Film
Sibling Revelry
Austin film-maker Robert Rodriguez’s home movies of his brothers and sisters took him all the way to Hollywood.
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Rodriquez was determined to do his first film project right, and he knew that would require money, even if his siblings were willing to act without pay. So the summer before he entered the program, Rodriguez signed up to participate in a pharmaceutical-testing study at an Austin-based laboratory and earn some cash. Two thousand dollars richer when school began, Rodriguez set out to familiarize himself with the three-lens 16mm camera that film students use to shoot their first-year projects. He designed the movie to take advantage of the camera’s light weight and maneuverability, using strange angles and rushing in on his younger brother David and his sisters, as if the camera were flying around the house and yard.
Rodriguez titled the result of the semester’s work Bedhead. Co-written with David, Bedhead adds yet another twist to the little-sister-takes-on-elder-brother theme. This time the girl gains telekinetic powers. Aided by another inspired sound track, the film races along. Most first-year projects have twenty to thirty edits; Bedhead has more than two hundred. The opening, an animated sequence, required some three hundred drawings. Rodriguez continued to fine-tune Bedhead during the winter.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez’s friend Gallardo had shown some of their short action films to a video distributor in Mexico. The distributor encouraged them to make a Spanish-language feature in Mexico. Working from the distributor’s assurances, they calculated that they could make $20,000. The two were confident they could blow away anything else on the market.
By budgeting carefully, they figured, they could shoot an action feature in Mexico in two weeks during the summer for about $9,000. To get the money together, Gallardo sold some land and Rodriguez signed on with the drug-testing lab to earn $3,000. Before Rodriguez checked in at the lab, the two made a list of what they had in the way of assets. “We had a pit bull that was Carlos’,” says Rodriguez. “We had a motorcycle. We had a school bus that his cousin was lending us. We had a jail, two bars, and a ranch. So I wrote the script during the lab study, came out of there with not only a script but my actor for the bad guy.” Rodriguez hired Peter Marquardt, who slept in the bed next to his. “Then we just went down there and shot it.”
El Mariachi was a blast to make. Stretched a little thin over ninety minutes (it had to be that long to be released on tape), the extremely bloody story involves two warring drug lords and a wandering musician (the mariachi) who gets caught in the middle. Also prominent are a pit bull, a school bus, a motorcycle, a jail, two bars, and a ranch.
It was an easy shoot. At lunchtime they would go to Carlos’ house, where his mother would spread out a feast. Evenings, they were free. The film came in $2,000 under budget.
In December 1991, while visiting Los Angeles, Rodriguez dropped off Bedhead and an El Mariachi trailer—a stylish rhythmic montage of quick shots from the movie—for agent Robert Newman, the director of special projects at International Creative Management. Rodriguez didn’t know Newman, but he had seen his name on the schedule of speakers for the Texas Film Alliance’s aborted celebration on behalf of the Texas Film Commission’s twentieth anniversary and figured he might be sympathetic to a young Hispanic filmmaker.
Newman was impressed. “It’s fantastic; I want to work with you,” he said, and he offered Rodriguez a one-year agency contract. After Rodriguez finished editing El Mariachi, Newman sent copies of the film to all the studios, with his endorsement that it was the best thing he had seen in a long while. Within two weeks the calls started coming in. Paramount, Columbia, TriStar, and Walt Disney Studios all expressed interest. But true to Hollywood form, some studios were leery. One executive loved the movie but wanted to fiddle with the concept a little. “Could we make it less ethnic?” he asked. “How about if, instead of a mariachi, the lead was a rock guitar player in the U.S. who gets wounded and taken to an Indian reservation, where an old mentor nurses him back to health and teaches him to play?”
Luckily, executives at other studios liked the film just the way it was. One of those was Columbia’s Stephanie Allain, who worked with Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton. Not only was Columbia interested in a big-budget remake of El Mariachi, but when Rodriguez pitched four additional ideas, Columbia was receptive to all of them.
In every way, Rodriguez’s timing has been right. Over the past few years, Hollywood has awakened to the viability of the ethnic market, and black directors such as Singleton, Bill Duke, and Spike Lee have become hot both commercially and critically. If Rodriguez’s case is an indication of a trend, it may be a good time for young Hispanic directors. El Mariachi is both ethnic enough to appeal to the untapped Hispanic market and enough of a dead-ahead adventure to cross over into the mainstream market.
Many promising independent filmmakers have been lured to the big leagues and have never been heard from again, either lost in the power maze—because they didn’t have the talent, the skills, or the stamina—or lost to drug and alcohol abuse. It is hard for young directors to survive the process, to focus on which films they really want to make, which is what Warren Skaaren meant two years before: In Hollywood the hardest thing is to remember who you are. Rodriguez says that John Singleton advised him, “Trust yourself, follow your heart. Don’t let the studios water down your ideas.” That’s easy to say but more difficult to do. The demands, the negotiations, and the considerations—all the noise and clutter involved in getting a film made—make it difficult to stay focused.
But Rodriguez is confident that his voice will prevail. Aside from his cinematic skills, he has shown a commonsensical approach to blending the creative with the commercial. He took his lifelong obsession with drawing and turned it into a successful college-newspaper comic strip. He designed Bedhead to win prizes, and it did. He made El Mariachi to sell it, and he has. If El Mariachi enjoys some measure of financial and critical success, Rodriguez should have the muscle to continue filmmaking on his terms.
Rodriguez also has a secret weapon, his family, to remind him not only of where he has come from but also of where he should be going. Only two years after he edited together three home movies starring his brothers and sisters for a local film contest, Rodriguez is at work on one of the ideas he pitched to the studio: Robert Rodriguez wants to do a film or TV series about ten kids growing up in a Hispanic family. And Columbia is very interested.
Louis Black is the editor of the Austin Chronicle.
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