Filming Pancho

How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution

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by Margarita de Orellana,

Translated by John King

Verso

Due/Published November 2003, 240 pages, paper

ISBN 1859843484

On 3 January 1914 Pancho Villa became Hollywood's first Mexican superstar when he signed an exclusive contract with the Mutual Film Corporation. In return for $25,000, Villa agreed to keep other film companies from his battlefield, to fight in daylight wherever possible, and reconstruct battles if the footage needed reshooting.

Villa is one of the main protagonists in Margarita de Orellana's account of the American movie industry's fascination with the events of the Mexican Revolution. Through memoir and newspaper reports, she charts the progress of the documentary film-makers who went down to cover events in Mexico: some, who learned their craft in the heat of these battles, became the leading newsreel cameramen of the First World War. Feature film-makers in Hollywood also created or developed a series of stereotypes of the Mexican between 1911 and 1917--the greaser, the bandit, the beautiful señorita, the exotic Aztec--and portrayed the border as the dividing line between order and chaos.

De Orellana's work reveals much about how Mexico was constructed in the American imagination and how the film images reinforced and justified American expansionism as well as racial and social prejudice.