This movie shows Bugsy Siegel watching a screentest of himself. In real life, Siegel made many friends amongst the Hollywood elite, asked for, and had a screentest. The footage no longer exists, like so many other screentests, yet the legend of Siegel's attempt to break into showbiz lives on.
Most of the Las Vegas scenes of the Flamingo construction were filmed near Palm Desert and La Quinta, California, where a full-sized replica of the Flamingo was built.
The movie that George Raft (Joe Mantegna) is making while Bugsy Siegel visits him on the set is Manpower (1941), which co-starred Edward G. Robinson. The scene being filmed where Raft gets into a bar fight and hands a broken chair to an actress (Virginia Hill (Annette Bening)) really appeared in the actual movie.
One of three movies released in 1991 that featured Bugsy Siegel as a character. The other two were The Marrying Man (1991) and Mobsters (1991).
The idea that Bugsy Siegel dreamed up the Las Vegas Strip on his own is only partly true. The Flamingo was the third major property on the Las Vegas Strip (behind the El Rancho and Last Frontier), and it wasn't even originally Bugsy's idea. The idea for the Flamingo came from degenerate gambler Billy Wilkerson, who intended to model it after his Los Angeles nightclubs. Siegel became Wilkerson's partner and eventually took over the project. He later injected a lot of his own ideas into the project, but the original idea was not his.
Barry Levinson: [Ralph Tabakin] Ralph (elevator operator) has appeared in every Levinson picture from Diner (1982) to Liberty Heights (1999).