Louis Theroux Vegas
Feb 04, 2007 Directed by Stuart Cabb. With Louis Theroux, Richard Wilk. Louis Theroux goes to the heart of gambling culture in Las Vegas. Synopsis Louis heads to Las Vegas, to reveal the world behind the myths of casino culture. Among the people he meets are two of the casino’s ‘high-rollers’ and an employee who looks after them as well as a retired doctor who says she has gambled away $4million in seven years. Shop Welcome To Louis Theroux Las Vegas. Available on a range of apparel with international shipping. Men's T-ShirtHeavy cotton classic fit adult Gildan t-shirt with taped neck and shoulders, pre-shrunk jersey knit and quarter-turned to eliminate creases. Louis Theroux's Gambling in Las Vegas documentary is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer. For those outside the UK, you can view the full documentary for free at Daily motion. The documentary takes us to the legendary Las Vegas Hilton. Back in the 1960s and 70s this casino and hotel had Elvis as their headline act.
Have you ever wondered what happened to some of those more oddball or extreme people that Louis Theroux introduced to us in his always entertaining TV documentaries?
If so, you will be interested in watching his new four-part series Life On The Edge on Prime in which he looks back at his documentaries spanning 25 years.
It features Theroux at home with his family in the UK during Covid-19 lockdown talking to some of his most notable contributors via webcam, updating stories and reflecting on his experiences.
“For years I’ve wanted to go back and make sense of the programmes I’ve made, to find out what happened to some of the contributors, update their stories, and see what all these many hours of making TV might add up to,” he says.
“Lockdown gave me the time and space to do this. It’s been a strange and fascinating couple of months working on this. I think we’ve been able to make the whole add up to more than the sum of the parts and to bring out surprising themes and commonalities.
“And, if nothing else, it was an interesting review of how my haircuts and glasses have changed over the years!”
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In the first episode he looks at how some people’s most fervent beliefs can bring them into conflict with mainstream society from neo-Nazis to alien killers.
“Even though I’m an atheist and was raised without any structured religion in my life, or maybe because of that, I’ve always been drawn to people who seem to have very fervent convictions and beliefs. Even when those beliefs seemed wrong-headed or confused or strange,” he says.
One of his earliest encounters was with a group of right wing patriots who set up the Almost Heaven community in rural Idaho to get away from what they felt was an interfering government. One of them, Mike Cain, predicted ‘all-out war with the government by 2000.’
“He turned out to be rather welcoming and I grew to like him,” says Theroux. “I felt as if he had a good heart and I liked his family.”
Theroux also tracks down Lamb and Lynx, two 10-year-old blonde American twins whose mother April raised them to be an extreme right-wing pop group called Prussian Blue who sang nationalist lyrics accompanied by Nazi salutes.
“April will never change but I never really felt the girls knew what they were doing. Now 19, they describe themselves as very liberal and have openly apologised for the things they said and did in the past,” he says.
“Our beliefs are part of the quest that we pass on to those around us, especially to our children, so it carries with it a weight of responsibility.
“It’s in the nature of the stories I do about belief that there is a moral dimension. And as I went on I suppose I pushed further in the direction of exploring ideas that were toxic and dangerous. I think it was part of growing up that I felt more confident about taking on those kinds of stories.”
A meeting with neo-Nazi ‘Skip,’ who welcomed him into his family in California, turned from being initially welcoming to menacing when Theroux, in his beguiling way, asked if he would be made quite so welcome if he knew he was Jewish.
Theroux also met black nationalists in New York.
“Most of them I spoke to had what I thought was an understandable belief in the improvement of civil rights but they also incubated an extreme fringe of true believers who took a totally over the top exclusionary view of other races.”
Earlier programmes show Louis visiting those obsessed with UFOs. The colourfully named Thor Templar, is head of the Alien Resistance Movement who monitor extra-terrestrials.
Proudly wearing military style clothes and a red beret, he says that they have killed many aliens and that he, personally, had been responsible for 10 of them.
Louis Theroux Podcast
The super-slick, Marshall Sylver, who Louis met in Las Vegas in 2000, wrote a self-help book called Passion, Profit & Power!!! about how you can find the skills to create the life of your dreams. He made a fortune himself from setting up courses that people would pay to attend in the belief that he would turn them into millionaires.
“Not that long after we stopped filming there was a prosecution,” Theroux reveals. “Nine counts of theft by obtaining money under false pretences. In the end there was a hung jury, so there was no conviction.”
Louis Theroux Life On The Edge, Prime, Wednesday, February 3
For the last 25 years, Louis Theroux has been making documentaries about life in all its strangness, mystery, and angst. Trying to make connections with people who are in different ways living on the edge. However, recently Louis has decided to take a pause and trawl through his old shows looking again at some stories that stuck with him over the years and to reach out to those he had featured to see how their lives have changed over the years. From all the hours of film, he has managed to tease out a handful of themes all of which in different ways go to the heart of what it means to be human in an attempt to figure out what he has learned about life and himself.
Episode 1: Beyond Belief
In the opening episode of this professional retrospective, Louis glances back on his earliest work and investigates how some people’s most intense convictions can lead them into strife with mainstream society. From his Weird Weekends scenes on survivalists and UFOs to his now-infamous film on the White Aryan Resistance in California (Louis and the Nazis), Louis has always been drawn to those whose beliefs seem unusual, confused, or, in some cases, abhorrent.
Episode 2: The Dark Side of Pleasure
From his memorable Weird Weekends episodes on rap to films about Las Vegas and the US opioid crisis, this episode examines the human tendency to jump to the dark side when seeking out pleasure.
Louis Theroux Bbc Las Vegas
Episode 3: Law and Disorder
In films such as Behind Bars and Miami Mega Jail, Louis spent time with hundreds of incarcerated men, discovering a world with its own rules and codes and a system that seemed to be broken. In A Place for Paedophiles, Louis came face to face with those responsible for serious sex crimes against children who were being locked up indefinitely, even after their sentences had been completed.
Episode 4: Family Ties
In his trilogy of films that centered around the Westboro Baptist Church, Louis explores the price the family was paying for its devotion to the distorted vision of its patriarch, Pastor Fred Phelps. With Pastor Phelps now dead, the family has been torn apart, some of its members are still utterly devoted, whilst others have left, forbidden from ever contacting their families again.
Louis Theroux Vegas Netflix
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