BANGOR (AP) – Construction workers are putting in six days a week as they rush to transform a former restaurant into an interim slot machine facility that Penn National Gaming intends to operate while building a $75 million gaming complex.

Since Penn National acquired the former Miller’s Restaurant, it has gutted the entire building while transforming it into Hollywood Slots.

“We’re on schedule for a November opening,” Jon Johnson, general manager of Penn National’s Bangor operations, said Thursday.

Penn will invest $17 million in its temporary facilities, which eventually will be replaced by a larger facility at or near city-owned Bass Park. The interim facility will house the first 475 of the 1,500 slot machines Penn is authorized to operate in Bangor, the only municipality in Maine that provided the necessary local approval.

A new sign and marquee has been erected and interior walls are being put up to create gaming, surveillance, office, kitchen, bar and other spaces.

Nearly six miles of cable will be installed to serve slot machines, more than 100 surveillance cameras, computers and other electronic equipment.

The theme, as the name implies, is Hollywood memorabilia.

Penn holds a large collection of movie memorabilia, with items ranging from Cat Woman’s suit, a Batman car, the airplane from the Hitchcock flick “North by Northwest,” a car used in an Elvis Presley film and Dorothy’s red slippers from the Wizard of Oz.

The items came with Penn’s 2002 acquisition of Hollywood Casino Corp., a group of casinos in Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana.

“It’s an interesting theme that is easily transferable to other properties,” Johnson said. “And it’s cool.”

The bulk of the slot machines, about 375 of them, will be set up on the upper level, which also will house a bar service area, offices for Penn’s managers and staff from the state’s gambling control unit, and the vestibule, the only public entrance.

The vestibule, Johnson said, will be where the ATMs will be located and where security workers will screen any minors, intoxicated people or people who are placed, or place themselves, on the exclusion list.

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Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangornews.com

AP-ES-08-12-05 1033EDT