Zorro in the Barrio

My senior project in Film School was a movie called Zorro in the Barrio, in which a modern-day Californian teen gets inspired by the legend and takes to the streets in a vigilante effort to rid his neighborhood of corruption. The Dons are gang leaders, and Zorro drives around in a lowrider Toronado, wielding a semiautomatic assault rifle. For a mask, he wears a multicolored bandana with eyeholes cut out. In the end of the movie, he dies, gang-banged in his warehouse hideout, having realized that it’s the external system of politics and welfare manipulation, White Flight and racism, that is the cause of his neighborhood’s misery, and the gangs are merely products of a hopeless subculture. But, in a teary monologue delivered in his beloved Maria’s arms, as he breathes his dying breaths, he wonders if this exonerates the gangs of their personal responsibility, and concludes that it doesn’t. The last shot of the film is of Maria, nuzzling Zorro’s bloody head between her breasts, screaming to the heavens for vengeance and justice.

I was naïve enough at the time to think that it was a startling, sobering, and unique commentary on social ills. In the insulated world of getting a BFA, I thought I was going to change the world. But as I showed the completed film around to the usual cast of friends and lovers, I could tell from their eyes that I hadn’t moved their hearts, I’d moved their stomachs, if not with the unmitigated gore of the film, then by its sanctimoniousness.

For a time, I tried to convince myself it was because of the quality of the acting. I’d imagined Lou Diamond Phillips as the outraged Zorro (né Jesús Rodriguez) and Rae Dawn Chong as his beloved Maria Sanchez. Instead, I’d gotten Hector Gonzalez, a struggling actor who waited tables at a Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood, and LaShae Wilkins, a barely literate classmate who bore a passing resemblance to Rae Dawn Chong. They were both hacks who slew the lines with the grace and panache of hashish-mad barbarians, making the final soliloquy a Dantesque nightmare.

But, watching the film in retrospect, I realized it was their poor acting that saved the film, rather than drowning it. Sitting through it, a few months later, I was reminded of the “Tragickal Mirth of Pyramis and Thisby,” only this time Bottom was still an ass even though he was performing for the King.

I realized that movie-making wasn’t about lasting social messages. That was pabulum that I’d picked up in film school, and before that, in high school composition courses. I remember a Kinks album called “Give the people what they want.” That phrase stuck in my head, more because I thought the Kinks were bragging about having sold out than because I agreed with the sentiment.

Years later, a soundbite stuck in my head, a sample from a Ministry track that ended, “Ain’t nothin’ but a show. Entertainment.”

What made Zorro in the Barrio worth watching was the Schadenfreude of watching these poor hacks attempt to pull off something which was obviously beyond them. Hell, it was beyond me, and there I was, trying to pull it off, too. Tortured Sanctimonius Artist I.

So I gave up on the artistic crap. Pardon my French, but as tragic as it was, that’s what it was. Unmitigated bullshit. People know about social ills. People don’t want to have it shoved in their faces.

Maybe that’s why the classics of literature aren’t appreciated during the authors’ lifetimes. People don’t want to read the misery they have to live. People don’t want to watch it.

People want Jerry Springer. People want victims who are worse off than them, who don’t even have the common decency to keep their punches and furniture throwing in the privacy of their own lives. They want to glory in the misbegotten lies and anger and rage of another’s misery.

People want larger-than-life heroes, angry at the universe and armed with the firepower to back it up. They don’t want Zorro in the Barrio, filled with angst-filled Shakespearean soliloquies, realizing that it’s a Greater Power who’s at fault, and failing as he stands up to it.

People want sex, but they don’t want to be told they want sex. They want hidden sex, a shot of a nipple in the shadows, maybe a hint of lace. They want to be reminded that sex is coarse and evil and disgusting. It makes them horny to be told they’re dirty. But they don’t want to know that, either.

People want escape.

Give the people what they want.

A few years out of film school, I wrote a script for another movie called Barrio Zorro. The title had a better ring in that order, I thought. This time, the lowly Jesús — a gas station attendant struggling to take care of his ailing mother and his six siblings — finds a magic cape that transforms him into the legendary Zorro. Again, he battles gang leaders, but this time with a whip and sword. He is mysteriously impervious to bullets, as are all Hollywood Good Guys.

Maria, the mistress of Carlos, the leader of the worst gang in town, falls in love with Zorro and leads him in the back way, just when Carlos is dealing the biggest coke deal the Barrio has ever seen. Zorro breaks it up, caging Carlos in a crate and making sure the evidence is visible when the police show up.

I envisioned Paul Rodriguez as Zorro, and Daisy Fuentes as Maria.

I thought about the script for a long time. It lay on my desk at home for months. I would stare at it, sometimes for hours, torn between a desire to be what my public wanted me to be and the unmitigated terror at having sold out.

At last, though, I mustered my energy enough to call a few of the contacts I had in the film industry. Through a series of phone calls and butt-kissing that I doubt I could easily reconstruct, the script wound up on a desk of a major executive at Paramount.

I remember the phone call. They liked the concept, they told me, but the execution wasn’t serious enough. Wild comedies weren’t moving well, and people wanted character-driven dramas.

I sold the concept, and they brought in the script writers to fix it up Paramount’s own way. They got Lou Diamond Philips to play Zorro, and Rae Dawn Chong to play Maria; they even got Edward James Olmos to play a much older and more dominating Carlos, and Christopher Walken as the major cocaine importer.

In their version, Jesús, disheartened by the tragedy in his neighborhood, becomes inspired by the legend of Zorro. Wielding a semi-assault rifle, he drives around the neighborhood in his lowrider Toronado. Wearing a multi-colored bandana as a symbol of unity, with eyeholes cut in it, he breaks up the gangs and ultimately confronts the drug lords that control the barrio. He dies tragically, having caused major damage to the stronghold that the drug lords have, delivering a heartfelt speech as he nuzzles Maria’s bosom.

The movie was a blockbuster, a surprise sleeper hit that exceeded even Paramount’s expectations. Friends still call me to congratulate me, and I have since signed several other movie contracts. My directorial debut, Tuesday Night, Rainy and Cold, is coming out next month.

So in the end, what’s the point? Did it all mean that I just wasn’t good enough to execute what I’d wanted in the first place? Did it mean that stories don’t sell, brand names do? Did it mean presentation is more important than substance?

Or did it just mean that life is just a handful of spaghetti thrown at the wall, and some of it sticks, and some of it doesn’t, and it’s impossible to tell what’s what?

I did learn one thing: I think too much.

1998