About PARKWAY OF BROKEN DREAMS
PARKWAY OF BROKEN DREAMS is an award-winning, feature-length documentary film that tells the story of a scrappy group of artists, poets, musicians, DJs, and entrepreneurs that built a thriving and highly influential arts scene on one stretch of road in the cultural wasteland of 1990s Las Vegas, only to see it fade away by the turn of the 21st century.
The full 79-minute theatrical version of the film is now available to purchase on DVD or to stream digitally on-demand. A 58-minute version of the film is currently airing on public television stations across the United States. Both versions are available for educational licensing or public screenings.
Synopsis
In the early 1990s, UNLV-adjacent thoroughfare Maryland Parkway was the thriving center of cultural activity in Las Vegas, where college students and the creative class of the city came to study, socialize, dine and shop. Independently owned coffee shops filled with academics and intellectuals. Multiple record stores, including a massive Tower Records, served as premier destinations for local musicologists. Bars and clubs buzzed with live music, flowing taps and warm bodies. At night, people casually walked from retail stores to cafes to bars. And UNLV’s own student-run radio station, KUNV, provided the soundtrack and connective tissue for the whole scene, through its innovative and award-winning “Rock Avenue” programming.
By the dawn of the 2000s, however, that scene almost entirely disappeared. Rock Avenue was cancelled. Record stores went under. Coffeehouses shuttered. The art and music scene, for the most part, moved downtown, and Maryland Parkway today looks very different: rising new UNLV construction projects mixed with a collection of decades-old shopping centers and proliferation of chain restaurants. Those walking the sidewalks at night are less likely to be students than residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, bus riders biding time between routes, or individuals living on the streets.
For many people, that scene that rose up out of the 1980s and blew up in the 1990s–paralleling the national mainstreaming of alternative music and coffeehouse culture–serves not just as a high-point in Las Vegas’ cultural history, but as the “big bang” for almost everything to come after that. Nightlife pioneers got their start putting on after-hours events in tiny cafes and bars. Rock Avenue DJs became music industry powerhouses. An Emmy-award winning TV writer honed his skills over cheap cups of coffee. Everyone from future Saturday Night Live stars to members of The Killers owe at least part of their creative lives to the opportunities afforded them from the inclusive, come-as-you-are nature of the Maryland Parkway cultural scene.
How did Maryland Parkway go from cultural center to cultural wasteland in such a short time, and can the redevelopment envisioned by UNLV’s administration really bring it back to life? Through archival footage and interviews with business owners, journalists, musicians, artists and scenesters from that era, PARKWAY OF BROKEN DREAMS tells the story of how alternative culture on Maryland Parkway was born, thrived, and, eventually, faded away.
Credits
Produced, Directed and Edited by: Pj Perez
Co-Executive Producers: Emmily Bristol, Scott MacDonald
Additional Cameras: Michael Willoughby, Shahab Zargari
Key Art: Hernan Valencia
Festivals & Accolades
- Winner, Audience Award for Best Documentary, Silver State Film Festival 2021
- Winner, 10° Hotter Award – Documentary Feature, The Valley Film Fest 2021
- Official Selection, Las Vegas International Film & Screenwriting Festival 2021
About the Director
Pj Perez is a musician, filmmaker, and award-winning writer whose work has appeared in hundreds of articles across dozens of magazines, newspapers and websites since the early 2000s.
Although he was born and currently lives in Southern California, Perez was a Las Vegas resident for 25 years and was actively involved in that city’s music, art and poetry scenes, both as a performer and as a reporter.
In 2006, just as UNLV was unveiling its “Midtown UNLV” capital campaign, Perez wrote an oral history of the Maryland Parkway scene as a cover story for the Las Vegas Weekly. Interviewing about a dozen influential participants in the scene–from business owners and artists to DJs and journalists–the article explored the origins, blossoming, and eventual decline of counterculture along Maryland Parkway, and asked whether UNLV’s plan to force change could ever reproduce or surpass what came before it, organically. PARKWAY OF BROKEN DREAMS explores that story on film.
Perez also co-wrote and co-directed the short film SUGARHOOK, created the micro-pilot LAS VEGAS RULES, edited the comedy short NAMASTE, and most recently, debuted the pilot for a travel-interview web series called NOTEPADS & BAR TABS, co-created with Matthew Sorvillo.