Nov. 15--It was a couple of hours before the 1994 opening of the Fiesta, and casino developer George Maloof Jr. was feeling like a teen-ager who was about to throw his first party. 

"What if no one shows up?" Maloof wondered, as he climbed the two stories to a roof that topped a section of the $28 million North Las Vegas hotel-casino. 

As he reached the viewpoint, Maloof gazed out at the scene and was shocked to eye thousands of people waiting to get inside. 

Flash forward seven years to tonight's scheduled 11 p.m. public opening of the Palms, a $270 million West Flamingo Road casino complex, and the 37-year-old multimillionaire is feeling a bit more confident. 

Maloof said the A-list of guests for a 7 p.m. invitation-only gathering includes such Hollywood stars as Matt Dillon, Samuel L. Jackson, Joe Pesci, Tara Reid, Martin Sheen and Charlize Theron. 

Nearly 1,000 people have requested media credentials to cover the unveiling of the 42-story hotel tower and 95,000-square-foot casino, while feeding at the trough of free food and drink. 

Earlier in the day, Maloof is scheduled to do live video hookups with local news stations throughout the country, and the Palms is scheduled to be the focus of a piece on NBC's "Today Show." 

The upbeat vibe has left the soft-spoken casino operator feeling a bit more confident about this opening than he was his last. 

"I don't know if I'll have time to get on the roof," Maloof quipped. "I think there'll be a few more people." 

The Palms is small by Strip standards. With 455 hotel rooms, it's not designed to lure the masses that fill such 3,000-room giants at Bellagio and The Venetian, although it has land to add an additional 1,500 rooms. 

It's been positioned as a Hard Rock-style boutique hotel where guests will lap up a trendy nightclub scene -- a strategy first employed by the neighboring Rio before multiple expansions and its sale to Harrah's Entertainment two years ago led to a downturn in its fortunes. 

But Maloof also envisions the Palms as a locals slot joint reminiscent of the Fiesta, which he and his family sold earlier this year to Station Casinos in a $185 million cash deal. 

The property will likely compete for customers with the nearby Rio, Gold Coast and Orleans, although it could also help create a critical mass that re-energizes that small off-Strip corridor. 

At the Fiesta, the self-proclaimed "Royal Flush Capital of the World," Maloof controlled a slot club that had an estimated 100,000 names, but that valuable marketing tool was sold as a part of the Station deal. 

He estimates that just 3 percent to 4 percent of his Fiesta customers generated nearly 80 percent of the casino's revenues. So Maloof employed a series of mailings earlier this year to sign up 50,000 members to the Palms slot club. 

"You lose a few of those people and that's a bad thing," he said. 

As for the hotel, Maloof plans to market the property throughout Arizona, California and his native New Mexico, and will use his family's National Basketball Association franchise, the Sacramento Kings, to publicize the Palms name. 

While he doesn't know Maloof personally, McDonald Investments financial analyst Dennis Forst is convinced that Maloof's Palms will cut into Strip business, especially at a time when the city is hurting from the faltering U.S. economy and the financial impact of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. 

"He's a good operator, but given the size of the Strip it's not going to make much difference," Forst said. 

Is the analyst concerned about the timing of tonight's opening? 

"No one would have dreamt that it would be in this environment," Forst said. "It's not the ideal time to open it." 

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