Fun Time Automatic Machines

Fun Time Automatic Machines was a manufacturer of slot machines for the Nevada casino market, pinball machines, and jukeboxes sold under the Melody-Coin brand across the rest of the country. The company appears in the Overlook Hotel's history through a scrapbook Jack Torrance finds in the basement, which contains a 1964 investigative column by muckraker Josh Brannigan. The column lists the attendees of a week-long gathering at the Overlook in August of that year, when the hotel was operating as a security-jacketed "key club" ostensibly for unwinding businessmen. Among the guests was Richard Scarne, identified as the principal stockholder of Fun Time Automatic Machines.

Ownership and Criminal Ties

Scarne's presence at the Overlook placed Fun Time Automatic Machines at the center of a financial tangle that linked the hotel to Las Vegas gambling barons and, through them, to both suspected and convicted underworld kingpins. Scarne himself had a criminal record: he had done time for assault with a deadly weapon in 1940, carrying a concealed weapon in 1948, and conspiracy to commit tax fraud in 1961. The column also noted that Peter Zeiss, a Miami-based importer fighting deportation as an undesirable person, was a large stockholder in Scarne's Fun Time company. Zeiss had been convicted on charges of receiving and concealing stolen property and conspiracy to commit tax fraud, and had been tried on charges of murder and accessory to murder. The overlapping ownership between Fun Time Automatic Machines and the Las Vegas casinos where its machines were placed created a structure that investigators suspected was used to launder money skimmed from casino operations.

Role in the Overlook's History

The scrapbook's clippings reveal that the Overlook's ownership had passed through a series of shadowy transactions. Horace Derwent, the millionaire inventor and entrepreneur who had renovated the hotel after World War II, sold it in the early 1950s. By 1963, a Las Vegas group called High Country Investments had purchased the hotel, and it was later revealed that High Country was headed by Charles Grondin, a former Derwent Enterprises executive who had been indicted and acquitted on tax evasion charges. The August 1964 gathering that included Scarne, Zeiss, and other figures such as Vittorio "Vito the Chopper" Gienelli and Carl "Jimmy-Ricks" Prashkin, demonstrated that the Overlook had become a meeting place for organized crime figures. The column suggested that Prashkin, who owned large blocks of stock in Fun Time Automatic Machines among other holdings, may have been in charge of laundering money skimmed from Vegas casino operations and funneling it back into the organization's legitimate western operations, which now included the Overlook.

Significance

Fun Time Automatic Machines represents the intersection of legitimate commerce and organized crime that characterized the Overlook's most notorious period. The company's slot machines and jukeboxes were legal products, but the ownership structure that connected Scarne, Zeiss, and Prashkin to the same Las Vegas casinos where those machines operated created a pipeline for illicit funds. The scrapbook's documentation of this network was one of the discoveries that fueled Jack Torrance's obsession with the hotel's history and his ultimately destructive desire to write a book exposing its secrets. The company's appearance in the hotel's records underscores the theme that the Overlook was not merely a haunted building but a site where real-world corruption, violence, and criminal enterprise had left their marks alongside any supernatural residue.