Teaser Trailer No. 1

Although this film is a long way off from being finished, after two months of production, I’m proud to share the first teaser trailer for Parkway of Broken Dreams.

This labor of love (and sweat) is literally years in the making, even though technically production only began in June of this year. The documentary is based on the oral history of alternative culture on Maryland Parkway I wrote for the Las Vegas Weekly back in 2006, but the inspiration for it all goes back to more than a decade earlier, when the events depicted in the film and article took place.

Why focus on Maryland Parkway in specific, when there are so many facets of Las Vegas culture from that era to explore, from the rise and (literal) fall of the Huntridge Theater to the sprouting of the Las Vegas Arts District from seeds planted (again, literally) at Enigma Garden Cafe? Well, a few selfish reasons, firstly: For one, I can only bite off so much. A richer history of the 1990s in Vegas would require a Ken Burns-style, eight-episode maxi-series. For another, I already laid the groundwork with the Weekly article, which is essentially serving as the loose “script” for this doc.

That said, there’s a less selfish reason: The fact that the rich cultural tapestry that those of us wove around UNLV in the late 1980s and early 1990s essentially evaporated completely by the end of the millennium is fascinating. The stretch of Maryland Parkway from Flamingo Road to Tropicana Avenue is essentially sanitized of any physical memory from the period. Not a coffee shop, record store or music venue remains. Neither does the massive kinko’s that served as the hub for bands to print fliers and publishers to produce zines. Nor does the award-winning alternative and rock programming on the college radio station. The college bars. The pizza joints. Even the (admittedly redundant) 7-Eleven.

There are many reasons why this all happened, and that’s what I hope to explore in this documentary. Over the last few months, I’ve interviewed on camera just over half a dozen of the movers and shakers from the era, and over the next several months, I’ll be interviewing at least a dozen more. With generous contributions from such folks as Doug Jablin and Geoff Carter, I’ve already built a decent archive of video footage from the era. And I’ll be soliciting more from anyone who has relevant material to contribute.

In the end, Parkway of Broken Dreams is not going to be a comprehensive catalogue of the era. No single film or article can be. I hope that what it will be is a compelling story of a neighborhood’s distinct cultural identity that may have faded away in real life, but burns bright in not only its participants’ collective memory, but also through the eyes of the film’s viewers.