Tuesday, June 29, 2004 | 8:04 a.m.
There's the maid who chopped cotton in Louisiana before moving to Las Vegas and going to work at the Algiers, praising the lord for earning $8 a day "to work in the shade."
And the female pilot who became vice president of Bonanza Airlines in the 1950s and was mistaken for a secretary when she attended an all-male meeting of airline executives.
The lifelong resident who builds motorcycles, the bell captain who was a favorite of the Rat Pack, a former showgirl in "Lido de Paris" and dozens of other Las Vegans take their turn in front of the camera for documentary filmmaker Lynn Zook.
They join a host of entertainers, political figures and business leaders who are helping Zook create a video tapestry that, when completed, she says will show Las Vegas for what it is, not what the world believes it to be.
"We started off interviewing people my parents knew, and it snowballed," Zook, a former Las Vegan who now lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif., said. "Everybody knows somebody.
"We are talking to everyday working men and women as well as those who are well known. We wanted to get a diverse swath of the community."
And so former cotton chopper Lucille Bryant tells her story right along with Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt, legendary saxophonist Sam Butera and numerous other celebrities.
"Everybody we are interviewing has been gracious about supplying us with old home movies, old family photographs," Zook said.
More than 120 will have been interviewed for the camera before the shooting is completed by the end of the year, ready in time for the 100th anniversary celebration of Las Vegas in 2005.
"I like the stories of regular guys, like Lou Pearl, a bell captain at the Sands who had a special friendship with Dean Martin," said Zook, who commutes to Vegas every few months to conduct interviews.
Pearl is the brother of well-known boxing referee Davey Pearl, who founded Davey's Locker, a bar at 1149 E. Desert Inn Road.
"This is a social history of Las Vegas," Zook said. "One of the things we have discovered is that there are these common experiences that occur in each generation that enable us to weave a common thread together to tell the story of Las Vegas and how the town has changed over the years."
Zook has been working on the project for two years. She says the Las Vegas Centennial Committee has given them a cold shoulder.
"They can't get behind us and endorse us because they apparently have an exclusive deal with PBS," Zook said. "That's too bad, because there are a lot of great local stories to be told.
"But these are more than local stories, they are American stories. Las Vegas is the last truly American West story -- the little town that should have dried up half a dozen times persevered to become a metropolis."
She says the cost is about $800,000, money that is being raised through donations, sponsorships and other sources.
Zook is constantly on the lookout for funds, a pursuit that she said can be frustrating.
"We've talked to several casino directors, but they don't think anyone outside of Vegas will care about the centennial," she said.
Eventually, 400 hours of interviews will have to be edited down to about 10 hours, which is the task of Jesse Bushyhead, a former producer for Maria Shriver.
"He will cut to the heart of the story," Zook said.
Zook says there actually will be four documentaries -- the main one, "As We Knew It: The Story of Classic Las Vegas," will be a four-hour production in two parts.
The others will include "The Women of Las Vegas," "Appearing Nitely" and "Lost Vegas," each running about 90 minutes.
"The Women of Las Vegas" will feature interviews with women who have helped shaped the city, including Las Vegas Sun Publisher Barbara Greenspun, University Regent Thalia Dondero and former Bonanza Airlines Vice President Florence Murphy.
"They were, and are, leaders of the community," Zook said, "kind of a microcosm of what was going on with women across the country."
"Appearing Nitely" is an informal history of Las Vegas lounges, showrooms and entertainment in general; "Lost Vegas" looks at the neon and architectural history of the city.
"We're putting it all into perspective," Zook said, "what the signage and the buildings mean as part of the culture."
The tapes will be sold as a boxed set and, Zook said, are to be broadcast on cable TV. She said they are negotiating with several cable networks.
Zook said she decided to produce the documentary after years of talking back to television programs that continually get their facts about Las Vegas wrong.
"My husband got tired of me yelling at the TV set," she said.
Zook is well acquainted with Las Vegas.
Born in Battle Creek, Mich., she was 4 when her mother, Laura, moved to Vegas in 1961 following a divorce.
"Mom was 21," Zook said. "She didn't see much of a future in being a waitress in Battle Creek. She heard about the opportunities in Vegas, packed up the car, came here, joined the Culinary Union and within days had a job as a waitress downtown."
Laura married Daniel Zook, a keno runner.
"She worked her way up to the Strip, becoming a showroom waitress at Caesars Palace when it opened in '66. She did that until she got into real estate in the '70s," Zook said.
Zook said the population of the Vegas Valley was about 50,000 when she moved here.
"There was a lot of open space," she said. "The activity was concentrated downtown."
In '64 the family moved to the Charleston Heights area.
"The city had just started its expansion westward," Zook said, recalling that the street in front of her house wasn't paved.
Zook said growing up in Las Vegas didn't seem so different from anywhere else.
"Only when I went away to school did I find out that people looked at us differently," she said. "They thought everyone lived in hotels."
Of course, her mother frequently brought home autographs from work -- Elvis, Fats Domino and others.
"It wasn't unusual to walk through a hotel and see celebrities," Zook said. "That was just part of everyday life."
In '69 the family saw Elvis at the International when he began his comeback engagement at the hotel.
"That was a big deal," she said. "Everybody got dressed up for that."
Zook spent a lot of time in movie theaters during the long, hot summers. That's when she fell in love with the whole idea of filmmaking. After graduating from Clark High School in 1975 she attended the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for two years and then went to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she majored in film.
Zook worked on a few low-budget projects before going to work for a company that made educational films for schools. After 15 years she joined a company that rented film and editing equipment.
"Then producing this documentary became a full-time job," Zook said.
She wants the film to dispel a lot of myths.
"The favorite is that Bugsy Siegel started Las Vegas," Zook said. "The town had a lot of history before 1946.
"Those we interview are telling stories that the general public doesn't know. Those stories are the real history."
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