The American Art of Blowing Stuff Up
A few days before the Fourth of July, I was on the rooftop of a casino in Las Vegas, where I ran into the head electrician of the Eisenhower Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which is in Washington, D.C. The electrician, Thomas Benya, who is also a licensed pyrotechnician, had come to Vegas with a swarm of other pyrotechnicians, to set up, and set off, what was being billed as the nation’s largest fireworks show. Back in D.C., President Donald Trump was claiming that his show, around the National Mall, would be bigger, and that he would be giving a “really long” speech. Trump had been trying to muscle his name onto the Kennedy Center, and then, amid a series of staff departures and cancellations by performers, closed the place down for a “comprehensive revitalization project”; Benya, who enjoys “building art with people,” and who has worked at the Kennedy Center for twenty years, since he was eighteen, told me, “It’s been traumatic.” Vegas seemed unlikely to offer respite. A molten-gold “TRUMP” tower loomed over the north end of the Strip.
Three hundred and twenty-nine thousand visitors were in town, to celebrate America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, and all of them were on my elevator. It was a million degrees outside. On a different rooftop, on another day, a gloved woman whose T-shirt read “AS REAL AS IT GETS” paused while loading orange-strobe fireworks shells into three-inch mortars and told me, “When you’ve been around one hundred and twenty and above, this doesn’t even feel like anything.” The best sweaty person I saw in Vegas was an older woman with upswept black hair and bangs, wearing a lime-green fake chrysanthemum as plump as a grapefruit tucked behind her right ear, and carrying a Spanish fan. This was at a coffee shop in the Arts District, miles from the Strip. At the next table was a woman who also had black bangs, plus lip piercings and a tattoo on both wrists. She was engrossed in a book called “Fool’s Errand,” a fantasy novel about an assassin named FitzChivalry Farseer who, per a quick Google, has abandoned “self-imposed exile to rescue a missing prince and navigate perilous political waters.” The woman wore an “Invader Zim” T-shirt: “DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!”
Belowground was the Vegas Loop—Elon Musk’s idea. The Loop is a privately funded system of one-way tunnels designed to ferry passengers, in self-driving Teslas, among nine destinations, primarily the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is the size of eighty football fields. One of Musk’s enterprises, the Boring Company, has been operating the tunnels since 2021. A local professor of public policy has called the Loop “the biggest, most absurd transit scam I have ever heard of.” ProPublica uncovered ominous gaps in oversight, saying that because the Loop “receives no federal funding, it is exempt from the kinds of exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analyses” often demanded of such projects. In other subterranean tunnels—storm drains, really—humans were living. It was monsoon season. Up top, you cook; down below, you drown.
The Strip provided distracting saturations of red-white-and-blue. The Sphere transmogrified into an enormous American-flag beach ball. Gift shops sold bedazzled Stars and Stripes tumblers. I saw a woman in a sequinned American-flag minidress, a man in American-flag shorts overalls. There were American-flag stilettos, cowboy hats, handbags. Topgolf was offering a “Let Freedom Swing” discount of 17.76 per cent. One casino was selling a cocktail called the Firecracker, which cost an ahistorical nineteen dollars. A G.M.C. Terrain was roaming around with its windows chalked in advertisements for “Peptides” and “IV Hydration,” suggesting that there’s a cure for everything.
A cure for mortality, in imperial China, was thought to be an alchemical mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate—later known as gunpowder, or black powder. It did not work. But, when burned, the mixture went BANG! It could be stuffed into the hollow center of bamboo stems, which were already used to scare off evil spirits and mythical “mountain men,” because the joints popped when thrown onto a fire. According to the historian John Withington, “It is said that for centuries, no self-respecting Chinese traveller would leave home without a stash of natural bamboo firecrackers.”
Modulating the mixture produces different effects. More potassium nitrate sustains a longer burn; more sulfur quickens the explosion. Someone eventually thought to add metals, which yield color: sodium, for yellow; strontium, for red; barium, for green; aluminum or magnesium, for white. Copper chloride breaks up quickly under high heat and washes out—bluish. Adding titanium produces a crackly effect. Iron shavings render gold. Today, various combinations are packed into cardboard spheres or cylinders—shells—along with fuses coated in a flammable slurry, then sealed inside kraft paper and shot from fibreglass mortars. Modernity has relieved humans of the added danger of approaching fireworks with a flaming torch or a lit cigar: professional displays are fired by electric current.
Shells are rigged to burn, and blow, in a specific manner. They can be made to go POW, poof, oom, BOOM, BOOM!, BOOMBOOM, whoosh, CRACK, ffffffffft, tsssssssssssss, EEEEeeeeee. Finales go BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM. One kind of firework sounds as though the sky just emptied its digital trash. Visual effects have their own names—chrysanthemum, peony, willow, palm. A falling-leaves effect looks like an enormous, invisible bucket of glitter just tipped. Crossettes fly apart like a cluster of struck billiard balls. A fireworks show’s designer considers, in this order: theme, venue, budget, playlist. Setting fireworks to music has been compared to “scoring characters in a ballet—some are very robust and baroque-like, and some are very delicate, soft.” The difference between a ten-thousand-dollar show and one that costs much more involves product quality, pacing, duration, density, and degree of difficulty. It’s generally more complicated to make fireworks scale the Washington Monument than it is to, say, shoot them off a barge on a lake. The downsides of fireworks—trash, smoke, wildfire, dog trauma—are something that the average spectator pushes out of mind.
Fireworks shows happen continually in Vegas. A couple of nights before the Fourth, I stood in a parking lot at the Palace Station casino, waiting for one to begin. A father in a Bud Light T-shirt took selfies with his small son; a security guard told people to stop leaning against his Range Rover. At nine o’clock, we heard a distant whining. A cloud of dust rose in a gravel lot nearby, and a fleet of drones could be seen lifting in unison. Suddenly, in the sky—colored lights! In the shape of a giant lottery drum! It was like a spaceship, and it seemed close enough to reach up and touch. The drum rolled, and a green ball of light with the number 5 appeared beside it. The ball turned red, and the 5 turned to 4. Yellow (3), blue (2), back to green (1)—POW! POW-POW! Fireworks erupted in the black void next to the lotto drum—green poof, gold poof, silver spangles, white comets. Drones, which can be equipped with lights and programmed to precise G.P.S. coördinates, are meant to enhance, not necessarily replace, fireworks; they can even be equipped with fireworks. Would it have ruined the experience for spectators to have known that drone operators were using computers, not joysticks; and that pyrotechnicians, also using laptops, were sending thousands of lines of code via a radio transmission called F.S.K., frequency-shift keying, which sounds like AOL dial-up, to tell the fireworks when and where to go off?
The drone pilots—Nebraskans—worked for a company called Fantasy Drone Shows. Their leader, Scott Buss, a pyrotechnician and also a pilot, managed retail stores before moving to drones. Drones, he said, let him “tell stories in the sky”—a hand of blackjack, a giant margarita—but they don’t tickle our monkey brain with their odor, or their concussive jolts. Buss enjoys drones; he loves fireworks—“the feel of it all.”
The writer George Plimpton, a founder and the longtime editor of The Paris Review, considered fireworks the “eighth art,” and he was obsessed with them. As part of the research for his book “Fireworks: A History and Celebration,” which was published in 1984, he discovered an industry periodical with the slogan “He who hath once smelt the smoke is ne’er agin free.” He interviewed a reverend in Minnesota who, having merged “his hobby with his clerical work,” had become known as the “blaster pastor.” The pastor explained to Plimpton that, during outdoor sermons, “I might say, ‘ . . . and thus is the way of the Lord.’ Boom!”
When Queen Elizabeth I reigned, from 1558 to 1603, she created a Fire Master of England position. Colonialist empires used fireworks to “overawe local people” and attempt to control them, Withington, the historian, notes in his recent book, “A History of Fireworks.” Pyrotechnics have been performed at Versailles, the pyramids of Giza, Tiananmen Square, the White House. They have been launched from mountains, riverbanks, bridges, medieval ramparts, cathedrals. Fireworks herald the World Cup, the Olympics, inaugurations, weddings, railroad openings, royal matrimony, saints, the Saints, the spring equinox, eclipses, the New Year, the Day of the Dead, the beginning of summer, the end of it. Peter the Great designed a display that “celebrated the treaty and final peace after twenty-one years of war with Charles XII of Sweden,” Plimpton wrote, adding, “Apparently, he simply loved noise.” America’s founding is inextricable from fireworks; John Adams sent a letter to his wife on July 3, 1776, predicting that the nation’s independence would be “solemnized” with, among other things, “Illuminations.” Two hundred and fifty years later, this is taken to heart—relentlessly. Americans spent an estimated two and a half billion dollars on fireworks this year, and that’s just the back-yard stuff.
Fireworks shells are measured in diameter—one inch, three inches, four, twelve. Pyrotechnicians, and the designers of professional fireworks shows, decide which shells to use based on what a venue can physically and legally bear. In Las Vegas, Benya, the Kennedy Center electrician, and his colleagues were working a rooftop whose rubberized membrane could withstand only one-inchers, which can still take off a human hand. Plimpton always insisted on lighting his own. Fireworks spoke to him—the juxtaposition of “flamboyant colors” and “that fine fringe of danger.” His summer parties in the Hamptons never failed to feature pyrotechnics. A guest once sued him, for eleven million dollars, over a burned arm. At one party, Norman Mailer wanted to light a shell. “He had his bourbon drink in a blue glass, really more a vase, the sort of receptacle one usually finds in the back of a kitchen cabinet when everything else in the house, even the plastic cups, has been commandeered,” Plimpton wrote. “He held the drink in one hand, safe out behind him, and he approached the fuse” with a railroad flare, lighting a six-incher that weighed about eight pounds. It “came out almost instantaneously,” and the surprise “toppled Norman into a complete backward somersalt through the sawgrass. Astonishingly, the blue vase remained upright as he pinwheeled around it; not a drop of bourbon splashed out. He got up and took a sip and asked if he could do another. ‘Do you have anything slightly larger?’ ”
Fireworks have magical names—Red Silk, Monkey Child. Plimpton used to say that when he retired he wanted a job naming fireworks, and he wanted his cremated remains to be launched as fireworks. He was about to begin his memoirs when he died suddenly, in his sleep, at his family’s apartment, on the Upper East Side. This happened on September 25, 2003, and he was seventy-six. The ashes waited. In 2005, his close friend Hunter S. Thompson, another writer who loved fireworks, died; the actor Johnny Depp, who had played Thompson in a movie, fired Thompson’s cremains from a cannon near Aspen. Invited guests included Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and Senators George McGovern and John Kerry. A neighbor told the Times, “I’ll always remember where I was when Hunter was blown into the heavens.”
On July 4th of the next year, at Gardiner’s Bay, in the Hamptons, Plimpton went up in his favorite firework, a Japanese Kamuro, which is also “known as the Boy’s Haircut, or Japanese Willow—a golden cascade of light that hangs there for a moment, shimmering, before winking off into the darkness,” his son, Taylor, later wrote. Taylor had packed the shells himself.
Fireworks by Grucci was Plimpton’s preferred pyro provider. That’s who Benya was working for on the casino roof in Las Vegas. The Gruccis have been in the business for six generations, since 1850, first in Bari, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea, and later in Bellport, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island. Grucci forebears immigrated through Ellis Island. It has been said that they “came here, basically, with a shoebox with some formulas in it, and a dream to be in the United States.”
Felix Grucci, Sr., opened a small factory in Bellport in 1929. During the Great Depression, fireworks shows went dark, and Grucci found a side job playing drums in a band. Later, to diversify, Grucci took a U.S. military contract manufacturing training simulators that mimicked an atomic bomb. In the early seventies, his adult children, Butch, Donna, and Jimmy, started running the fireworks company. Jimmy liked trying new things. The Gruccis were among the first to fire shows using computers and electronics. Jimmy was said to have invented an effect called the split comet, which multiplies as it blows apart. In 1979, he insisted that the Gruccis travel to Monte Carlo to compete in an invitation-only fireworks competition. They won. The Gruccis started to be referred to as the First Family of Fireworks, an honorific that, to this day, can be found on the company logo.
The Gruccis were spending Thanksgiving weekend of 1983 making final preparations for Christmas and New Year’s Eve shows when an explosion levelled their factory in Bellport. The ground shook for twenty miles. Locals immediately figured Russian bombs—the end of the world. Felix was at the factory but somehow was not injured. Jimmy and a nineteen-year-old cousin, Donna Gruber, were killed. Plimpton, who was close with the Gruccis, got a phone call and was in Bellport within hours, talking his way past police barricades and onto a “tortured” landscape, which reminded him of photos of trench battles in the First World War. Butch told Plimpton that pyrotechnicians never quite stop thinking about the worst that can happen: “You live with it every day, sort of like knowing that nuclear weapons are pointed at you.” Then he said, “When it really happens, it’s nothing like what you thought. I had an idea the sound would be deep and kind of awesome, like being inside a wave, but it was different. It was a ripping and tearing sound, high and piercing, almost a kind of shriek.”
A member of the Pyrotechnics Guild International wondered if the explosion had been caused by spontaneous combustion. “It was awful to consider,” Plimpton wrote. “A single shell, packed in amid its fellows, slowly, in the darkness of the warehouse, changing its internal composition until now, a deadly instrument, it awaited some delicate shift of atmospheric pressure, or a certain degree of humidity, to be triggered into that first puff of smoke.” Another theory was arson. A town had grown up around the once rural factory’s location, and certain neighbors had been pushing for Grucci to relocate, which is eventually what happened. The cause of the explosion was never revealed, if ever it was known.
A eulogy for Jimmy Grucci was delivered by Plimpton, whose vibe had been theatrical since at least his Hasty Pudding days. (When Plimpton met his first wife, at P. J. Clarke’s, he was wearing a cape.) A double descendant of prominent Mayflower families, he spoke in an accent that Taylor has described as “old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English.” You might imagine how it sounded, then, when Plimpton noted, to a crowd of mourners, that Jimmy’s after-dinner “recreation” was to “watch tapes of his favorite Grucci fireworks shows on the great curved extra-sized television screen at the foot of his bed,” and that his alarm clock was that same television, set to “the climactic moment of the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture as played outdoors by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.” During performances, Plimpton said, Jimmy often threw in extra shells, “to give an audience just a bit more than what was necessary.”
Jimmy Grucci had a son, Phil, who was a freshman at Long Island University at the time of the explosion. Phil had been going to Grucci shows with his family since he was a boy, and he remembered spectators crowding around his grandfather on the Coney Island boardwalk, to congratulate and praise him after each finale. “That’s very addictive,” he once said. Plimpton called Phil “Philly”—“Phil-lay!” They climbed the Brooklyn Bridge together, to work on its centennial show. Phil remembers Plimpton sitting beside him during performances, gazing skyward and banging him gleefully on the knee, and shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” Phil-lay later oversaw the packing of Plimpton’s ashes into the Kamuros.
Fireworks by Grucci survived the Bellport explosion, in part because, the following year, the developer Steve Wynn hired the company for the opening of a new tower at the Golden Nugget, in Las Vegas. The Gruccis have performed the big shows in Vegas ever since. They went on to fire the Statue of Liberty centennial, several Olympic Games, World’s Fairs, dozens of New Year’s Eve millennium shows, the Inaugurations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. “I’ve had people say, ‘I can’t believe you’re shooting fireworks for that guy!’ ” Phil told me. “I say, ‘We are a bipartisan fireworks company.’ ” (Barack Obama skipped fireworks at his Inaugurations.)
Phil and his wife, Debra, who wears a “Grucci” necklace studded with tiny, tasteful diamonds, have two children, Lauren and Christopher, who are in their thirties. Along with a cousin, Corey, they are the next generation of Fireworks by Grucci. All are licensed pyrotechnicians. Lauren’s first show was at Pearl Harbor. A photographer, she documents the performances that her father and brother put on. Chris works shows and is also a program manager for Pyrotechnique by Grucci, the defense-contracting side of the business, which still makes training simulators for the military: now hand grenades, and the kinds of groundbursts that a soldier might encounter via a trip wire. His wife, Lemonia, who goes by Lena, was the company’s H.R. director until she decided to spend more time at home with their daughter, Siena, who was born two years ago—two days after the Fourth of July, to Phil’s feigned dismay. Gruccis aren’t required to work in the family business, but they usually do. Phil told me, “We get hooked on it in the womb—hear the noise in the background, come out ready to go.”
In 2006, Wynn took the Gruccis to Macau, to fire an opening for the first of his properties in Asia. “He always said, ‘I’ll give you the building, you give me the razzmatazz,’ ” Phil told me. Two years later, the hospitality magnate Jerry Inzerillo hired the Gruccis for the opening of the man-made archipelago Palm Jumeirah, in Dubai. Plans for Grucci shows—even those performed in the U.S.—now come from engineers and designers in Dubai, where Grucci has an office. Phil expects the Middle East to overtake the U.S. soon as the largest over-all market. “They’re not about razzmatazz—they’re about big,” he said.
Saudi Arabia alone has a “giga-tourism” goal of attracting a hundred and fifty million annual visitors by 2030, through U.F.C. fights, Formula 1 races, theme parks. “Something beyond oil,” as Phil put it. Fireworks shows for certain events have giga-budgets, though it is hard to get a dollar amount. Millions? I pressed Phil. “Oh, yeah,” he said. The bigger the budget, the better the “opportunity to go outside of the box.” The Gruccis have fired the Burj Khalifa, the planet’s tallest building, which stands just over half a mile high, in Dubai; a UNESCO World Heritage site made of clay, in Saudi Arabia; and Al Marjan Island, another man-made archipelago, in the emirate of Ras al-Khaimah.
For years, Grucci held the record for having made and fired the largest aerial shell—sixty inches. Phil showed me a replica at one of his company’s warehouses; it looked like a mutant Christmas ornament. That record was broken in 2020, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Such records require feats of engineering. The Steamboat Springs shell contained three hundred and eighty comets and had been wrapped in fifty-one miles of gummed paper by a machine built specifically for that purpose. The shell weighed two thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven pounds and was shot out of a custom-made mortar, on a mountaintop. The lift had to be powerful enough to blast the massive orb into the sky, and the shell had to explode at just the right moment, without raining flaming debris. The Gruccis have been commissioned to break that record on New Year’s Eve, in Dubai, with a sixty-six-inch shell, and they have already been hired to plan for seventy inches, in 2027. Phil told me, “The Middle East—particularly the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia—are very, very energized by world records.”
The Gruccis import their fireworks already assembled, largely from Italy and Spain. The Italians are respected fireworks-makers from way back, and the Spanish city of Valencia has long been known for its pyrotechnics festivals. “You want flawless, perfect stuff? Go to Japan. It’s like getting a diamond,” Chris told me one morning, in Las Vegas. Grucci also imports from China—but less, these days. “It’s just too expensive,” he said. (Tariffs.)
The imports come through Pyrotechnique by Grucci, which is based out of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, near Virginia Tech. The plant was built during the Second World War, to manufacture propellants for rockets and other artillery. During the coronavirus pandemic, when fireworks shows were cancelled, the company surged staff to Radford, where most Grucci operations now take place. Chris moved there from Bellport. He and Lena, whose family is from Greece, got married in Roanoke, which had the closest Greek Orthodox Church they could find. Phil marked the occasion with a fireworks tribute. The hotel hosting the reception allowed this only after a demonstration and with the assurance that the Gruccis would not shoot off anything that generated close sparks. The hotel, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, had nearly burned down before.
Chris prefers the rote stability of defense manufacturing to the logistical chaos of fireworks shows, which can get derailed by anything from high wind to a fumbled permit. A couple of weeks before the Fourth, I met him and his father at the Radford plant, a complex that occupies nearly seven thousand acres straddling the New River. I had to clear three security checkpoints to get in. Parts of the property appeared unused and overgrown, with signs that read “Welcome to First Rolled Powder” and “Increment Weigh House.” There were steel chutes and silos and rusted railroad tracks and gas pumps, and objects that looked like intergalactic lug nuts. A contractor, B.A.E. Systems, now runs the plant and leases workspace to thirteen commercial tenants. As a Grucci assistant and I passed a Northrop Grumman building, the assistant said, “I don’t know what goes on in there. I try to be careful with my curiosity.”
Grucci’s main office was a prefabricated building set among long, low-slung, flat-roofed structures that called to mind old-timey chicken houses, with open bays. The buildings were color-coded. Blue trim meant no explosives; red meant the obvious. A safety official named Scott handed me a fire-resistant lab coat, goggles, and a pair of black clodhoppers designed to discharge static electricity. Some of the buildings had specialty flooring and lighting, and maximum-occupancy rules. In one, Scott had me step onto a machine that resembled a scale, with a needle indicator that moved from red to green, measuring the conductivity of the shoes. My needle stayed in the red—my feet were too dry, potential friction. Scott directed me to remove the shoes and spritz the bottom of my socks with water from the kind of bottle that you’d use to mist a houseplant. I put the shoes back on and tried the scale again. The needle shot into the green.
Chris walked me to a building where workers were using automated machinery to drop black powder and pulverized aluminum into cardboard tubes, to make the hand-grenade and groundburst simulators. The tubes reminded me of the inside of a roll of toilet paper. The grenade simulators are designed to build muscle memory in soldiers: pull the pin, throw it, take cover, don’t just stand there and watch.
In a room smelling of cornstarch, Chris showed me where workers coat cotton twine in a black-powder slurry, to make fusing called “quick match.” In an X-ray area, an employee was running explosives samples through a machine that printed out moisture levels on a diagnostic slip that looked like a receipt. Then we watched a team leader named Paul tape fuses to cardboard tubes, venting each with two tiny holes made by a corncob holder.
We passed through an area where the tsssssssssssss of compressed air was so loud that one employee wore earplugs. She was attaching whistles to simulators—some can be made to sound like incoming missiles—and sealing them with glue. Near a building marked “Prime & Ferrule,” an employee named Jimmy handed Chris a small container in which he’d been test-mixing an oily amalgam of black powder, camphor, and acetone. I took a sniff—nail-polish remover, times a thousand. Jimmy laughed and said, “It’ll clear you out.”
I got into a Chevy Suburban, license plate “GRUCCI,” and rode with Phil to a vast, open field where a large buck likes to sleep in the cool sand beneath a pole barn and groundhogs could be seen scampering off into the weeds. Four Grucci employees, led by a young crew chief named Alyson, were ending their workday by test-firing one last hand grenade and one last groundburst simulator. They placed the grenade on a catapult and operated it from within a three-sided safety hut, via a rope threaded through a window. “It’s almost like ‘Looney Tunes’—go in your little bunker and pull the rope,” Alyson told me.
The grenade fell just short of the sandpit and blew up—it passed. An employee named Gary placed the groundburst simulator upright on a metal stand and attached the rope, which they let me pull. BANG! went the simulator, leaving shredded cardboard and a plume of smoke.
Grucci fireworks are stored in magazines, which in Radford are cement-block structures hidden by earthen berms and heavy timber. The magazines are well spaced, in case one blows. Phil drove me to one that looked deserted. Three employees were inside, pulling boxes for a July 4th show in Yonkers. Product was organized by effect. As I was looking at a box labelled “Letter shell ‘P’ White,” Phil said, “We have pretty much every letter in the alphabet.”
The fireworks and equipment for Vegas had already gone out. The logistics were being managed in another Grucci facility—part office, part warehouse—in nearby Dublin. When I met Phil there, trucks were coming and going, filled with mortars and modular panels. The office’s main corridor was lined with large framed photos of Grucci shows. Phil and I stopped in front of a shot of the grand reopening of the Palms, a Las Vegas casino: two high-rise towers that, dressed in fireworks, evoked brightly feathered birds. Phil said, “I get inspired by the architecture of the structures that we work with. How do we emphasize it with fireworks without overwhelming what we’re there to honor?” He had envisioned comets coming off the top of the buildings, twenty-foot “fountains” out front, and multicolored mines running up and down the sides, spewing horizontally, like fixed wings. “Then the question is: How do you attach the mines horizontally? How do you make them equidistant? These windows don’t open,” he said, pointing, “so the only way you can do that is rappel down the side, or lower cables that have preloaded rigging. And then you have to keep it off the building, so you don’t damage the building.” The Palms show had required a twenty-person crew and four days of setup. “All of the logistics and the production comes together for that ten- or fifteen- or twenty-minute performance,” he said. “And the audience roars—hopefully.”
Grucci’s director of operations, Brenda Albano, oversees logistics for a couple of hundred shows per year. Phil said, “It’s like moving a small army around.” There are permits to secure, protocols to finalize. Barges don’t magically cross state lines. Trucks need to be routed, drivers hired. Albano, a native Virginian, has been with the company for twenty-seven years. She started out on the defense side. Before that, she sewed toes onto socks at a factory. She prefers fireworks. Like a lot of Grucci employees, she is also a licensed pyrotechnician. If she were a firework, she would be a flying fish—in constant motion. Phil would be a hornet swarm—all over the place. Chris would be a fountain—steady burning, grounded. Albano is too restless to sit at a desk; she stands. She keeps Skittles and a Costco-size jar of Mt. Olive dill pickles in her office, alongside reflective vests and a book called “Hazardous Materials, Substances & Waste Compliance Guide.” A decorative woodblock on her bookshelf reads “BUT DID YOU DOCUMENT IT?” She told me, “I am bossy, and I’m demanding, and I’m loud, and I don’t like lazy people.”
Grucci employs more than two hundred people full time. Some who transfer from the defense side can’t handle the pace in fireworks, which also has hundreds of part-time pyrotechnicians. Full-timers commit with the understanding that no one takes vacation between May 1st and July 15th, and that they may be asked to leave for Las Vegas the day after Christmas, as Chris Grucci does, to prepare for the New Year’s Eve show.
Ahead of July 4th, Albano was running near-constant check-ins with staff, while also managing an ailing dog and meeting with the fire marshal, to get cleared for incoming storage pods. I was sitting in on one of her conference calls when someone broke the bad news that Andrew Warby, a chief pyrotechnician who’d been hired to work Vegas, was in the hospital—he’d just fractured a foot while jogging. “Is that rooftop wheelchair accessible?” someone on the call said. Warby, a native Australian who lives in Dallas, showed up in Vegas in a medical boot. By the time I met him, on the roof of a casino called Sunset Station, he’d tossed the boot—it was slowing him down. Limping, he cheerily told me, “Show must go on!,” as he’s surely said to the media a thousand times before.
The Gruccis have many clients in Las Vegas. They had produced the fireworks that accompanied the drone show at Palace Station. For the Fourth, they were putting on several shows out in the Las Vegas Valley, and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority had hired them to fire the entire three-and-a-half-mile Strip. Pyrotechnicians were assigned to the rooftops of the Aria, Caesars Palace, the Fontainebleau, the MGM Grand, Planet Hollywood, Resorts World, the Strat, Treasure Island, and the Venetian. Designers and engineers in Dubai had sent bespoke site plans. Joe Sedlock, a chief pyrotechnician from Columbus, Ohio—who would almost work for free, because hearing a crowd’s reaction “is like Christmas morning”—showed me color-coded schematics of mortar racks, fallout areas, safety distances, products, and firing times, down to the millisecond. Forty comets, fired from different locations and at a seventy-degree angle, yield what? “A nice, pretty cross,” Sedlock said, adding, “We can fill the sky—sort of paint it.” He was scheduled to fire the MGM Grand, whose twenty-eight-page site plan involved, by my count, at least two thousand five hundred and eighty-one effects: “RED RING W/CRACKLING PISTIL,” “TIME RAIN TO GOLD,” “SUPER CRACKLE (SALUTE).” The over-all technical director, Oscar Lopez, whose day job entails managing events at Resorts World, hustled crews carefully among setups and sites. Just inside the roof door at Resorts World, where the crew included Benya, Lopez had used a black marker to trace the outline of his large shoes, and to write “CELL SIGNAL,” on the cement floor. Stepping into his footprints, he told me, “This is the only place where I can make a phone call.”
Large patches of duvetyn, a fire-resistant fabric, had been taped to the Resorts World roof. Benya and other pyrotechnicians were wiring up hundreds of racks of comets—which resembled opaque, oversized test tubes—affixing them to plywood slabs and placing them on the duvetyn. The wiring contained copper, which can short. Benya told me, “It doesn’t matter if it’s this eighteen-gauge wire carrying twelve volts or a six-aught cable carrying four hundred and eighty—you gotta respect it, you gotta be careful with it, you gotta terminate it properly.”
In the operation’s command center, Room 38029 in the Masquerade Tower of the Rio, large curved windows overlooked the entire Strip and an eastern sweep of valley. A computer monitor showed real-time weather conditions, including wind speed. Dedicated binders held schedules and protocols—fallout frontages, spotter locations—counting down to “SHOWTIME!!,” 21:00 hours. Music: “Born in the U.S.A.” (Springsteen), “Waking Up in Vegas” (Katy Perry), “Viva Las Vegas” (Elvis). Chris had conducted a dress rehearsal, to work out kinks in the variously assigned rooftop laptops and firing systems. F.S.K. code fuzzed from a speaker. “That is the underlying heartbeat of everything,” he said.
Just before 21:00, a security guard escorted me and a couple of others to the roof of the Rio. Below us, on the terrace of a lounge called VooDoo, several dozen people were dancing, drinks in hand, in front of a live band. An older man kept trying to make a “U.S.A.!” chant happen. Precisely at nine, we heard—shhhhprrrrroooo BOOM. Fireworks appeared simultaneously above all nine Strip locations. Everybody on the VooDoo terrace watched through lifted phones.
The show was so spread out that it felt less personal and powerful than the Palace Station performance, the one with the drones. An even cooler sight, I thought, was in the valley, where lesser shows played out ceaselessly and, from where we stood, silently—a diorama of glitter and spark. The entire landscape seemed alive.
Grucci made its name on finales—when the tempo picks up and the reports intensify. This show ended after eight minutes and four seconds. A few people at the VooDoo went, “Woooooo!” The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s live stream captured spectators saying, “Look at ’em all!,” and “Las Vegas sure knows how to do fireworks, huh?” The written comments were less favorable: “extremely boring,” “highly disappointed.” That’s show biz. As the smoke drifted off, the VooDoo band came back on and Jimi Hendrixed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Nobody seemed to mind that it wasn’t the real thing. ♦