Neon Museum Launches Film Tour Showcasing Las Vegas Movie History

The Neon Museum has launched a new guided experience spotlighting Las Vegas' deep and often surprising relationship with cinema. The Viva Las Vegas Movies Tour is a 45-minute program developed in-house to explore how film history connects to the signs, spaces, and stories preserved in the Neon Boneyard.

The tour will feature some of the most famous titles in the city's film history, along with lesser-known films that help to build out and refine the cinematic legacy of that particular community. Featured movies include Casino, Cool World, and Showgirls, alongside deeper cuts such as Boulder Dam (1936) and Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur, illustrating how Las Vegas has appeared on screen well beyond its most famous portrayals.

“I'd constantly get asked movie questions … I was just getting sent people constantly,” he says. “That pet fascination and that curiosity that our visitors might have had at that time really turned into a pretty big part of our programming here, which I'm really proud of.”

Participants explore film locations and artifacts tied to specific productions, including Steiner's Cleaners and the first film screened at El Portal Theatre in 1928. Docents encourage questions and personal connections, allowing visitors to engage with the material in ways that reflect their own interests and film knowledge.

The tour is led by Johann Rucker, the museum's senior manager of research and scholarships, who curated a list of roughly 50 films from a much longer draft. “He gets it down into bullet points, core narratives, key facts … so that they can also then personalize it on their own and find their own connections with it,” Rucker says. “That's something that I think is true for every one of our tours at the museum, no two visits are the same. Depending on what guide you get, you get a different perspective, different sense of humor, presentation style.”

“Growing up here as a cinephile, you think of other cities as having these rich cinematic lineages. Las Vegas fully deserves to be on that list. The stories that filmmakers like your Scorseses and your Francis Ford Coppolas, your Sofia Coppolas ... find within the city are singular,” says Rucker. “Las Vegas is a place of freedom. It's a place of liberation, but it's also a place of bright designs and isolation. Every filmmaker that makes a movie here has a very particular way to use the city. And I think that is one of the strengths that comes across through the film tour.”

The Viva Las Vegas Movies Tour runs daily at 6:30 p.m. Tickets start at $35 and are available through the Neon Museum.