Film
To B or Not to B?
That is the question for El Paso director Cesar Alejandro, whose low-budget action flicks haven’t made him a hit in Hollywood—not yet, anyway.
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Alejandro never meant for the action market to be more than a stepping stone. In America today, B-movies rarely even get theatrical releases; they typically go straight to video and only earn money in the long haul. And in Mexico they’re even less of a prestige item. They first surfaced there in the early seventies, when the Mexican middle class deserted the national cinema in favor of American productions. The cheap videohomes, as they’re called, were and still are the only homegrown movies able to turn a profit (though they’ve been hurt recently by the peso devaluation and bootleggers who duplicate the films and distribute them illegally). Yet since most scenes are done in one take, they can be so amateurish that they’re unintentionally funny. With little money for special effects, the “action” is often implied as much as it’s actually executed. The plots typically involve drug running, gang activity, police shoot-outs, illegal-alien bashing, and weapons smuggling—sometimes all at once—with enough clothed sexuality to make them simultaneously chaste and lurid. Nobody watches them except the Spanish-speaking working class on both sides of the border. “They’re important for the way they reflect contemporary Mexican culture,” notes Carl J. Mora, the author of Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896—1988, “but they’re pretty schlocky.”
Exactly. Seen in the U.S. on the Telemundo and Univision Spanish-language TV networks as well as on video, they’re definitely an acquired taste. I enjoy them because, like The Trip and other Corman films of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, they’re absolutely up-to-date in their references to pop culture and social and political issues. After all, they’re shot in two weeks, so they can respond quickly to current trends and events.
While Alejandro’s movies can be sluggishly paced, his sharp visual sense ranks him among the best of the B bunch. He’s also a gifted actor with an uncanny ability to look different in each movie. But the main reason he has made a name for himself may be that he’s the only American (albeit a naturalized citizen) with a track record in the genre. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, to a meat-packer father who resented his son’s decision to enter the arts rather than take over the family business. As a teen, Cesar went to Mexico’s national poetry-reading championships twice, studied acting, and won some minor TV roles. In 1981 he moved to El Paso, where he served four and a half years in the U.S. Army so he could learn English.
After taking more acting classes and working in small stage productions in El Paso, he moved to New York City. In 1989 he signed a recording contract with a Mexico City label and returned to Texas so he’d have quick access to both sides of the border. But the deal went sour, and Alejandro ended up stranded in El Paso with his wife, Laura Rojo De Zamora, and their three young kids. Broke and dejected, he accepted a part in his first videohome in 1990. Five films later, he began producing the movies, then directing them. In 1992 he and Laura formed their own film company, Peliculas Alexandria (Alexandria Films). “My name as an actor was so bankable in that market,” he says, “that I could ask distributors for advances to shoot the movies.”
In 1994, with an eye to bigger things, Alejandro released his first film in both Spanish and English, Loteria Mortal/Fatal Lottery. But the turning point came the next year with Ranger III: 187 Ley de la Muerte/187 Deadly Law, a film inspired by the controversial California statute that refuses social services to illegal immigrants. The English-language version, which starred Little Joe in his film debut as the bandito out to kill the politician sponsoring the law and Alejandro as the Texas Ranger who must protect him, stressed the politics; the Spanish cut emphasized the fast, violent action. That plot dichotomy, which is now a staple of Alejandro’s bilingual films, was designed to please Mexican distributors who complained that he wasn’t offering enough sex, drugs, and violence, and it has worked better than he could have imagined: Since he has gone bilingual, the revenues generated by his films have increased by 30 percent. His English-language distributor, selling his videos country by country, brings in an average of $60,000 per film, while his Spanish-language distributor collects another $25,000 or so in Mexico and the U.S.
This time around, as Alejandro attempts his biggest crossover with Down for the Barrio, the Spanish-language audience is less important. That’s why he shot the Spanish scenes first—they served as a “rehearsal” for cast and crew before doing the English-language version. “This is not an action movie, but a drama with action,” he insists. Yet whatever it is, it’s still as much an example of filmmaking-on-the-run as any of Alejandro’s past efforts. Take his set and casting decisions. The west El Paso mansion occupied in the movie by Mr. D, whose drugs the gang members distribute, belongs to Puerto Rican psychiatrist and sometime salsa singer Marcelo Rodriguez Chevres; after talking Rodriguez Chevres into letting him use it, he cast him as the Spanish-language Mr. D—and got use of his Dodge Viper RT10 as well. Likewise, when the Hispanic actress playing one of Mr. D’s molls had to go downtown to appear in court, Alejandro simply replaced her with the Anglo moll. Some of the Anglo actors who appear in the Spanish version can’t even speak the language; they recited their lines phonetically. And when certified stars Willie Nelson and Elizabeth Pena told Alejandro at the last minute that they couldn’t join the cast, he shrank their parts and gave them to two novices.
It ain’t Hollywood, but no matter. “This business is like the lottery; to win you have to keep hoping,” Alejandro explains. “You do that every time you buy a lottery ticket. When we work at this, it’s like we’re buying more tickets. I’m doing the most I can with very little money. What really counts is tenacity. If you don’t have that much talent or budget, but you are willing to stick by it and keep getting better at what you do . . .” It’s hard to tell from his border movies what he might do with a real budget, but Cesar Alejandro dreams the dream as sincerely as anyone. And if he gets lucky, he can say he did it the hard way.
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