Las Vegas show producer brings the circus to a ghost town
Since the days of the gold rush, dreamers hoping to strike it rich have been staking their claim to a dusty, 80-acre California town in the Mojave Desert called Nipton. For nearly all of them, those dreams have been fool’s gold.
A buyer who envisioned turning the California ghost town into a testing ground for solar power died before getting his green-energy idea off the ground. An attempt by a cannabis company to create a weed-themed resort was impeded by legislation that banned marijuana sales there.
Ross Mollison is the most recent badlands baron. His company, Spiegelworld, bought the town on a whim last year for $2.5 million — a million or so shy of what he paid for his six-bed, five-bath apartment in Park Slope, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.
As founder of Spiegelworld, a live entertainment company producing sybaritic adult circuses in Las Vegas, Mollison specializes in spectacle and calls himself an “Impresario Extraordinaire.” But even hedonists must occasionally fast. In the desert sun of Nipton, where visitors now can find little beyond a peeling one-room schoolhouse, an empty general store, a five-bed hotel and a small cluster of forgotten cabins, he is trying to build an oasis of escape — a circus sanctuary.
This unincorporated town, with no local government and a penchant for attracting homesteaders who prefer to stay off the grid, can become a retreat for circus performers to workshop new acts and a luxury attraction for tourists who could stop there on the way to Las Vegas, Mollison said.
“I’m not approaching it like a developer. I want Nipton to look like it does now, but more beautified, with a globally significant, interesting restaurant that is somewhere between Francis Mallmann and the French Laundry,” he said, referencing well-known restaurateurs as he described plans for multiple eateries, a hotel, solar panels and a runway for small planes, all with a big-top twist. “Maybe we stick a trapeze in the middle, or a high wire that’s 1,000 feet off the ground. Or is that too P.T. Barnum?”
The resurrection plan has not gone unnoticed by the town’s handful of locals, who have watched men like Mollison come and go. Like his circus attractions, Mollison is a bit of a curiosity. He has a fondness for foul language, especially the word that begins with the letter F. He is unabashed about his taste for the refined, and his distaste for the conventional. His employees say he pushes them to constantly go weirder and wilder in their thinking, and is often willing to make huge investments of both time and money to see how that thinking plays out.
“My first week on the job, we had coffee, and he said, ‘Look, I want to hear every stupid idea you’ve got,’ ” said David Anthony, general manager of “Atomic Saloon Show,” a Spiegelworld production at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. “Of all the people I know who would have bought a town, Ross makes sense.”
Mollison grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and Nipton’s topography — studded with eucalyptus, a tree mostly native to Down Under — reminds him of home. “It smells like Australia,” he said.
Perhaps the man is meeting the town. There is only one paved road, and little aside from sand, shrubs and cholla cactuses for miles. The Union Pacific railroad train regularly barrels down the tracks that border the town, its whistle splitting the air. The nearest hospital is an hour away; to send or pick up mail, residents must drive to post office boxes across the Nevada border. Without taxation for city management services, fire and police support, while technically available from other nearby towns in San Bernardino County, can be spotty.
It takes a certain kind of person to live so remotely. “It’s a very small town,” said Alex Strebel, who along with her husband, Frank, was tapped as Nipton’s caretaker shortly after Spiegelworld’s purchase. “If you sneeze when you’re driving by, you’re going to miss it.”
‘It’s like Hotel California’
Nipton has fewer than two dozen residents, primarily clustered in a small RV park. Most are seasonal miners who stay for a few months at a time and keep to themselves; others, such as Jim Eslinger, have lived there since 2009 and are offering themselves as informal partners to Spiegelworld.
“This is my idea of paradise out here,” said Eslinger, 66, a former long-haul trucker who grew up in Washington state and came to Nipton in 2009 after 18 years on the road. “It’s like Hotel California — I checked in and I never plan to leave.”
Mollison said he has made it a priority to include the local residents in his plans for Nipton, and in a smattering of small events that Spiegelworld has held on the grounds so far, he has made sure to invite them.
In late February, Mollison decided to give a party in Nipton. Two dozen Spiegelworld performers and employees drove in from Las Vegas. As they gathered in Nipton’s abandoned saloon for a festive sukiyaki dinner, inspired by a hot pot soup that Mollison had recently enjoyed in Japan, Will and Eslinger were guests at the table.
From bolt-hole to big top
First a gold-rush outpost in the early 1900s, Nipton later served as a bolt-hole for silent film stars looking for a respite from Hollywood, and even the setting for a post-apocalyptic video game. But after the gold rush stalled and the mining industry declined, Nipton’s appeal, rooted largely in having a general store and a rail station, faded. The boomtown went bust by the middle of the 20th century.
Nipton’s latest chapter begins in the 1980s, when Gerald Freeman, a gold miner eager to make the shift to renewable energy, purchased the town. After decades of disuse, it was largely abandoned. He fixed up its store and cafe into an old-timey destination for tourists seeking a taste of the American West and began installing solar arrays amid the yucca and gum trees.
But he was only about halfway to that goal when he died in 2016. His wife, Roxanne Lang, then sold Nipton for $5 million to American Green, a cannabis company with plans to turn the town into a weedthemed resort geared toward Instagram marijuana influencers. But after only a year, American Green sold Nipton to a subsidiary, which ended up defaulting in payments. Lang forced a foreclosure and put the town back on the market. In 2021, Mollison stepped forward.
Mollison, who signed a $75 million deal with Caesar’s Entertainment in 2021 and reportedly dropped $30 million just on the artwork for his Las Vegas restaurant Superfrico, brings an immense amount of muscle to a town long accustomed to fending for itself.
In every Spiegelworld production — there are four on the Las Vegas Strip, with two more in the works, and two headed soon for Atlantic City — Mollison is notoriously detail oriented, furiously sweating the small stuff. He’s just as hands-on in Nipton, where on a recent visit he was found jumping excitedly into a recently converted Spartan Imperial Mansion trailer to review the craftsmanship and map out precisely where future overnight guests would sit and sleep.
Alex and Frank Strebel are production managers, the back-of-house crew who keep theater performances running behind the scenes. They met Mollison three years ago when he hired them to build props for OPM, Spiegelworld’s space-age themed variety show at the Cosmopolitan. Mollison liked their handiwork, and he also liked their lifestyle: The couple, both 35, met at UNLV and were living largely off the land of their home in Pahrump.
They had what it takes, he felt, to turn
Nipton around.
“We rolled up our sleeves and fired up the tractor,” Frank Strebel said. “Our contractors are two hours away, but we have experience in doing things locally since we built our own house.”
No hurry
Gypsy Wood, an Australian burlesque dancer who performs in OPM, arrived at the February dinner party in her red convertible with her dog Marcello. Like many of Spiegelworld’s artists, circus life was handed down to her by her parents, who were traveling performers in her hometown, Adelaide, Australia.
Gypsy is her given name — “I wouldn’t have chosen this as my stage name. I would have chosen something else, like Annabella,” she said — and she said she is counting the days until the dream of Spiegelville is a reality.
“Circus life is like being on a bus trip that you can’t get off. Vegas is so seductive in that way. But you can’t leave, and there are like three coffee shops, so you see everyone all the time. Nipton might be an escape from the drama,” she said. “It will help you get yourself together.”
Mollison is committed to fostering creativity, so much so that he estimates he’ll spend about $20 million to make his dreams for Nipton come true. But he isn’t rushing the process. “People come to Las Vegas, and dinner theater is like someone pretending to be Frank Sinatra and you’ve got to sit there for 30 minutes waiting for it to end,” he said. “The thing about this place is that it’s a surprise, and it’s different from what’s out there. We’re in no hurry.”
A few hours before the dinner party was set to begin, Mollison got into his Cirrus airplane and flew over the town, grinning while surveying his purchase from the sky.
He wasn’t thinking about the town’s history of failed endeavors. He was only thinking about his delight in planning its future.
“I want Nipton to be growing as long as we have great ideas,” he said. “And I’m so excited about this idea. It’s just so much fun.”