Posted on 09/07/2003 1:54:21 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
The first time Joshua Maurer read in a musty history book that Pancho Villa sold Hollywood the movie rights to the Mexican Revolution -- that camera crews traveled along with Villa's troops and that Villa didn't start attacks until a director yelled ''Action!'' -- he said to himself: ''What a great story! This can't be true.''
He did more research, then went to HBO to pitch a movie. This'll be great, he told the executives. Villa signed a contract saying he wouldn't fight at night, when the cameras didn't work -- he let the studio costumers dress his men in old Confederate uniforms -- hired hookers to play their wives. The HBO executives exclaimed: ''This is a great story, Josh! But we don't believe it.''
It wasn't until Maurer dropped everything to become a full-time history detective that the research on this bizarre and little-known chapter of history turned into And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself, which debuts on HBO tonight at 9:30.
''As we got into it, it became obvious that the story was richer and deeper and more complicated than any of us could have imagined,'' says Maurer, one of the movie's three executive producers.
Though Villa's deal with Hollywood was well-known at the time -- many editorial pages ran withering cartoons of directors surrounded by chaos and carnage screaming ''Cut! I'm out of film!'' -- it was almost completely forgotten before Maurer began his research. (A 1,000-page biography of Villa published in 1998 devotes scarcely a page to it.)
Maurer spent five years going through old newspapers, tracking down obscure memoirs by cameramen and other technicians, and translating doctoral theses from French and Spanish. He even found the original contract between Villa and a Hollywood studio at a museum in Mexico City. The story he uncovered is so unbelievable that he takes a 500-page loose-leaf notebook full of documentation along on interviews.
In the end, though, his research was good enough to persuade HBO to spend about $30 million (a good chunk of it to entice Antonio Banderas to play the bandit-revolutionary Villa), making it the most expensive movie in HBO history.
But for the money, HBO got something more than a peculiar historical asterisk. Villa's waltz with Hollywood resonates 100 years later in a world of reality television, embedded reporters and bold-as-brass political spinmasters.
''We're dealing with the idea of war as theater,'' Maurer observes. ''What is reality, what is illusion. Film as ultimate arbiter of imagery and reality . . . The manipulation of that imagery is what our movie is about.''
FIRST BLOCKBUSTER?
Villa, a nearly illiterate peasant whose most passionate objective for the Mexican Revolution was to ban foreign investment in his country, seems an unlikely candidate as the father of modern propaganda. ''But it was Pancho who made the offer to Hollywood, not Hollywood to Pancho,'' Maurer says.
In late 1913, in the middle of the revolution, Villa -- the most successful of several generals battling the dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta -- was in difficult straits.
Not only was he broke, but the American press (led by the Hearst newspapers) was portraying him, not entirely without reason, as an economic radical with a vicious temper, making it hard to raise money. And all this at a time when a U.S. arms embargo on Mexico was forcing him to pay exorbitant black-market prices for guns.
Forging a path that countless soldier-celebrities from Norman Schwartzkopf to Jessica Lynch would follow over the next century, Villa shopped a deal to Hollywood's fledgling silent-movie industry: For $25,000 and 20 percent of the profits (points! Pancho Villa invented points!), a studio could buy the exclusive rights to travel with his soldiers and film their attacks.
It was a stunning concept. Movies were thought of as entertainment, not journalism, and no one had ever filmed actual combat before. But a young Hollywood director named D.W. Griffith, who hadn't yet shot the epic films like Birth of a Nation that would make him famous, saw the potential.
''Griffith was trying to reinvent cinema, literally, with everything from new lenses to different editing techniques,'' Maurer says. ''And he saw this had the power to be the first blockbuster. Instead of actors and fake blood, you could see real people actually dying!''
Not to mention the star appeal of Villa himself, a military genius who loved ice cream and women (he had dozens of wives, scores of children) but was also prone to raging bloodlust and psychotic tantrums -- he not only executed prisoners, but, sometimes, their wives.
''He was good copy,'' Maurer says simply.
Griffith persuaded his partner in the Mutual Films studio, Harry Aitken, to send a team to Mexico to seal the deal. Villa was so excited to see them that he stopped his troops in mid-battle so he could negotiate. The documentary that resulted was a critical and financial flop. The finished film has been lost, but Maurer found the unedited footage at the Library of Congress.
''It was hard to look at,'' he says. ''It was dark and blurry -- a lot of the fighting took place at night, and there was no way to light it.''
The other problem is that Pancho became a complete ham when the cameras turned his way. 'The term you read in a lot of the reviews is 'lens louse,' '' Maurer says. ''He just turned goofy on camera. There's no other word for it.''
DOCUDRAMA
The result: A second contract.
This time, Villa promised to fight only when the sun was out and the director said his crew was ready. To counteract criticism that Villa's guerrilla army, with its rag-tag clothing and bare feet, didn't look martial enough, Mutual Films provided the general's men with surplus Confederate uniforms -- and strongly advised him to buy some heavy artillery that would look properly menacing on camera.
The second film, The Life of General Villa, was the first docudrama. Genuine battle footage was intercut with staged biographical scenes. At seven reels (about an hour and 45 minutes), it was more than three times as long as the average movie of its day.
''The second movie was a huge critical success and very popular,'' Maurer says. ''But it opened in May 1914, and three months later World War I broke out. Everybody in the United States forgot about Mexico and Pancho Villa.''
Villa would remind them two years later when he began targeting Americans. After he crossed the border and killed 17 people in a bloody raid on Columbus, N.M. -- an attack that brought the U.S. Army across the border in pursuit -- Mutual reshot some scenes of General Villa and re-edited others to produce a third film, The Outlaw's Revenge in which Villa was the villain rather than the hero. Like the first two Villa movies, it has been lost to time.
''I've heard that it played in theaters in the Mexican-American neighborhoods of Los Angeles every Cinco de Mayo for years and years,'' Maurer reports. ''But I couldn't find it anywhere, much as I tried. It's a safe bet, though, that Pancho didn't like that one. And that he didn't get paid, either.''
Um....Actually I've known about this Hollywood Deal that Pancho Villa had for years. However, I could understand how historians would ignore it. This interferes with their vision of Villa as some sort of revolutionary hero instead of a glorified self-serving horse thief. However, I will definitely be watching this movie tonight since I enjoy all movies about Pancho Villa. Yul Brynner starred as Pancho Villa in one movie. It wasn't very accurate but it was fun to watch. Antonio Banderas will need to put on some weight to better portray the paunchy Pancho. If D.W. Griffith is portrayed in this movie, it will be the second such portrayal I've seen of that director. The other movie portraying Griffith was Babylon which was really terrific.
I was also in a Mexican restaurant where the walls were covered with pics of Pancho Villa and other scenes of the Mexican Revolution. My reaction was different. I actually enjoyed looking at those photos. One reason is that the Mexican Revolution was an extension of the Old West. Although the Old West in the USA was over by 1895, it kept on going in Mexico for at least another 20 years. One reason was that Mexico was rather undeveloped compared to the USA. In Villa's time there were still few cars and little electricity outside the big cities. Also the Mexican Revolution kept Mexico in a state of anarchy where there was little law and order. Note that The Wild Bunch movie took place in Mexico during their Revolution. The Old West was long gone in the USA back then but it lived on in Mexico. As to Villa's crimes, it was so long ago that I really don't get too worked up over them. I just enjoy movies about Villa so I am looking forward to tonight's movie.
I think that was the one where Yul Brynner portrayed Pancho Villa. However, it was a MOVIE. I don't think that ever happened although Villa was certainly no angel. However, as I said, Villa was so far in the past that I get no more worked up over his crimes than I do that of Jesse James. Don't tell me you're still outraged at Jesse James' robberies?
I do believe that's incorrect. He had dozens of women and may have had scores of children but it has long been held that he married only one. She still lived in Chihuahua in the late sixties and had a museum in her big home which included the bullet riddled Dodge. My mom still has a photo of our family with Luz Corral, Villa's "official" wife. I found this site about her and the museum. It says she died in 1981. She was a nice old lady in '67 or '69, I forget which trip to Mexico we went there.
Here's a picture of Pancho you don't often see. It's displayed twice as big at the source which is from a
site that sells posters of Pancho and Zapata.
Just after midnight on June 14–15, 1919, some 1,200 Villistas attacked the Carrancista garrison at Juárez. By the next night, stray shots from the battle had killed and wounded some Americans in next-door El Paso, Texas. Brigadier General James B. Erwin, in command at Fort Bliss, Texas, decided to cross the border and disperse the Villistas. His artillery bombarded the Juárez racetrack, where the Villistas were concentrated, killing many of them. Then Colonel S.R.H. "Tommy" Tompkins--older brother of Major Frank Tompkins and himself a veteran of the Punitive Expedition--led the 2nd Cavalry Brigade (composed of units from the 7th and 5th Cavalry Regiments) across the Rio Grande just south of Juárez. At the same time, infantrymen from the 24th Infantry Regiment poured into Juárez across the Santa Fe Street bridge. Caught in a pincer movement, the Villistas "scattered like quail," in Tompkins's words. The U.S. troops immediately returned to American soil.
I've seen a lot of Mexicans who have that Pancho Villa look.
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