director Nikki Corda. “I think people were just really ready to come back together for the film festival experience.” Not every movie theater survived the pandemic shutdown. Similarly, not every film festival has made it back. The Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival, once the longest-running film festival in Nevada, held virtual screenings on a regular basis through early 2022, but is now on hiatus as festival director Joshua Abbey works on a documentary about his mother, artist Rita Deanin Abbey. The Las Vegas Queer Arts Film Festival, which held two editions before the pandemic and mounted a virtual festival in 2021, will not be returning. “It was a challenge, trying to bring back that pre-pandemic momentum that the festival had going,” founder Kris Manzano says. The Las Vegas Film Festival, which had become the premier general-interest film festival in town, still lists canceled 2019 dates on its social media and has made no announcements regarding future plans. Corda says she doesn’t know what’s going to happen with local film festivals in the future, adding, “Judging from our experience last summer, I feel positive about it.” Kelly may discount the importance of Regal Village Square to the evolution of art house cinema in Las Vegas, but Corda is one of many local film mainstays who appreciated its value. Highlights of her experiences there included HEAR MORE Kip Kelley seeing the documentary talks about Three Identical Strangers the Beverly on KNPR. and Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place. Manzano remembers going with a friend to see Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. “I went to see something before it left, but it’s empty on the (theater listings) app,” local filmmaker Adam Zielinski said on February 14, a day before the theater’s initially announced closing date. “It’s heartbreaking.” The Beverly should soothe some of that heartbreak for Zielinski and others, and Kelly plans to embrace the local film community, both festivals and filmmakers. “If there’s a filmmaker who’s put together something that is worthy of a screening or premiere in Las Vegas, then we can give them that opportunity,” he says. Regal neglected Village Square toward the end of its run, leaving it with a broken HVAC system in summer 2022 and ending its lease as part of a company-wide bankruptcy restructuring. That appears unlikely to
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happen at the Beverly, which has Rogers’ and her staff’s full support. “We really designed this place for locals,” Kelly says. “We just want people to come here and keep coming back.” That’s been the dream of every art house cinema operator in Vegas for the past three decades. Now, it’s the Beverly’s turn to try and make it a reality. ✦
MUSIC
Punked Up
What’s a museum for an anti-institutional movement doing in Las Vegas? BY Lissa Townsend Rodgers
O
ur hometown of gaming tables, showroom stages, and celebrity chef restaurants is developing a reputation as a home to something else: weird museums. From neon signs to cursed dolls to Tommy guns, collections of the unusual have succeeded where fine art has failed. The newest addition to the roster may be the most unexpected — not just for Las Vegas, but anywhere — as the Punk Rock Museum prepares for its expected April opening. How does a cultural movement founded on sweat, spit, safety pins, and smashing institutions turn itself into, well, an institution? “Punk rock is more than just ‘smash the state.’ There’s passion and creativity. Its influence has reverberated through art and other music forms and education, even the way that people approach doing business,” museum
co-founder Vinnie Fiorello says. “It wasn’t supposed to last at all, but it’s lasted 50 years.” Fifty years?! Does a punk rock museum mean that punk is dead, like the mummies of the Egyptian Museum or the dinosaurs of the American Museum of Natural History? Scott Crawford, director of the Washington, D.C., punk/hardcore documentary Salad Days and author of the accompanying book Spoke, doesn’t think so. “I’ve never subscribed to the idea of punk being dead and never will. Every new generation redefines it and makes it something entirely their own,” he says, adding that museums are essential to “helping to document and preserve such an important cultural movement. It’s only natural that some of the people that were informed by punk rock are now in positions where they can create such a space.” The museum’s collection will be organized chronologically, from early ’70s Blondie relics to last year’s Amyl and the Sniffers merch. But there will also be a focus on the punk scene of various cities. “Before the internet, you had this sort of tribalism of San Francisco punks and L.A. punks and New York punks and Chicago punks and being able to show that sort of tight-knit group — the shows and the clubs and the photos and some artifacts,” Fiorello says. The relics of punk rock tend to be ephemeral: flyers, setlists, T-shirts, ’zines, cassette tapes, and 45s, although there are some sturdier items such as club signage and leather jackets. There are also guitars, but their durability may depend on museum guests, since visitors will be able to actually play the instruments used by bands such as Rise Against, Sick of It All, and Pennywise. There’s one thing Crawford would like to see — or hear — within the museum: “In addition to the flyers, photos, and usual ephemera, I think keeping an audio archive that includes first-person accounts of various shows, events, and personal stories would be a nice addition — kind of like a punk rock StoryCorps, if you will.” And the museum will have its storytellers, although you won’t be able to press play on them without getting your hand smacked: Members of bands such as Agnostic Front, Anti-Flag, L7, and more will offer personally guided tours for smaller groups (and a bigger ticket price). The Mob Museum, the Neon Museum and the Atomic Museum, among others, all represent major parts of Las Vegas history. But punk rock is a minor part of the city’s past … at best. While there was indeed a scene here, it was no New York or Los Angeles, or even Boston or Minneapolis. Which is actually