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.
WE’RE ABOUT TO DO SOMETHING you’ve never seen before,” chuckles director Cesar Alejandro one bright morning in El Paso. After he calls for acción, two gangster types come walking out of a mansion, one of them in control and dressed impeccably, the other a standard-issue goon. They talk heatedly in Spanish about wiping out a rival. The scene ends, and the camera shuts off for a few minutes. Then the scene is repeated, with another boss but the same goon—only in English.
For the next few weeks, Alejandro will continue shooting two similar but different movies in two different languages. Having made his name as an actor-director-producer of low-budget Spanish-language action films popular in Mexico and the Southwest, the 37-year-old is trying to ease into a larger field by going bilingual. He’s the only filmmaker in America working this way, and no matter what you say about his “enchilada westerns,” as one of his friends calls his flicks, they have the genuine flavor of the Tex-Mex border.
Alejandro’s latest project, Down for the Barrio (in Spanish, La Pistola Humeante, or “The Smoking Gun”), is his boldest attempt thus far at penetrating the American market. A cautionary tale about gang life, it is the first movie he’s shot on 35mm film rather than on video-quality 16mm. He had a bigger if still measly budget to work with—$350,000, mostly raised from investors, as opposed to his usual $70,000 to $90,000. And more money meant he could splurge on a real actor, Tony Plana (One Good Cop, Nixon), to supplement the usual cadre of friends who work for free, including Little Joe, the godfather of tejano music, and country singer Johnny Rodriguez. These improvements easily provide enough juice to make the film a Spanish-language hit, but Alejandro needs more than that: He needs English-language theatrical distribution. He hoped to get it in late February by entering Down for the Barrio at the American Film Market in Los Angeles, where he passed out two-minute promos. Ten distributors asked for copies of the movie, he says, and two are very interested, so right now he’s playing the waiting game. If nobody bites, he’ll distribute it himself—but perish the thought. “This one has such a good look,” he told me, “that I do not accept the possibility we will not be picked up.”
That’s Cesar Alejandro: smooth, cocky, ambitious, never-say-die. “Oh, he’s really a persistent guy,” says Jonathan King, the director of creative affairs for Miramax Films, one of the distributors Alejandro is wooing. “What he does now is comparable to what [B-movie legend] Roger Corman used to do, which is pump ’em out and work so much you get your technique down. The question becomes, Can you do any more than that? Francis Coppola and Jonathan Demme made movies for Corman and eventually had what it took to go farther, but a lot of others didn’t.”
So will Alejandro be the next Corman—or the next Ed Wood, the fifties cult director who was everyone’s favorite bad filmmaker, a guy who consistently took a lemon and made not lemonade but a bigger lemon? Time will tell, but two things are working in his favor. One is the rapid rise of Robert Rodriguez, the young Austinite who directed El Mariachi, a rousing, bigger-than-life homage to the Mexican action genre; its unimaginable success—it cost $7,000 to make and grossed more than $2 million—won him a multi-picture studio deal. Alejandro, who admires Rodriguez more for that accomplishment than for his art, could well capitalize on Hollywood’s tendency to clone box-office smashes on the cheap.
A second reason for Alejandro to be optimistic is that the days are nearly gone when white Tinseltown types were the creative forces behind minority films. Recent Hispanic movies like My Family, Mi Familia—which generated great buzz and modest profits—rely heavily on Hispanic talent behind the camera as well as in front. Alejandro figures that trend will make things easier for him. “I think the main selling point to the industry will be that it’s a movie written by Hispanics, directed by Hispanics, produced by Hispanics, and acted mostly by Hispanics.” Then there’s the message of Alejandro’s film. “This vicious cycle of ‘my brother was in a gang, my father was in a gang, I’ll be in a gang’ has to be stopped,” he says. “I think the theme of stopping it will attract a lot of Hispanic people.”
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