Documentary About Las Vegas Legend Jimmy Vaccaro Being Shopped by Filmmaker Frank Zarrillo

Jimmy Vaccaro had seen a half-century’s worth of characters walk through his Las Vegas sportsbooks, in and out of the doors of the Barbary Coast or Mirage or South Point. He’s conversed with thousands – many thousands – of them, particularly as his celebrity grew as America’s most famous and media-friendly oddsmaker, long before legal sports betting became a national obsession after 2018.

Vaccaro has heard a lot of people say a lot of things, make a lot of boasts and promises. There wasn’t always a lot of follow-through.

So when Frank Zarrillo walked into the South Point in August 2024, a year before Vaccaro retired after 50 years in the business and moved back to his native Western Pennsylvania, the oddsmaker wasn’t exactly sure if the young New Jersey-raised filmmaker was serious about making a documentary about his life and career. When he learned that he was, when the project neared completion in February, he let Zarrillo know that it meant something.

“I went back to South Point for the Super Bowl, and he said something to me I haven’t forgotten,” Zarrillo told Gambling Insider. “It was kind of like the first handshake to the last handshake. He did the touch-the-other-hand, you know, the double-hand handshake, and it’s not word-for-word, but he said something along the lines that a lot of guys had come to him into his orbit over the years and said what they’re going to do. And they basically never followed through. He kind of, I guess, respected me for that.”

Documenting a Highly Interesting, Highly Vegas Career

Whether Vaccaro, 80, and the 38-year-old Zarrillo became friends during their extensive time together is up to their own interpretations. Zarrillo would like to think they did. More importantly to him, he wanted to make sure he was faithful to Vaccaro’s truth. 

As he seeks a distribution deal in tandem with Richard Paraiso and Linda Bose of the Empire Agency, Zarrillo already knows that he earned respect of a man who, too, has put in his hours

“It was maybe the middle of the summer [of 2024], and he called me,” Vaccaro told Gambling Insider. “He said what he wanted to do, and all I said was ‘Do what you want.’

“The only thing I said was ‘When you’re done with it just let me know. I want to watch it too.”

The filmmaking career of Zarrillo and producer/collaborator Eric Landrum has mostly focused on athletes, but his introduction to Vaccaro came after a private screening at the South Point for his documentary about poker player Mike Matusow, who makes a cameo in the new film. South Point sportsbook director Chris Andrews – a Vaccaro friend of nearly 60 years from back home in Western Pennsylvania – liked the film and had an idea.

“He suggested I meet with Jimmy,” Zarrillo said. After a meeting a few months later, things progressed quickly. And easily.

“We literally just started filming. A month into it, I get a call from Sonny Vaccaro. His brother calls me up,” Zarrillo recalls. “He’s like, ‘Whatever I can do to help, I love what you’re doing.’”

Zarrillo had no idea he was walking into such a well-timed project, with Vaccaro soon entering his final year as a professional bookmaker.

No Preconceived Notions, No Days Off

Zarrillo grew up in New Jersey and frequented Atlantic City, even writing a screenplay based there that he’s trying to get produced. But he doesn’t gamble, and didn’t place one bet, he said, the entire time he was encamped at South Point for filming. 

So as with most of his projects, Zarrillo went into the Vaccaro shoot with little personal background on the subject, and therefore no preconceived notions to influence what his lens was absorbing.

“I get a front row seat, and I get an education, too, walking into an industry,” he remarked. “These are the guys that are doing it at the highest level. And that was the same situation with the poker industry. Same with the bodybuilding industry. 

These are the guys that either have done something significant or made it to the highest level. You get to deal with these guys and see how they operate on a day to day.

“It’s always the same. They’re always basically married to the work. And that’s why they’re at that level.”

Vaccaro, the raconteur, was a documentarian’s dream. He had stories to tell and speaks in paragraphs and in stream of consciousness, providing reels of material.

“His interviews were at least three or four hours, and in the two months I was there,  we’d film every single day,” Zarrillo remembers. “There was rarely a day that went by that I didn’t film something, whether it was him or just in the sportsbook or just other people that are involved in the project.”

Las Vegas Stories

The shoot – which included a rare interview with South Point owner and long-time Vaccaro friend and kindred spirit Michael Gaughan – yielded upwards of 14 hours of footage that was condensed into a 74-minute final product.

Vaccaro hits the heights of his career, his years of media practice on live television, and on YouTube benefitting him, recounting exploits such as being the only oddsmaker to offer lines on the 1990 Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas fight, helping to create the types of prop bets that fuel the modern sports betting industry, and made him a plum subject that his family and peers wish had been explored in a documentary earlier.

The film, Vaccaro: Vegas Bookie, is at times a quick-paced love letter to both Vaccaro and old Las Vegas – a place, Vaccaro laments in one of many scenes filmed inside the casino with South Point co-workers, has passed, as his time there soon would. 

It also becomes a deep dive into the history of the Vegas gambling industry with Vaccaro as the throughline. 

There’s also interesting insights about his personal life growing up outside Pittsburgh, and a tidbit about his first marriage and a boxing match that rings insightful about how he lasted so long in the business.

Fantastical Vaccaro yarns are buttressed by a gallery of Vegas peers and admirers lavishing him with praise, personalizing the story for the scores that know or have interacted with him, or maybe just remember him as the bookie who set odds on who murdered Mr. Burns in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons.

“I interviewed a lot of people and just filmed a lot of people over the last several years,  and he’s one [who] falls in that category of a unique character for sure,” Zarrillo described. “It’s just the way he talks. He’ll give me like five, 10 minutes and he goes, ‘All right, I’m done with you.’ And he walks away. Says it in a joking manner, of course.”

Then Vaccaro would take a little time for himself.

“He would come in around 11ish, we would do our thing, or maybe a little earlier,” Zarrillo recalls. “We’d do a little bit and then we built that timeline over the course of the few months. And then he would go to the spa.”

Keeping True to the Subject, Truth is Crucial

Zarrillo acknowledged he “absolutely” cares if the subject likes the work, often showing them rough cuts “before I put a nail on it and say it’s done.”

Vaccaro, though, seems to be relying on the opinion of his friends before the final version is ready. There’s a sense he knows the plot already and is assured his tight circle of comrades will make sure the right thing is done. He’s been pleased with what he’s heard, but in his typical unvarnished way, admits that some friends think it “maybe got a little lengthy.”

But really, Vaccaro suggested, there’s no need to burnish this tale.

“I’m very happy from everything that I hear. It’s all positive,” he said. “Not one thing is negative. And I can attribute that to something very simple. It’s the truth. There was nothing there that didn’t happen. There was nothing that was exaggerated five times. Never. I would never do that. You know, the first bet we took on Buster Douglas, it was $27,000 to win $7,000. And the final was $420,000. What am I going to tell you?”

Whenever the project comes to a television screen on some platform, Vaccaro will finally be able to tell Zarrillo how he really feels about the finished product, a distillation of an extremely interesting half century spent in sportsbooks.

For now, Zarrillo savors what Vaccaro told him with that handshake.