Mr. Baer goes to Carson

Many years ago, Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, gave Max Baer Jr. some unsolicited advice about sales and showmanship: “You cannot sell the steak, you can only sell the sizzle. … Just don’t forget to give them a steak."Baer didn’t pay much attention to what the rock legend’s manager was telling him at the time, but it later became business gospel to him.

Many people know Baer as Jethro Bodine, the skirt-chasing numbskull he played on The Beverly Hillbillies, a CBS sitcom that ran from 1962 to 1971. Hollywood typecasting as a dolt after the series ended prompted him to write, produce and act in the movie Macon County Line. A hit when it premiered in 1974, it later achieved cult status and, until The Blair Witch Project came along decades later, held the record for the highest-grossing film per dollar spent in production. It and other movie projects during the 1970s helped him become wealthy, he said.

Baer eventually embraced his Jethro persona because he hoped it also might prove financially lucrative. In 1991, he acquired rights to use The Beverly Hillbillies name and those of its characters from CBS.

Maybe you’ve heard of Baer’s most recent plans to open a resort in Carson City by June 2004: Jethro’s Beverly Hillbillies Mansion & Casino. After plans to build the resort at Park Lane Mall in Reno fell through a few years back, Baer examined his options and began to consider the state capital for his planned 30,000-square-foot casino.

The resort plans include a 240-room hotel, showroom-theater, Granny’s Weddin’ Chapel, Elly May’s Buns, a cement pond and a multi-screen movie complex. But the controversy tends to revolve around a monolithic symbol of wealthy hillbilly-hood: a 200-foot-high oil-derrick-style structure that gushes a spout of flame—instead of Texas tea—on Highway 395.

“Carson City is the steak, and I’m the sizzle,” Baer said. “The oil derrick has the sizzle.”

The resort, Baer said, should generate hundreds of new jobs and millions of dollars for the city in sales and room occupancy taxes. It will be in Southgate shopping center in the former Wal-Mart building. The retailer closed last summer, supersizing and relocating to Douglas County.

It’s a big plan for a city of about 53,000 people. Carson City has roughly 1,700 lodging rooms already, not including those in the works at the Holiday Inn Express and those originally planned for the Ormsby House. (The Ormsby renovation is now in question, as developers have begun to “lose interest” in the project due to dealing with the city’s “red tape.” They’ve filed for a demolition permit for the historic hotel.)

Competition doesn’t bother Baer.

“If I were a resident of Carson City and someone like me offered to do what I want to do, I would definitely welcome them,” Baer said.

Since Baer purchased the building’s retail and parking spaces, then announced plans for the themed casino, opinions have been zapping across town like white lightning. The Nevada Appeal, Carson’s daily paper, seemed to get more comments about the Hillbilly’s casino and oil derrick in its “Your Two Cents” feature than it did about either the war in Iraq or the state’s budget woes.

“Some people say they don’t want the ‘trashy oil derrick’ in their city,” Baer characterized the critics. “Have they driven down Highway 395? What about the trash there? And what are they doing about it?”

Carson City Mayor Ray Masayko said it’s up to an entrepreneur to decide what type of business to open. It’s not the city’s job. The city merely ensures, he said, that the business is in an appropriately zoned area and that it obeys applicable laws.

“We also want people to know Carson City is a good place to do business,” Masayko said. “We want to provide backup and assurance to people who want to come to town. It would be wrong to roll out the welcome mat and then slap them in the head with it.”

Baer believes The Macerich Company, owners of Park Lane Mall in Reno, did exactly that to him when his plan for a Beverly Hillbillies casino at South Virginia Street and Plumb Lane ended up unrealized.

Baer’s theory is that Macerich told the media in 1999 that Baer didn’t have the money for the project because the mall owners wanted out of the agreement.

“The bank wouldn’t finance a building built on someone else’s land,” Baer said. “I never owned the land. I had a deal with Macerich to rezone in exchange for a land transfer so I could borrow the money. I got it rezoned, but Macerich did not want to spend the $30-35 million on redoing the mall.

"[So] they lied and said I didn’t have the money. They didn’t act as gentlemen. They were trying to save their asses.”

The Macerich Company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., declined to comment.

A visit to the Ponderosa Ranch near Lake Tahoe, where Baer bought a home more than 20 years ago, inspired the idea of a Beverly Hillbillies casino.

“I looked at it and thought, ‘What the hell is this all about?’ They didn’t really seem to offer that much, but people really seemed to like it,” he said. “I thought ‘What if I could do it on a grand scale and charge [visitors] nothing?’ “

His first Beverly Hillbillies concept was conceived for Stateline in the early 1990s. He wanted to create it in the building that had been home to the Tahoe Nugget. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, however, wouldn’t allow a Beverly Hillbillies-type automobile atop the roof.

Baer has since attempted to start up Beverly Hillbillies-themed businesses in Las Vegas, Douglas County, Colorado, Sparks and Reno.

But unlike the parking lot of Park Lane Mall, Baer and a venture capital partner own space at Southgate. Carson may finally be Baer’s answer.

Or not.

“Max has extraordinary enthusiasm and great ideas but no proven track record,” said Shelly Aldean, president of Glenbrook Company, manager of the shopping center where Baer intends to operate the resort. Aldean is also a member of the Carson City Board of Supervisors.

Aldean’s concerns focus first on redesigning the Wal-Mart into an architecturally unique structure.

If Baer runs out of money or goes out of business, a specially designed building that’ll be hard to rent or resell will be left sitting unoccupied. Also, after the initial interest in the resort wanes, how will Baer sustain interest? Gaming has never been an economic mainstay in Carson City.

And if the resort succeeds, what impact—good or bad—will it have on the retailers in Southgate: JC Penney, General Nutrition Center and Payless Shoe Source? Hotel and motel parking lots don’t experience the traffic and heavy turnover of parked cars that retailers rely on for survival, Aldean said.

As owners of the property, Baer and partner John King of King Ventures in San Luis Obispo, Calif., can do most of the things they’d like there. Some uses, however, are prohibited under the shopping center’s covenants, conditions and restrictions between Wal-Mart, JC Penney and the Glenbrook Company.

For example, some amusement operations are banned by the CC&Rs, Aldean said. But neither gaming nor lodging is prohibited.

After reaching agreement with the writers of the CC&Rs still involved with the shopping center, JC Penney and Glenbrook, Baer will have to apply for a gaming license from the state and likely will need city approval for the tall, flaming oil derrick.

“I don’t fault him; it’s his dream. But there are just a lot of unanswered questions,” Aldean said. “Failure won’t hurt just him; it’ll hurt Carson City potentially.”

Episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies are still popular in syndication and air on Superstation WGN and the Hallmark Channel. People who watched the series during its original run, however, are the most likely to travel to a resort like Jethro’s. Demographics indicate that those original viewers are among the people who gamble these days.

And plans for a Hillbillies-themed slot machine may also be in the works. International Game Technology and Baer signed an agreement last year for production of machines based on The Beverly Hillbillies.

“It’s a very popular game theme,” said Rick Sorensen, IGT spokesman. “The show lends itself well to animation and audio.”

The Reno-based slot manufacturer, while at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas in mid-September, introduced a slot machine based on another 1960s sitcom, Gilligan’s Island. Themed slots and other electronic games began surfacing in the mid-1990s. Now, there are hundreds. The first ones produced by IGT were Wheel of Fortune and Elvis.

“These themed games are so successful because there’s an image already in people’s minds,” he said. “They’re things people remember.”

And the premise of the The Beverly Hillbillies is striking it rich. To get lucky—like Jed, the “poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed"—is why people gamble.

“A Beverly Hillbillies casino resort? There isn’t anything around like it,” said Dave Schwartz, coordinator of the Gaming Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond.

Schwartz said the idea might get off to a rocky start.

“It might be a little hard because people don’t have places like this in their hometown,” he said. “Carson City is much smaller than Las Vegas. It might be a little disjunctive.”

The first theme casino resort in Las Vegas opened in 1942—Hotel Last Frontier. Its Wild West theme extended outside of the building to a small Western village. The closest thing to a gaming resort like what Baer has planned is the Las Vegas Hilton’s attraction, “Star Trek: The Experience.” It includes a ride, museum, restaurant and memorabilia shopping, but it’s not a stand-alone resort, as Jethro’s would be.

“But it definitely seems to be a curious idea, and personally the curiosity factor would be interesting to me," Schwartz said.