he was talking on his cell phone as he drove into the valet at the Bellagio when he hit the gas instead of the brakes and rammed his Mercedes into another car. The airbag inflated and twisted his knee. When he showed up to meet Burnett a week later hobbling on a cane and explaining what had happened, the producer began to laugh. “Hey,” Mark said, “save a little drama for the show!”
Perry was sure Tim would make a great television character—and that I’d compliment him well. But Tim didn’t want to do it. He didn’t like the idea of being followed around by cameras twenty-four hours a day. He was a private person to begin with—which is an understatement when you consider that I’d begun to call him Howard Hughes. He was concerned that he’d be portrayed as a compulsive workaholic and that I’d come off looking like a playboy. But most of all, Tim was against surrendering creative control.
I certainly didn’t want to give it up, either. But if we were writing out a list of pros and cons about whether to do the show, the list of pros was far longer. Mark Burnett may have been born in London and served as a paratrooper in the British Army, but he’d certainly become a master at locating the pulse of mainstream America. The Apprentice was topping the ratings for NBC, and Survivor routinely attracted more than twenty million viewers for CBS. Burnett was offering us hundreds of thousands of dollars to put our brand before six to eight million people week after week for an entire summer. You couldn’t buy advertising like that. To give you an idea just how much exposure that is, that’s roughly ten times as many viewers as the MTV Real World show got when it set seven strangers in a luxury suite at the Palms Hotel a few years earlier. And that was a smash success.
Granted, it’s not easy to make a television hit, and Burnett didn’t have the lure of a competition in our show to keep viewers hooked like he did on Survivor and The Apprentice. But if he could work his magic, who knows, maybe our logo would start to pop up all over America like Donald Trump’s “You’re Fired!” hats. The timing seemed perfect. We’d be getting Burnett at his peak. Not only were The Apprentice and Survivor shining back in 2003, but Sylvester Stallone was working with Burnett on a boxing reality show called The Contender and Steven Spielberg was talking with him about another project that would come to be called On the Lot.
While Tim could see the potential in all of this, he never would’ve made this deal if he were on his own. This was one of those rare cases where he hit the brakes while I gunned the gas. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I was already drinking the Kool-Aid. I’d gone to college to be the next Bob Costas, and though a reality show is much different than being a sportscaster, it was still television. TV had a powerful allure to me, and I didn’t understand the world I was driving us toward. One of the disadvantages of always wanting to dive into new situations is you’re constantly going to be naïve at first. I had no idea just how much Kool-Aid was waiting for me—or how much I had the capacity to drink.
Perry had been around. He wasn’t drinking any Kool-Aid. To him, the show made sense on its business merits. So he put his foot on the gas pedal, too, and after awhile the deal just sped ahead. We all signed on with high hopes to do The Casino with Fox. But underneath, Tim wasn’t putting his trust in the form or Burnett. He was trusting my instincts and Perry’s judgment.
As soon as Burnett arrived in Vegas, he put us all at ease. We were truly impressed. When you get an inside look at the unique way he devises sets and thinks about character development, you quickly understand why he’s a master at what he does. Burnett wouldn’t have taken the show on if he didn’t think it had the potential to be great. The only thing he really had to do was point the cameras at our reality.
There are plenty of casinos that invite celebrities in for publicity. But nowhere else would you find the owner of the joint on the floor dealing blackjack to the Sopranos. And, of course, Tim being Tim, he got us into hot water when he jokingly dealt only good cards. (“Oh, what’s the matter? You don’t like that one? How about this one?”) We got fined for that little indiscretion. But even the gambling regulators understood that Tim was simply acting as if he were in his living room.
I guarantee you, nowhere in all of the concrete palaces lining The Strip would you find a happier casino owner than Tim. Or any owner using the master key to open the door on one of his sleeping customers at three in the morning, and then jumping on that customer’s back. But that’s just what Tim did with our pal Fritz.
When Tim noticed Fritz’s girlfriend, Biata, wheeling a suitcase through the casino floor at almost three o’clock in the morning, he hustled over to find out what was wrong. Biata told him that Fritz had tossed down a few too many and gone to bed early while she’d stayed at the tables. When she arrived at the room, he was furious that she’d returned so late. “Only whores come in at this hour,” Fritz fumed. Naturally, an argument ensued, and the next thing you know she’d packed her suitcase and was rolling it through the casino floor with tears streaming down her cheeks. Tim led her back up to the room, opened the door with the master key, and jumped on top of Fritz.
“You gotta make up with Biata!” he pleaded. “I will not have her crying in the middle of my casino at three in the morning!”
Fritz rubbed the fog out of his eyes, smiled, and the next thing you know he and Biata were hugging and kissing. When Mark Burnett said he envisioned our show as The Love Boat on steroids, I imagined this is what he was talking about.
You could develop a natural plot line just looking at the situations that Tim got us into when he opened up the limits. One time, Johnny D. called in about a whale from Europe who played roulette. Nobody in Vegas would give him the game he wanted. Johnny D. wanted to know if Tim would let the guy bet more than he could anywhere else in town.
The guy wasn’t coming in on a line of credit. He’d be bringing millions straight to our cage. If he lost, we wouldn’t have to wait thirty days for him to pay his marker, or worry whether he’d try to stiff us. We wouldn’t have to negotiate a lower payment with him. The money was ours. All we had to do was let him put more money down at The Nugget than he was able to at any other roulette table in Vegas—and then beat him.
To Tim, it was like Fort Knox calling to get a game.
“Talk about a dream customer,” he said. “There might not be ten guys like him in the world.”
The guy was already in Vegas. We didn’t have to send a plane for him. We didn’t have to so much as offer him a suite. All we had to do was give him a roulette table and then allow him to bet his millions.
To Tim, the temptation was unbearable. Roulette, he knew, is one of the worst games a player can play. It’s not like blackjack where The House edge is only a small percentage. There’s absolutely no skill involved. Of the countless bets you can make on a roulette table, none of them are very good—while a lot of them are really bad.
So you could almost hear the voice of Bob Martin echoing in Tim’s ears.
“If you think you got the best of it…”
But…
The odds pay so well on some of those lousy bets, that if the guy put a mountain on the table and won, he could take us down in an avalanche. Take down the whole house! Tim. Me. Eugene the showroom manager. Ken the singing waiter. Drew the smiling bellman. Reinaldo the world’s greatest window cleaner. Everyone.
But…
He’d have to be extraordinarily lucky to do that.
“We have so much the best of it,” Tim said. “I can’t not take him.”
This bet was bigger than the money. Because—and I’ll never be able to get this point across strongly enough—it’s not about the money for Tim. Money is just a way that Tim keeps score of how well he handicaps life. This bet got to the core of why Tim wanted to own a joint in the first place.
Gigantic corporations with a wide range of hotels and billions of dollars in assets wouldn’t give this roulette player the game he wanted. They wanted no part of this guy because they were no longer truly in the business of taking bets. That gnawed at Tim. He hated that most casino revenue in Vegas was now coming from the restaurants, shows, clubs, and shops. The 70 percent that did come from the casinos was dropped into slot machines—which Tim didn’t consider gambling at all. It bothered Tim that every time the sun came up, Vegas was further away from the day when Benny Binion would give a rich guy with cancer a chance to plunk down everything he had on one last spree at the Horseshoe just before the poor bastard kicked the bucket. Or when Benny’s son, Jack, allowed anyone to come into the Horseshoe and bet any amount he wished. Your only limit at the Horseshoe in the good old days was your first bet.
That was what Tim wanted to bring back. This roulette player was giving him a chance to be a Binion back in the day when it didn’t get any better than being a Binion. So it came down to this. Would Tim take the bet that nobody else in Las Vegas would take?
The only request the roulette player made was that we didn’t hock the game—that is, put nine pit bosses around the table.
“Yeah,” Tim couldn’t resist. “We’ll do it.”
The roulette player was a classy guy. He came in wearing a sports coat and tie on a Saturday afternoon. Talk about tension. For an hour, that roulette wheel was spinning at that table. It was just the guy in the sports coat, the dealers, and Tim. All you had to do was point cameras at Tim’s face, the chips on the green felt, and the spinning roulette wheel. Tim couldn’t smile or cringe or jerk his head to check bets on the table once a number was called. He had to act perfectly calm on the outside though anyone could tell that his stomach was doing somersaults.
After that hour, the guy in the sports coat turned to Tim and extended his hand. As they shook hands, the guy thanked Tim for the game. It didn’t get any better than that moment for Tim. He’d taken the bet that nobody else in Vegas had the balls to take—and won a million bucks.
Now, you couldn’t find suspense in a casino any more natural than what led up to and took place during that hour. The trouble was, that didn’t appear on our reality show. Nor did Fritz and Biata. Nor did the Sopranos.
A little after 9:00 PM on June 14, 2004, our heads grew fifty feet tall, and reality was never the same.
Tim and I threw a red-carpet party at The Nugget on the evening The Casino made its debut. The festivities filled the entire hotel and spread out along Fremont Street under the giant canopy that has an underbelly lined with more than twelve million bulbs to make it the world’s largest LED screen. This screen hovers about ninety feet overhead and is longer than four football fields. All the space under that canopy next to the hotel was packed with people. Downtrodden downtown suddenly looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Tim and I could barely move as we stepped into the crowd to introduce the show.
From the angle at which we stood, our bodies appeared contorted on the canopy screen. It was as if we were looking at ourselves in a fun-house mirror. When I think back on it now, that image couldn’t have been more telling. Everything Tim and I were working toward was about to be twisted and distorted.
It’s not just that the reviews turned out lousy, or that the governor of Nevada would ask us what the hell was going on. We were about to learn what could happen when you don’t pay careful attention to a partnership.
There is a photo of Paul McCartney and John Lennon during the best of times that Perry Rogers keeps in his office. He keeps it there to remind himself: don’t fuck it up. Whether a partnership is as creative as the one between the two Beatles during the good years, or as strong as the one between Perry and Andre, it needs to be constantly nourished. No matter how close two people are, no matter how much they achieve together, there’s always the possibility of a wreck and a split. If that goes for the best of partnerships, you can imagine what might happen to a partnership that was no deeper than ink on paper. As soon after he’d put us at ease at the outset, Mark Burnett had disappeared.
We knew he had to shuttle between some far-flung island to shoot Survivor and New York to work with Donald Trump. So we understood. Occasionally, Tim and I would look at each other and say, “What happened to Burnett?” But we figured he was on top of things wherever he was. By the time we realized there was a problem, our heads had grown to fifty feet, and it was too late.
What happened, we heard later on, is that Burnett got hit with a low blow by Fox. He’d tried to sell his boxing show, The Contender, to Fox—but Fox was outbid by NBC. Not long after, Fox decided to start its own reality boxing show with Oscar De La Hoya and compete with his.
You can’t blame Mark for being angry. But you can see exactly where this put us. We had a show on Fox being produced by a guy who was pissed off at Fox. We were caught in the middle of a conflict that we didn’t even know about. All we knew was that we were without Mark Burnett. Looking back on it, we were his third-string show, and Burnett had left us with some first-time producers.
Everything proceeded as normal on the surface. There was a crew of about two hundred staying at the hotel and filming six days a week. But once Burnett vanished, everything changed. No amount of glue will hold together a partnership when one of the partners becomes a ghost. We weren’t asking him to be there with a tissue every time we sneezed. But you can imagine how we felt when we heard that Burnett had come to town to meet with Sylvester Stallone and didn’t even make time to say hello to us.
Even if he’d been around us for a little while during the filming, he would’ve sustained Tim’s attention. But when he left, so did a part of Tim. Tim’s focus went straight to the casino, not into The Casino.
This put the producers on site in a bind. They thought they had Joe Pesci. Now, they were scrambling to figure out ways somehow to fill a summer’s worth of hour-long episodes—which put me in a bind. Suddenly, I felt like the point guard on a basketball team that couldn’t do anything right. I’d expect Tim to be in place to slam home an alley-oop, and he’d be on the other side of the court. I’d look to pass to Mark Burnett and find out he wasn’t even on the court. But there was plenty of Kool-Aid waiting for me on the bench whenever a time out was called. Life became, “Show up for a shot at eight. This is going to be great!” and “Your show is going to be Fox’s biggest of the summer. You’re probably going to be on Jay Leno.” What a sucker I was. At eleven thirty at night, I’d find myself tuning into The Tonight Show to get a good look at Leno’s set. Meanwhile, I didn’t even realize that my younger brother, whom I usually talk to five times a day, was barely speaking to me because he felt so uncomfortable being around the cameras.
The ideas coming off Burnett’s producers’ clipboard didn’t feel natural. But I embraced them. If the producers asked Tim and me to make a $5,000 bet on which one of us would win a race to work, I made sure we acted out the wager, hopped in our cars, hit the gas, and weaved through traffic like maniacs. The strangest part of the experience is there was no way to understand what was going on. With five thousand hours of tape being winnowed down into only sixteen hours of actual television time, it was impossible to intuit what the producers were really up to until the show was about to air. It was like playing a basketball game without knowing the score. You only find out at the final buzzer.
The days leading up to the debut were filled with interviews and press coverage. Tim and I would be on the roof of The Nugget jumping on a trampoline in 100-degree heat for a magazine cover photo shoot, and the photographer would be screaming, “Higher! Higher! Good! Now, can you guys hug each other? Good! Higher! Higher!” We’d come down sweating only to find more Kool-Aid waiting. There were flights to Los Angeles for walks along a red carpet to promote Fox’s summer lineup. As the debut grew close, the Kool-Aid began to be served every half hour. People magazine at six o’clock. Entertainment Tonight at six thirty. Access Hollywood at seven. I chugged it all. When I saw my picture on the cover of TV Guide, I thought, “Y’know, maybe we do have a shot at Leno.”
Then came the premiere. The show opened with the tension that Tim and I went through during the hearings for our gaming license. It was gripping and revealed the potential of what the show might be. But after the first commercial break, we immediately got a glimpse of where it was headed. A playboy named Big Chuck sauntered through our casino trying to seduce every woman he brushed up against until he ultimately convinced one to go up to his room. The scene ended with Big Chuck in disbelief after realizing that the woman he’d seduced was a transvestite.
Okay, kind of funny. But not exactly the brand recognition we were looking for. The show went downhill from there. Bachelor parties. Swingers. The wannabe cocktail waitress tempted to become a hooker. All of it casted. All of it staged. All of it obvious.
Look, they don’t say “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” for no reason. We understood that a good part of the lure of Vegas is sex, and we understood that sex would be a part of the show. But the sex in the show was fake and cheesy and it was smeared all over our reputation.
“When they bought The Golden Nugget, Tim Poster and Tom Breitling vowed to return it to its former Vegas glory,” wrote one columnist. “Great. I just never knew The Golden Nugget was a frat boy fantasy whorehouse in its previous incarnation.” This columnist knew just where to stick the knife. “The Casino is so awful,” he continued, “it will have you praying for, as Sinatra once said, ‘a kick in the head.’”
The lower each episode sank, the more the producers reached for sex to keep it afloat. We’d filmed dinner with Steve Wynn, our meeting with the most charismatic mayor in America, and a poker game with legend Doyle Brunson. All of it ended up on the cutting room floor. That left plenty of time for the Trashy Lingerie Girls, bikini bowling babes, and a road trip taken by one of our youngest employees to a legal brothel.
Perry called Mark Burnett to find out what the hell was going on.
“Well, we thought we were getting Tim Poster,” Burnett’s producer argued.
“And we thought we were getting Mark Burnett!” Perry fired back.
I’d completely overlooked the underside of Burnett’s success. I’d been so entranced by the idea of being on TV in front of millions, of being in the company of Donald Trump, Sylvester Stallone, and Steven Spielberg, that I hadn’t given much thought as to how Burnett could possibly be in so many places at once. Tim and I were used to focusing on one company. If you shook hands with us, we were there to honor our end of the deal. Burnett was in a much different place. He could feel comfortable with a half-dozen shows on the air at once. Some would be hits. Others wouldn’t work and be quickly canceled. That’s just the way it goes in his world. He put his soul into the successes.
Tim will tell you that if he were doing it over again, he would’ve thrown himself into the filming when Burnett disappeared. If Burnett didn’t like where he was taking it, well, then that would have forced Mark to appear and work it out. Maybe the best solution would have been to turn the show into some kind of contest that allowed people to compete for a jackpot. Either way, we might have had a chance of creating a success.
But our partnership with Burnett degenerated into a summer of angry e-mails and phone calls. There was little that Tim and I could do about what appeared. We’d surrendered the right of creative control. You can imagine the guilt I felt watching Tim go berserk at the sight of letters from longtime customers who were aghast at scenes designed to make a fourteen-year-old boy chuckle. “If that’s what goes on at your hotel,” one woman summed it up, “you won’t be seeing my husband again.”
This was only just the beginning. We had a whole summer of episodes to endure. Tim closed the door to his office and retreated into a shell. The show created a rift between us. That was stressful enough. And I haven’t even mentioned the wedge that fit right into the rift. The wedge arrived on the same night as the premiere party. The wedge was a Hollywood actress.
A tense summer of weekly reality shows was about to play out as Tim and I worked through one of mankind’s oldest conflicts. What happens when a woman steps between two best friends?