Welcome to The Dispatch, a new column by Derek C. Blasberg featuring a mix of interviews and reports from the front rows of the worlds of culture, art, and fashion.
I ’ve never been married, but one time I was the groom in a Las Vegas wedding-themed photo shoot. Filmmaker Gia Coppola was the bride. We were shooting a fashion story for the May 2012 issue of this very magazine. I was on set as the stylist, but when the Elvis impersonator we’d hired went AWOL, I stepped into the King’s white polyester bell-bottoms to save the day. Thankyou. Thankyouverymuch.
No, this month’s column isn’t about how I’m a fashion hero. (But it could be, dammit!) It’s about the revelation that is The Last Showgirl, Coppola’s new film set in Sin City and starring Pamela Anderson as an aging dancer whose feathered, bedazzled career comes to an abrupt end. It’s a stark, moving performance that has earned Anderson a Golden Globe nomination, along with something even more elusive: critical acclaim for a serious role.
In December, nearly 13 years to the day from our faux nuptials, I meet Coppola and Anderson at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. In person, Anderson’s beauty is electrifying. It was big news in September 2023 when Anderson arrived at the Isabel Marant show in Paris without a stitch of makeup, marking the unofficial dawn of her barefaced era. “I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room,” she said then. “I feel like it’s just freedom.”
Coppola’s own connection to Vegas is deeply personal. Her grandfather Francis Ford Coppola, the Oscar-winning director, would go there for inspiration and take her along. “When I was young, he brought me because it’s a great place to write,” she told me back in 2012. “It’s open 24 hours, you can get a burger whenever you want it, and, since everything is inside in Las Vegas, you never know what time it is. You don’t feel pressure to do something before the sun sets.”
A decade later, Coppola’s cousin Matthew Shire, a writer and producer, sent her a play written by his wife, Kate Gersten, titled A Body of Work, which was inspired by the Jubilee! showgirl revue at Bally’s, which closed in 2016 after 34 years. Coppola was immediately enthralled by the idea of turning it into a film and shooting on location in Vegas. “It’s such an interesting, bizarre city,” Coppola says. “Who are the people that make it come to life? What is their day-to-day life like? I hadn’t seen a movie [explore] that.”
Coppola immediately fell for A Body of Work’s protagonist, Shelly, a single mother who follows her dreams every day with a smile—and a feathered headdress—even when things get rough. “I related so much to the mother-daughter story, having been raised by a single mom,” Coppola says with a nod to her own mother, Jacqui Getty, a costume designer, who also worked on The Last Showgirl. (Getty was pregnant with Gia when Gia’s father, Gian-Carlo, died in a boating accident in 1986.) “And then becoming a mother myself”—Coppola had her first child with husband Honor Titus in 2023—“and having that perspective on how complex that relationship is, and being a working mother, and how there are so many systemic issues in terms of how to do that juggling act.”
Coppola’s next hurdle: Who could play the down-on-her-luck 50-something dancer with complex family dynamics and a heart of gold? “I’d fantasize about Marilyn Monroe or past actors who were no longer around,” Coppola says. “But when I came across the documentary, I was struck with how raw and real Pamela is.”
Coppola is, of course, referring to Pamela, a Love Story, the 2023 Netflix doc that sparked a radical reconsideration of Anderson as a woman and a cultural figure, exploring her childhood, early career, (many) high-profile marriages, and tabloid past from a more personal—and perhaps more enlightened—perspective.
Coppola missed Anderson’s mid-1990s Baywatch era and was only aware of her one-dimensional pinup existence in pop culture. “But in the documentary, she’s extremely intelligent,” Coppola says. (My favorite reveal from Pamela, a Love Story was that Anderson was reading Tennessee Williams plays on set during her vaunted Playboy pictorials.)
While the similarities to Shelly were obvious, there were enough dissimilarities to make it a meaty role for Anderson to sink her French-tipped nails into. “She was itching to prove herself as an actress,” Coppola says.
But when Coppola first contacted Anderson’s agent about The Last Showgirl—“My ex-agent!” Anderson interjects—the response was less than enthusiastic. “I got turned down within an hour,” she says. “But it was good because I knew she didn’t get the script.”
Coppola then reached out to Anderson’s eldest son, Brandon, who vetted her before taking the script to his mother. She was adamant: “No one else could play this role but Pamela.”
Anderson credits both Brandon and her younger son, Dylan, with making Pamela, a Love Story happen too. “They told me that they knew the world felt a certain way about me, that it wasn’t true, and they couldn’t take it anymore,” Anderson says.
Once Anderson read the script for The Last Showgirl, she immediately saw in the character what Coppola did. “I was at home in my garden and I threw my pickles in the air,” she says. “I just thought, ‘I have to do this film. This is what I’ve been waiting my whole life for.’ ”
With Anderson on board, Coppola recruited Jamie Lee Curtis—then fresh off her Academy Award win for her performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once—for a small but captivating role as a cocktail waitress. (You have to see it to believe it.) “She’s such a supporter of independent cinema,” Coppola says of Curtis. “And everyone wanted to work with Pamela.”
Curtis’s involvement required moving up the schedule so they could shoot in Vegas last January. “We had to prep over Christmas, when all of the warehouses and prop houses were closed,” Coppola says. “But everyone was so passionate about this project, in front of and behind the camera, that they came at it with their A game and allowed for us to move fast.” (The cast includes Brenda Strong, Kiernan Shipka, Dave Bautista, and Billie Lourd.)
Coppola drove to Las Vegas from her home in L.A. on New Year’s Day—“which is also my birthday,” she says.
Anderson also drove, from her native Vancouver Island; she moved back home to the town she left for Hollywood, more than three decades earlier, during the pandemic. “I showed up in Vegas loaded with all this life experience and all these notes and all these emotional diaries, and every single scene I wanted to pour so many parts of me into,” Anderson says. “What if this is the only movie I get to do? I’m going to put everything I got into it.”
The Last Showgirl was shot over just 18 days, on a budget of less than a million dollars. The casino theater that served as the film’s primary location hosted a water circus act every night. “There were towels everywhere,” Coppola says. “It had a very interesting smell, and we had to put back everyone’s personal items by the time they got there and redecorate the set the next morning.”
The showgirl costumes were also real, designed by Bob Mackie and Pete Menefee for the original Jubilee! show at Bally’s; they’re now in the archives of Caesars Entertainment, which owns Ceasars Palace. “Some of them still had the names of the women who had worn them sewn in,” Anderson says. “I’d try to feel each woman’s energy when I put them on.”
The Last Showgirl received a national theatrical release in January, barely a year after it was shot, and Anderson is relishing the whirlwind journey. “I always tell everybody, if you don’t have a therapist, take an acting class, because you just get to know things about yourself that you could never know in any other way,” she says. “I’ve learned along the way that happiness is a choice. We’ve all lived difficult lives, and we’re all fighting these invisible battles. That’s why we need to be kind to one another. I’ve known that my whole life. This movie is about second chances, about reassessing your life choices. I feel like Shelly is always going to sparkle. She’s always going to have hope.”
As lunch is wrapping up, Anderson slips into a slim, prim Brunello Cucinelli cashmere coat that’s far more quiet luxury than Barb Wire. Even though she has spent nearly four decades in front of the cameras, something now feels new. “I feel like it’s the very beginning of my career,” she says. “I didn’t think leaving Vancouver Island was a possibility. I mean, I’d never been on a plane before I came to Los Angeles.” This is the woman who sat in the front passenger seat with the driver when Playboy sent a limo to pick her up at the airport.
“But doing the impossible is exciting. To live in the mystery of not knowing what’s next is a romantic way to live,” Anderson offers. “I still don’t know what’s next—and that’s okay.”