Ocean's Thirteen: The Casino That Never Existed
The Bank casino was five soundstages of pure invention, wrapped around glimpses of the real Strip.
For the trilogy's Vegas homecoming, the target was Willy Bank's monstrous new tower, The Bank, a casino shaped like nothing on earth, because it was on no earth. The Bank was built across five Warner Bros soundstages in Burbank, with Stage 16B converted into a full working casino floor, one of the largest sets the studio had constructed. The filmmakers had learned the lesson of the first film in reverse: when the plot requires rigging every game in the house, no real casino is going to hand you its floor.
The real Vegas in the seams
Around the fiction, the real city leaks in. The Bellagio returns for Terry Benedict's office and its establishing shots, the Palazzo appears as the modern Strip's texture, and the montages of airport slot machines and boulevard neon are the genuine article. The trick of the film is how seamlessly a Burbank soundstage passes for the Strip, which says something about how much of Las Vegas itself is stagecraft.
Rigging the games, for once, honestly
The heist this time is not stealing money but forcing the house to lose it: loaded dice, magnetized shuffle machines, a tunnel boring machine under the foundations. It is a fine catalogue of everything that cannot happen in a regulated casino, where independent labs test the random number generators and the regulator audits the payouts. The real-world version of that protection is the licence and audit information listed in every case file on the Loot Board, and it is far duller than a drill under the Strip, which is exactly the point.
The Faces
