🎬 THE FIRST LAS VEGAS | Official Screenplay Excerpt

(PULLING MOLARS FOR DOLLARS OR DEALING FARO FOR FORTUNES)

INT. HOLLIDAY DENTAL SURGERY - CENTER STREET, LAS VEGAS, NM - DAY (1879)

Morning light cuts sharp and white through the frosted transom. The room is quiet, sterile, and scented with carbolic acid, clove oil, and the faint metallic tang of fresh iron.

In the corner, an empty cast-iron dental chair sits under an angled brass reflector.

DOC HOLLIDAY (27) stands over a white porcelain basin in a starched dental smock, sleeves rolled to the forearms. With slow, rhythmic care, he rinses a pair of heavy steel extraction forceps under a stream of pump water.

Crimson clouds swirl down the drain. On a silver tray beside him, two bloodied molars rest on a square of gauze.

Across the room at a neat pine desk, KATE (28) methodically dips a steel pen into black ink, logging figures into a leather ledger. Her dark hair is pinned back, her posture composed and serene.

The brass bell over the street door CHIMES.

WYATT EARP (31) and JIM EARP (38) step over the threshold. Dust-caked wool dusters, heavy trail boots, hats in hand.

Wyatt stops dead in his tracks. He takes in the white lace curtains, the pharmaceutical jars, the porcelain spittoon, and Doc—scrubbing blood from steel like a surgeon at an autopsy.

A slow, wry grin creeps across Wyatt’s face.

WYATT

Well, strike me blind and call me a Methodist. Look at you, John. Still finding a way to draw blood before noon, only now you hand the poor bastard a bill for the privilege.

Doc doesn't flinch or look up. He dries the forceps with a pristine linen towel, laying the steel on the tray with a delicate CLICK.

DOC

(slow, honeyed Georgia drawl)

A gentleman’s science, Wyatt. Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, Class of ’72. Four dollars for an extraction, six for gold foil, and the patients rarely reach for a pocket derringer when presented with the reckoning.

Wyatt saunters closer, running a dusty gloved finger along the cold arm of the cast-iron operating chair.

WYATT

You smell like vinegar and peppermint, John. It’s unnatural. You look like an undertaker who took a wrong turn on his way to church.

Doc turns, resting his hands lightly on the basin counter, taking Wyatt in with cool, hooded eyes.

DOC

Mr. Abernathy had an abscess the size of a pigeon’s egg and the constitution of a hysterical mule. I relieved him of both within twenty minutes. An honest day’s labor for honest coin.

Kate’s ledger SLAMS shut.

The heavy thud echoes off the cedar walls. Kate rises from the desk, her chair legs biting hard into the floorboards as she steps directly between the two men.

KATE

(sharp, Hungarian precision)

He is Dr. Holliday in this county, Wyatt. And you are tracking three miles of Kansas trail mud across my clean floor.

Wyatt dips his head, frontier courtliness softening his gaze, though his posture remains unyielding.

WYATT

Good morning to you as well, Kate. Las Vegas seems to agree with your temper.

KATE

We have a six-month lease on this building. We have eighty-four registered patients. We work by God's daylight, we sleep by ten, and he has not touched a drop of rye or a deck of cards since our boots touched New Mexico soil.

WYATT

(softly, to Kate)

And you’ve got him penned up in a corset, playing house.

KATE

I have him breathing.

Wyatt turns his eyes back to Doc, who remains motionless, leaning against the counter, listening with an amused, fatalistic tilt of his chin.

WYATT

Hundreds of men in the plaza right now, John. The Santa Fe railhead just crossed the river and the whole damn frontier is pouring into this valley with pockets full of silver and nothing to spend it on. Saloons running around the clock, half of them with chalk-line tables and greenhorn dealers who couldn't cut a deck without dropping the ace of spades.

Wyatt picks up a silver mouth mirror from the tray, turning it in the sunlight before setting it back down.

WYATT (CONT'D)

Hoodoo Brown’s running the marshal’s office out of the back of a brothel, and there isn't a proper faro bank within two hundred miles. We take a table at the Del Rey, we clear five hundred a night on the cut alone before the midnight whistle blows.

Doc’s gaze drifts toward the frosted glass window. Down Center Street, the muffled, distant ROAR of the boomtown plaza echoes through the glass—wagons rattling, men shouting, the tinny clatter of a distant upright piano.

KATE

(voice trembling with fury)

He coughed up half a lung in Dallas, Wyatt! He woke up in Fort Griffin with blood soaking straight through the mattress! He did not come to these mountains to bleed out over your ambition!

WYATT

(quiet, steady, unblinking)

I didn't ask for your blood, John. I asked for your hands.

Doc looks down at his starched white smock. He looks at the blood-spotted towel on the basin, then up at Kate’s fierce, desperate eyes.

A faint, languid smirk curls beneath his mustache. Slowly, deliberately, Doc begins unbuttoning the starched cuffs of his smock.

DOC

Tell me, Wyatt... exactly how much is San Miguel County charging for a gaming license these days?

Kate’s breath hitches in her throat. The silence that follows is absolute.

DOC (CONT'D)

(smooth, fatalistic)

Lock the street door, Kate. It appears the doctor has concluded his office hours... faro and fortunes are in our destiny.

[SCENE END]