June 9, 2005 | Read Time: 3 minutes
For a tax lawyer and someone who has spent much of his time the past few years reading, analyzing, and
discussing complex legal issues while overseeing the Senate Finance Committee’s examination of charities and foundations, Dean A. Zerbe has an unusually creative background that continues to influence his work.
Trained as a concert pianist from age 6, Mr. Zerbe, 40, plays Gershwin and Mozart with the emotional subtlety of a seasoned professional. A lifelong lover of music, film, and the arts, he keeps a massive French Art Deco painting hanging in his kitchen and has a collection of dozens of art books.
Raised in a home where music was encouraged (his brother is a former professional music conductor), Mr. Zerbe took to the piano quickly. He practiced six hours a day through much of his childhood, was putting on polished solo performances with youth symphonies by age 9, and got his general equivalency diploma at 15, intending to enroll at the Juilliard School.
But a hand injury made it too painful for him to practice the instrument and forced him to rethink his professional ambitions. Instead, he put himself through film school at New York University in part by playing piano in jazz bars in New York City. One of his classmates was the movie director Spike Lee.
Las Vegas Weddings
After film school Mr. Zerbe worked as a legislative aide in the U.S. House of Representatives, which whet his appetite for Congressional investigations and persuaded him to later go to law school. But his desire to make a movie remained strong.
In the late 1990s, while practicing law in Reno, Nev., Mr. Zerbe produced a documentary film about people who get married in offbeat wedding chapels in Las Vegas.
The movie, called Vegas Wedding, is at turns quirky, humorous, and touching, focusing on what happens in a short time at four of the hundreds of wedding chapels in Las Vegas, where thousands of people get married every year.
It’s easy to get married in Las Vegas — it costs as little as $50, the city’s marriage-license office is open 24 hours a day on weekends, and people exchange vows not only in tacky chapels but also at drive-up windows from the front seats of their cars, Mr. Zerbe’s movie shows.
One of the more moving moments in the movie occurs when a Samoan couple get married in the back seat of a limousine. In another scene, a couple that have dated for more than 40 years make their way to an imitation altar, where the soon-to-be bride breaks down crying while saying her vows.
But the movie also has plenty of levity — something Mr. Zerbe is known for in his work on Capitol Hill. At holiday parties for Senate staff members, he puts on skits to make fun of colleagues. He has also gotten Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the chairman of the Finance Committee, to use props during Senate hearings to lighten the mood and attract news-media attention at serious but sometimes dull proceedings.
In his movie, Mr. Zerbe’s camera is drawn to the many Elvis Presley impersonators who perform in the background during Vegas wedding ceremonies. Presley got married in Las Vegas, and many of his fans head to the city to follow in his steps.
In one of the film’s moments of which Mr. Zerbe is proudest, a woman who organizes weddings hangs up a phone and, with a straight face, says: “Elvis is stuck in customs.”
“You can’t even make up dialogue that good,” Mr. Zerbe says, laughing. A later scene in the film begins with a screen that says, “Elvis has entered the chapel.”
Although Mr. Zerbe says he is too busy with Finance Committee work to make another movie right now, he has not closed the door on producing films. The man known for his many suggestions for improving charity governance has no shortage of film ideas either. His latest: He wants to return to Nevada someday to make a documentary about a cowboy poetry festival.
