A wild ride into revisionism

It was nearly 90 years ago, in the formative years of cinema, when a film crew from the then movie capital of Fort Lee, N.J., descended on a tiny, war-torn Mexican border town. They were there to capture the star power of revolutionary general Pancho Villa, shooting battle scenes that were choreographed with the full and richly compensated cooperation of the leader himself.

Called “The Life of General Villa,” the 1914 movie made history as the first to get live battle scenes on film -- and for setting a Hollywood precedent in manipulating events and people to heighten dramatic effect. The movie has been lost for decades -- but it has remained an object of fascination among historians and film buffs.

Now Hollywood has returned to film a movie titled “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself” about the making of the 1914 movie, only this time with Antonio Banderas in the title role and Bruce Beresford directing a Larry Gelbart script on a $23-million budget, the most HBO has ever spent on one of its made-for-cable TV movies.

The Gelbart script focuses on mutual manipulation and its modern echo: how Villa and the Mutual Film Co. used each other for their own ends and how history got tweaked as a result. Mutual got its movie and Villa projected his image as Mexico’s Robin Hood to U.S. audiences.

It’s the script’s “movie within a movie” and the 1914 film’s blurring of entertainment and reality that drew both Banderas and Beresford into the project, each saying they wouldn’t have been interested had it been just another film biography.

In fact, Banderas’ original plan for when “Pancho Villa” was in production last fall was to be rehearsing for his Broadway debut in the Broadway musical “Nine,” preparation for which he had cleared four months off his schedule. But the Gelbart script made him “destroy that plan”; he found other time to rehearse, since he remains in that role, which earned him a Tony Award nomination this year.

“I read it, read it again, and I knew I had to take it,” says jeans- and sweatshirt-clad Banderas, interviewed at a San Luis Potosi hotel last November on a day off from filming. His participation made HBO’s day: Without Banderas’ star power, the Villa movie’s chances of going forward were slight, producers admit. It premieres on HBO Sept. 7.

Like an invading army, the production with its phalanx of caterers, costumers, battlefield extras and technicians took over this little town and its 18th century hacienda an hour’s drive southwest of San Luis Potosi. Outdoor scenes, including revolutionary battles, were shot here and at historic locations in and around nearby San Miguel de Allende.

The movie amounts to a high-stakes gamble because of the tricky theme and the historical sensitivities involved in any movie about Villa, a highly polarizing character here. He was at once a brilliant military tactician, a murderous bandit, an insatiable womanizer and a revered champion of the poor. The movie’s principals are prepared to be second-guessed.

The trim, athletic Banderas is ready for some flak, at least in his physical portrayal, making no attempt to resemble the roly-poly Villa.

“Some people say I don’t look like Pancho, he was fatter than you, stuff like that. But we’re not trying to make a wax museum version. We are trying to describe the personality of this man relating to the very special event of shooting a movie and how it affected him,” Banderas says.

A little controversy wouldn’t bother HBO, which is hoping that the Banderas-Beresford-Gelbart troika produces international buzz. Flush with expanding revenue from video, DVD and, sometimes, theatrical releases of their productions, cable TV companies like HBO, TNT and Showtime are wagering greater and greater sums on marquee names that a decade ago were seen only in theatrical films. In fact, HBO spent $125 million on Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s mega-miniseries “Band of Brothers.”

The movie was shot in such a way that it can be shown on the almost square TV image as well as the more rectangular theatrical format, just in case. Banderas’ deal with HBO includes the rights to distribute the movie to theaters in Spain and Italy.

NEWSREEL STAR

These days, Villa is remembered primarily for his audacious invasion of Columbus, N.M., in 1916, the first foreign incursion into the United States in a century. What’s been forgotten is that in the early years of the Mexican Revolution that started in 1910, Villa was immensely popular as a star in U.S. newsreels.

Villa was a bandit in the border state of Chihuahua who, after being pardoned by Mexican President Francisco Madero, became one of the revolution’s leading generals, known for his audacious tactics, brilliant cavalry maneuvers and solid popular support. He financed his battles by stealing cattle and extorting protection payments from businesses. Some of the money he used to buy arms in Texas, some he gave to the poor.

By 1913, Villa’s charisma and media-savviness had attracted dozens of freelance photographers, newsreel cameramen and writers as his camp followers, including the great leftist journalist John Reed, whose book “Insurgent Mexico” remains one of the classic first-person accounts of the war.

Aware of his marquee value and desperate for cash amid a U.S. arms embargo, Villa put himself up for bid to movie companies in late 1913. He instinctively saw film as a way to finance his war and of selling his image to U.S. audiences, and by extension to the U.S. government at a time when Uncle Sam’s allegiance to the warring factions was in flux.

Legendary filmmaker D.W. Griffith -- who the next year would direct, write, produce, edit and compose music for American cinema’s first blockbuster, “The Birth of a Nation” -- saw Villa’s box-office potential and persuaded Harry Aitken, his partner at Mutual, to sign the general to an exclusive contract. Griffith was to have directed the movie but bowed out to focus on “The Birth of a Nation.” In Griffith’s place came director William Christy Cabanne (played by Michael McKean). He was accompanied by Aitken’s nephew, young production assistant Frank Thayer (Eion Bailey), whose evolving relationship with the general makes up the heart of the film.

Mutual failed in its first pass at a Villa movie in January 1914, a straightforward documentary of the Battle of Ojinaga. Dust obscured the goings-on and Villa’s famed Division of the North looked, in Gelbart’s words, like a “motley crew of peons, which they were.” Villa, with his ragged suit and stubbled beard, appeared very un-Napoleonic, looking more like he’d wandered onto the battlefield from a soup kitchen.

So on a follow-up deal a month later, Mutual paid Villa $25,000 for the right to dictate battle conditions, prohibiting night attacks so cameras could get into position and shoot in natural light. It dressed Villa and his troops in army surplus uniforms -- including, according to the film, anyway, some leftovers from the Confederate army -- and got Villa to put on makeup. Mutual staged some scenes with Raoul Walsh (Kyle Chandler) as the young Villa and intercut them with real battle and camp footage.

“Mutual did a makeover of Villa. They wanted a better-looking movie. They took his rough looks and they coiffed him, trimmed his mustache and lightened his skin so he’d be more palatable to gringo audiences,” says Gelbart, the writer whose credits include HBO’s “Barbarians at the Gate,” the Oscar-nominated script for “Tootsie” and, most famously, the “M*A*S*H” television series.

The 1914 film that resulted, “The Life of General Villa,” was the first instance of Hollywood “blurring the lines of what’s real and what isn’t,” Gelbart says. “We are making the point that, early on, film was an idealized, glamorous version that didn’t reflect reality.”

Mutual’s association with Villa ended after its crew, which included Charles Rosher, who shot many of Mary Pickford’s films, filmed his victory at the Battle of Torreon in March 1914. “Life of General Villa” debuted at the Lyric Theater in New York the next month.

Villa’s star soon fell because of his changing fortunes in the war, his involvement in the murder of a British national, William Benton (Anthony Stewart Head), and the U.S. government’s decision to back competing general Venustiano Carranza, who later became president. His eclipse was final after he invaded New Mexico in March 1916, prompting an unsuccessful pursuit by U.S. troops led by Gen. John Pershing.

Soon after Villa’s raid, Mutual took the same footage it had filmed in Torreon, reshot some scenes with Walsh, and rereleased it as “The Outlaw’s Revenge,” only this time Villa was a villain. That movie has also been lost. Notably, this downhill side of Villa’s career is nowhere to be found in the HBO movie.

WELL-RESEARCHED

Knowing historical accuracy is its best defense, the production team led by executive producer Joshua Maurer researched Villa and Mutual’s movie of him in depth. So have Banderas, Beresford and Gelbart. Margarita de Orellana, a Mexico City author and authority on Villa’s movie-making episode, was a consultant on the set. All strove for verismo.

“We don’t want this to look like ‘Three Amigos,’ ” Gelbart says.

Banderas said his role is faithful to the duality of Villa’s “angel and evil” personality, one moment the witty and simpatico people’s hero, the next a compulsive and vicious killer. One scene calls for Banderas to shoot a woman who is hysterical over the execution of her husband.

“From the moralistic point of view, I won’t judge him. From a dramatic point of view, he is a dream,” Banderas says.

Under a flawless azure sky here in November, Beresford led 300 extras in a re-creation of the Battle of Torreon, won by Villa’s troops in 1914, the climactic event in the original film. He shot take after take of a 12-year-old soldier collapsing in death amid staged explosions and gunfire using period weapons shipped down from Los Angeles

The director of “Breaker Morant,” which was based on a true story about Australian troops during the Boer War, Beresford said that no matter what ends up on the screen in his treatment of Villa, some historians will “come out of the woodwork and say ‘that’s not right.’ because they’ve got a drum to beat.

“I was doing a documentary in Australia for the Olympic Games about the history of Sydney and historians came to me and said, ‘Don’t mention convicts,’ even though Australia was a convict colony from 1788 to 1868. ‘That’s not important,’they said, ‘Don’t mention them,’ ” Beresford recalls.

“I was flabbergasted and I realized that all these historical things are very, very open to interpretation, debate and fashion,” says Beresford. The director has turned his attention to opera recently, with seven directorial efforts including “Rigoletto” at Los Angeles Opera two years ago.

Beresford and Banderas were to have done a historical film together several years ago, a biopic on the life of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. But after he signed on, Banderas received “1,000 letters, many of them death threats, the whole deal, from the Greek community warning me not to do the movie.

“They didn’t want Ataturk to be portrayed in a sympathetic way, and they thought if Tony Banderas was doing it, it was going to be sympathetic. I rejected [doing the movie] for that reason. I had a wife and kids to think about. If I was alone, then I might have taken the risk anyway,” the actor says.

“Villa” is Banderas’ sixth movie shot in Mexico, and he will return in the near future to film the sequel to “Mask of Zorro.” He is increasingly at home in Mexico -- but knows that his portrayal of Villa, a national icon of machismo, will be taken here “with a certain distance.”

“During the first week on the set, the crew, which are mostly Mexicans, was really watching me. They were testing me, thinking ‘Who is this guy to play our Pancho?’ I felt arrows in my neck,” Banderas says. “But after the first week and some serious work on my scenes, they started calling me ‘my general.’ That makes me feel really proud.”

*

‘And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself’

Who: Antonio Banderas (Pancho Villa), Eion Bailey (Frank Thayer), Alan Arkin (Sam Drebben), Jim Broadbent (Harry Aitken), Matt Day (John Reed), Colm Feore (D.W. Griffith), Kyle Chandler (Raoul Walsh), Alexa Davalos (Teddy Sampson), Michael McKean (William Christy Cabanne).

When: 9:30 p.m. Sept. 7.

Where: HBO

Production credits: Executive producers, Joshua D. Maurer, Mark Gordon, Larry Gelbart; writer, Gelbart; director, Bruce Beresford.