Did You Know?

Ever the pioneer, with this film Coppola was one of the first directors to use a live, from-the-camera video feed, instant playback, and, ultimately, using that video to enable rough cuts made of each scene shot by the next morning making this movie less of a film than a grand experiment and continuous, collaborative work-in-progress.

In order to make the signs for the miniature Las Vegas scenes work, neon artists Larry Albright and Bill Concannon needed to develop a process for making neon signs where the tubing was 2mm in diameter. (By comparison, most neon signage is between 10mm and 18mm, where most of the tubing on the Las Vegas strip is 15mm.) Custom glassblowing burners, electrodes, and other hardware needed to be fabricated from scratch. Amazingly enough, many of the pieces produced still work today.

Rather than shooting on location, director Francis Ford Coppola insisted on building sets, to add to the artificiality of the proscenium. Set construction proceeded to such an extent that a replica of Las Vegas' McCarran Airport - complete with a jetway and jet airliner (built from the nose section of a crashed plane) - was built and used for the penultimate scene. The sets for the film consumed the entirety of sound stage space at Coppola's recently-acquired American Zoetrope studio. Because of the maze of wiring and flammable scrims, backdrops and other materials, production designer Dean Tavoularis half-jokingly referred to the Vegas Strip set - the centerpiece of the film - as a "firetrap", saying it caused him to have "nightmares about fires" during the film's production.