Casino is the story of Sam "Ace" Rothstein and the events that occurred while he ran the Tangiers hotel and casino in Las Vegas. The movie is based on the real life of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal and what happened while he was running the Stardust.
What's fun about this movie are the choices Scorsese makes, how often his story accurately mirrors the real events that inspired it and where they deviate from one another. Not only the differences in the narrative but in the movie version of the city of Las Vegas. Both are set in the 1970s through the early 80s. However since the movie was filmed in 1994, without the use of modern CGI, differences between how the landscape looked during the time the story is set in and what it looked like during filming were unavoidable. Despite that challenge, Scorsese made the conscious effort to represent the city as it existed during that time when he could, changing it when it benefited the story.
In that spirit, lets play a game. We want to see how close the movie storyline matches what really happened. While doing that, we'll compare the landscape in Scorsese's version of Vegas to the real one.
We'll start by assuming both are exactly the same and analyze the movie to either confirm this or establish that they're different. As we encounter moments that conflict with the chronological events, we'll acknowledge them, then remove them from the equation so we can move on connecting the moments in time that still match up. We'll continue doing this until we're finally shown something that breaks the last connection we have, to the continuity of the real events.
Regarding the landscape, we will allow it to help us progress in the timeline but not to establish a break in it. Conflicts will simply be documented differences between the movie landscape and the real one. That being said, one rule we will make is you can't make things up. The Tangiers will be the only fictional landmark. The rest of the landscape can only be reconfigured, either in location or in its evolution. The moment something can't simply be reconfigured to explain what you are seeing, the game is over. That includes making changes to the infrastructure. IE, things like roads and landmarks exist exactly as they are, or were, in the Las Vegas until something is shown to force us to relocate them. So if we are driving along the strip and after the Flamingo we see the Golden Nugget, then that's where the Golden Nugget exists in films version of Las Vegas. It doesn't become a problem until we see the Golden Nugget shown again but located in a different geographical location
Also, understand that an argument can be made to challenge any of this. This is just a chance to over analyze a movie and talk about Vegas while doing it.
