El Mariachi: Original intent

I wouldn't do that.

I haven't seen it in almost 30 years. I was sitting in a writing group at the senior center. I mentioned it in something I wrote. A guy in his 80's who had lived in Mexico in the 1950's said he thought it was a stupid movie. Every time the guy went outside, people tried to kill him. Why didn't he stay in his room?

I looked back on here and found that I've brought the movie up over and over on this blog saying pretty much the same things about it each time.

The thing about it is that if you mention it, people will think you're talking about making a movie for a few thousand dollars that would be picked up by a major studio and rake in a fortune. I never thought that way. There's no hope at all of that happening now. I look at Robert Rodriguez's original intent which was to sell it to a Spanish language home video company and make a few thousand dollars profit. I don't understand why that idea is so unappealing to film schoolers.

Seems like something you could do before hitting it big. At least you'd have a few thousand dollars to wave in your parents' face and say "I told you so!"

I've been around film school graduates. One worked in a pizza place. The others were unemployed. One did quite a bit of legwork in vain hope of becoming a box boy.

One had never had a job of any kind. I told him to put his student films on his resume as work experience. Emphasize scheduling and being responsible for expensive equipment. He didn't listen.

I hipped them to a job in a related field. TV stations need studio camera operators for the local news. It's a bad job. It pays minimum wage and you work a split shift. You come in for the evening news, go home and come back for the 11 o'clock news. But that's good because they have a very high turnover and it's an easy job to get. If you need to, you can get experience at the community access station. It's a question of knowing which cables to connect.

I don't know if you could parlay that into a better job at the station, like becoming an editor. We'll never know because none of them went for it.

You bring up El Mariachi and they always say the same thing: That the studio put extra money into it. They think they're debunking it. Columbia pictures put $200 thousand into remixing the sound and making a transfer to film. It was shot on 16mm then digitized and edited on computer. As far as I know, no 16mm print of the final film existed.

I don't know what it tells you that they bring THAT up but say nothing about the millions they had to have spent on publicity and advertising.