Hollywood calls it "independent creation" when two fictional properties come up with the same plot. Moviegoers called it just plain weird in 1992 and '93, when "Honeymoon in Vegas" and "Indecent Proposal" turned out to have the same plot: A virtuous woman has to shack up with a smarmy but charming rich guy to pay off the gambling debts of the poor schmuck who brought her to Vegas. Both turned out to be comedies. Only one was meant to be.
As the deliberate comedy. "Honeymoon in Vegas" was no home run, but it did deliver fairly consistent chuckles. "Indecent Proposal" was the campy melodrama, but Redford's comeback role as a handsome rake charmed female viewers and helped its perpetrators laugh all the way to the bank. The movie grossed more than $100 million.
"Honeymoon" writer-director Andrew Bergman says the idea of a guy losing his fiance in a poker game was easily combined with the desire to set a movie in Vegas, which figured into his screenplay for 1984's "Oh, God! You Devil." The movie's very title is meant to inspire chuckles, reflecting many people's view of Vegas as the anti-Christ of love and romance, despite the fact that wedding chapels are a cottage industry.
"If Vegas is a 24-hour circus and it's so bizarre... Why do people get married here?" star Nicolas Cage pondered out loud at the movie's promotional junket. "I don't know the answer to that. I think it might be because it's fast, and you do not have much time to think about it."
Cage's character hopes so. Jack Singer is a New York private detective with a commitment problem, thanks to seedy divorce investigations and the dying wish of his mother (Anne Bancroft) that he never get married. But Jack realizes he'll lose his girlfriend Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker) if he doesn't. "Let's just get on a plane, go to Vegas, and do it!" he proclaims.
"If I'd just said 'City Hall,' the story would end here," he appends in voice-over. Before they can even check into Bally's, a ball-busting (literally) high roller named Tommy Korman (James Caan) spots Betsy as a dead ringer for his late wife, and conspires to possess her by fixing a poker game and luring Jack into it. The game evolves into a tense scene, despite the presence of an Elvis‹the hotel is crawling with them in an impersonator's convention -- and the hound-dog face of former UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. "The description in the script was a guy who looks very much like Jerry Tarkanian," Bergman explained later. "We looked at pictures of guys and realized very early on the only person who looks like Jerry Tarkanian is Jerry Tarkanian."
Jack winds up owing $65,000 to Korman, who will erase the debt if Betsy will spend the weekend with him in Hawaii. If not, he'll erase Jack. Removing Betsy to the tropical charm of Kauai, he charms her with lies, while keeping an ever-befuddled Jack at arm's length. When Korman escorts her back to Vegas after convincing her to tie the knot, Jack resorts to desperate measures to intercept them: Hitching a ride with the "Flying Elvises" parachute team and skydiving into the Bally's parking lot to rescue his lady love. (The first draft called for Jack to catch a ride with Siegfried & Roy and their white tigers. The idea "was funny," Bergman says, "but he wasn't doing anything heroic to get the girl back.")
The continual background presence of Elvis impersonators often steals laughter from the main plot. Between takes, the impersonators were well-aware that Cage played Wild at Heart as a twisted Elvis movie. "They kept saying, 'Hey man, let's get a beer and talk about 'E,' " he recalled. Though Cage took the part to get away from psycho roles and play something "a little more sunny," Jack becomes increasingly bug-eyed and manic, the perfect embodiment of anyone driven to the edge by the sound of slot machines.
"I like to gamble, but I don't like gambling with a deck of cards. I like to gamble with work a little bit," Cage said. And his subsequent career gamble in Vegas -- the Oscar-winning "Leaving Las Vegas" -- paid off better than his roulette system during the "Honeymoon" shoot: "I had this system, which I will not be doing again," of betting on red at the roulette table, and doubling his bet if he lost. "There was one streak when I lost 13 times consecutively. Finally I got it back, but I was sweating."
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