Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Home a set
Las Vegas couple keep changes to ‘Casino’ home
Richard and Sharon Weisbart’s home in the historic Paradise Palms neighborhood looks much the same as it did in 1994 — once the “Casino” production designers got hold of it and made it resemble the best thing mobbed-up money could have bought two decades before.
The couple, who had lived there since 1976, relocated to a condo for five months — their house was emptied, except for a few choice pieces, with just two or three days’ notice — to make room for its new inhabitants: Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and his wife, Ginger (Sharon Stone).
The walls that separated the living room, dining room and den were taken down. The wooden floor in that den was pulled out. The chandelier and the refrigerator were changed.
“They pretty much knocked everything out, made it all one giant room, and expanded the view of the golf course from two, like, regular glass doors to, like, 28 feet of glass all across the back central part of the house,” says Richard, 78, a retired lawyer.
The once tasteful home was, in some areas, given a garish makeover. Especially on its walls.
“Our favorite colors were wedgewood blue and silver, and so the house was quite formal,” says Sharon, 76, a former teacher. “They put in animal print and different things. But when we put our stuff back, it looked all right, except for the wallpaper that was falling down.”
Virtually all of those changes have been maintained — even the loud wallpaper. The production team didn’t bother to line it because it was intended to stay on the walls for five months, not 25 years, so the Weisbarts have treated it multiple times over the decades to keep it in place and looking as nice as it ever did.
They even bought a few pieces — the headboard and bedspread, some etched glass — from the production once it wrapped to complement the home’s lived-in movie set vibe.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Richard says of the “Casino” shoot. “This whole neighborhood became like the backlot of a studio.”
The couple portrayed nosey neighbors in the scene where police respond to Ginger’s disturbance at the house. Sharon was styled with curlers in her hair. She says Martin Scorsese, a stickler for verisimilitude, asked if she regularly slept that way. When she replied she didn’t think she even owned curlers, Sharon says, the director took them out of her hair and threw them into the middle of the street.
That the Weisbarts’ house was used by a thinly veiled version of Frank Rosenthal seems almost like destiny. They knew the Rosenthals, and their families would carpool to get the children to and from school. Their kids, David and Wendy, were in Rosenthal’s Cadillac Eldorado in 1982, two days before it was bombed in front of Tony Roma’s. Their home was previously owned by Irving “Ash” Resnick, another casino executive who was targeted by a car bomb.
It’s become something of a tourist attraction over the years. The house was a regular stop on the mob tour run by the late Frank Cullotta, who served as a technical adviser on “Casino” and inspired the character of Frank Marino, played by Frank Vincent. The Weisbarts regularly see strangers stopping in front of the home for photos. That interest extends to the famous, as well.
“Heidi Klum was our first celebrity,” Sharon says, namechecking a variety of stars who’ve visited or used the house for commercial projects. Adam Lambert filmed his “Another Lonely Night” music video there. Iggy Azalea and T.I. did the same for their “Change Your Life” collaboration. Nicolas Cage showed up one day looking to buy the house, which wasn’t for sale and, Richard says, never will be.
“I guess we could’ve demanded that they return it to the old way,” he says of the production team, something that was within their rights according to the contract. “But we were very happy with what they did and still are.”