TheFitzyreport

Our 10 days in Vegas were not typical. We didn’t get to the poker tables, Sean used an aqualung to swim in a three and half foot swimming pool, and at least 2 days were spent in a window washing cradle 60 floors up in the air. It was quite an adventure! With 10 principal models and about 30 extras, we shot a new campaign for Aria Resort and Casino in five different locations – the pool, the poker room, the sky villas, the fountain and the high roller Carta Privada.  Each venue had it’s own story of ‘Modern Seduction’ to be told in photography and film. But the sheer size of the resort with the vast distances to be walked front and back of house, meant my own story was more like old fashioned exhaustion. We shot 14 hour days along side the crews shooting American Idol, and the knowledge that J-Lo was in their lineup had the local punters looking twice at our models. It was all part of the razzmatazz of Vegas, the goldmine in the middle of the desert where anything can happen and dreams can come true.

In fact we shot with $2 million worth of jewellery, borrowed from the casino and accompanied at all times by a well armed guard, who allowed an earring to fall into the pool for the sake of that story, in which a fully dressed man leapt into the pool to retrieve the piece for a damsel in distress. Good grief, would you buy a $2M necklace & earring set if one of the pieces had been wet…?!? The Sky Villa we shot in cannot even be paid for, it is reserved as a gift for those high rollers who breeze into town and win ( or lose ) a million or so at the tables. The Villa has a gym and a barber’s room, it has a toilet with a lid that lifts when you enter the bathroom and warms when you sit. That will really make you feel better. The high roller room we filmed has a minimum bet of $500. The casino tokens on the poker tables have trackable microchips inside them so the house knows the minute one is taken off the table. ( Actually the hotel uses similar technology for the minibar in the rooms. If you lift a box of chocolates or a miniature of vodka, without immediately putting it down again, you are billed for consuming it… ) So it’s another world. All they need is your credit card. The real red casino dice I was given by Father Christmas in the staff canteen on my first day in Vegas feel great in my hand. I’m going to enjoy playing with them and only having to worry that my choices are going up a ladder or sliding down a snake!

It may seem a little crazy to go all the way to Miami to become a certified scuba diver, but at this time of the year it would have been crazy not to. Apart from the temperature dipping to 4*C in NYC, we needed to complete 4 open water dives to gain accreditation. So sunny Miami looked like a good option, and would give us another opportunity to add a dot to the map on the kitchen wall.

I had always thought Florida was full of people who had retired – or who wanted to. How wrong could I be ?! By absolute chance I booked us into a dive shop ( run by an Australia so thought it must be good ) in walking distance from a hotel ( recommended by a hair stylist from a previous job ) which found us in the middle of South Beach. Think Latin, think Mardi-gras, think tropical party-mode and you’ll get the picture. Versace had a house ( which he was murdered in ) on this stretch.  There are art-deco lifeguard shacks on the beach, wall to wall bars selling ‘bulldogs’, a scary combo of 2 coronas perched in a giant cocktail glass, and music and people jiving until the early hours. So much for retirement!

The beach itself is long and wide with a healthy breeze off the sea and lifeguard shacks at regular intervals. The shacks are all individually decorated to fit with the look of the area – an opportunity afforded when Hurricane Andrew blew away most of the peninsular in 1992. Maybe it’s the transience that living in a hurricane zone instills, but there is a relaxed vibe in South Beach, it’s laid back and self indulgent. Even the police follow suit. Traveling along the road from the beach to the lagoon for a diving lesson, we encountered police cars at strategic places, sitting unmanned but casually monitoring the speed of the traffic. At Starbucks I encountered a woman with an outrageous handbag made of feathered rosebuds. When I asked her if she made it herself she purred ‘Armani’…. So it’s easy to see how fashionistas and eccentrics would fit right in here, and how the coffee guy would have no second thought about calling out ‘Versace…..expresso for Versace….!’

I had a particular interest in discovering Cuban food after learning that the Latin flavor of South Beach was primarily attributed to the influx of Cuban and Columbian immigrants. Pulled pork, slow cooked anything with peppers, onions and garlic, and deep fried plantain were typical dishes. But with limited time and a diver’s hunger, the best food we found was thin crispy pizza made by a Turkish New Yorker, tuna salad tossed by a surfing Frenchman and cold cider courtesy of an Irish pub. Maybe I’ll find that Cuban food in the Bronx on the weekend….

Our time was spent mainly in the company of our PADI instructor, who took us first to a pool to learn basic diving principals, and then to a lagoon to complete open-water dives when the wind proved too dangerous for diving on the reef. Laurent was a fastidious teacher, a Monsieur Poirot character, who had all the arrogance of the accent, but the same disclaimer that entitled him to a unique level of superiority. Struggling into my wetsuit ( the achievement of which I thought everything else had to be downhill ) I longed for the days of Mr RG Martin at the Ungarra Primary School where earnest attention and enthusiasm was everything. In the pool I suddenly had to learn how to be fish-like in breathing and in motion, but the combination of rubber suit, air hoses, waisted weights and three foot fins, gave me the dexterity of an oxymoron ( axolotl ? ) and Laurent was not amused…. It was even worse the next day when I inflated instead of deflated at the bottom of the lagoon and suddenly rocketed to the surface in a flurry of bubbles. That was actually a lot of fun and my lungs didn’t explode as he said they would. Even the giant iguana in the overhanging mangroves appeared to be amused…

But I did somehow manage to pass the various tests to become a certified scuba diver. So it was definitely worth the trip, and means I will now be in a position to hire the air tanks and respirator for our next underwater adventure. Opportunity is a wonderful thing…

‘Going to Vegas’ has long been synonymous with ‘I feel lucky’ and Sean & I were certainly feeling lucky when we flew off to Vegas last week. We had just been awarded a fantastic job shooting photography and film for the newest and most spectacular resort & casino on the strip. The shoot is not until the weeks leading into Christmas, but we needed to scout the locations with the client beforehand, and the best time for everyone just happened to be the week of Thanksgiving.

People start their holiday transit days before the 4th Thursday of November in the hope of less chaos and more legroom. Arriving at Kennedy Airport at 5.30 last Monday morning, there was not so much chaos as there were just a lot of people. It took an hour to shuffle our way through security, undressing and dressing and being zapped by the x-ray. My heart went out to the turkeys! But we made the gate in the nick of time and apart from a peanut protocol ( a woman behind me was allergic, so all nuts in the rows in front and behind had to be removed ), the five and a half hour journey back in time was peaceful.

Sean & I had driven through Vegas a few years ago en route from LA to the Grand Canyon. My memory is that after a day of driving through a moonscape of dry, red rocky terrain, we entered the valley at the peak of sunset, and the skyscrapers of Vegas reflected the blinding light, making it seem like a goldmine rising out of the flat desert. It was spectacular. This time was different, we flew in over the Eiffel Tower, giant pyramids and New York skyline, but the sight of poker machines in the airport meant we could only be in one place – Vegas!

Las Vegas is another world, a fantasy land where you can forget everything else and just have fun. You can win money or lose it – glamorously. There is something for everyone – Kris Kristofferson, Janet Jackson and Sting were performing there this week, BB King and Frankie Valli were in town for their regular shows, and there were conventions for groups as extreme as the American Beekeepers Federation, the World Latin Dance Cup and the Single Action Shooting Society.

Then there is Aria, the place we have come to scout. Just as well we bought our walking shoes. At a cost of 8.5 billion dollars and covering 67 acres, Aria encompasses 150,000 square feet of gaming, 17 restaurants, 10 bars, numerous swimming pools and luxury accommodation. It is an awesome place – huge. Big enough to showcase sculptures of Thomas Moore and busy enough to require that the felt tops of the most popular poker tables are replaced every month. Can you believe that!?

For two days we looked at locations throughout the resort for our shoot. We relished the Boab trees and the Acacias around the swimming pools, we chose freshly made omelettes rather than biscuits & gravy for breakfast in one of the 1,000 seater restaurants, browsed the Elvis shop, and felt comforted by the fact that we could always buy the type of mattress we had slept in should we feel we couldn’t leave without it.

And just before we left to catch the red-eye back to New York, we had a glass of champagne. It was about 8pm so the drinking crowd hadn’t arrived and we had the black leather couches to ourselves. The music was loud and the waitress was almost dressed. That is to say, she was wearing just enough spandex so you couldn’t say she was naked. And what a smile! We felt this rounded our whole Vegas experience – no wonder the tag line says – What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’!