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113 Once Upon a Time in Moviemaking David Hochman/2003 From Premiere, October 2003, 69–71. Reprinted by permission of David Hochman. The adventure begins, as so many do, with the artist as a young man. At age seven, he is already a fixture at the revival movie house in San Antonio. The MGM musicals and Hitchcock double features deliver cheap thrills for a Mexican-American family that would soon number ten children. Mother encourages the kids to sit through multiple showings . One day, they watch Gone with the Wind. Three times. By eleven, he has commandeered his dad’s Super-8 movie camera, and by thirteen he has converted his adolescent lair into a primitive control room: Two aging VCRs are hooked together by an umbilical cord so he can edit tape. A Radio Shack cassette recorder is rigged for crude sound fades. He has Frank Frazetta posters of moon princesses and chained barbarians, a turntable spinning AC/DC, a Stretch Armstrong doll with a drumstick shoved through its chest. The room always smells of modeling clay and pencil shavings. In high school, they call him Video Bob because he usually carries a video camera. He gets out of doing term papers by making action comedies with a smidgen of educational value. He barely makes the grade. He needs actors, so he recruits his brothers and sisters for his stock company. He wants better equipment, so he borrows it. He likes the way his windup Bell & Howell makes objects appear to move around, so he shoots a film about a girl with telekinesis. The short, called Bedhead , racks up awards at fourteen film festivals. But that is not enough. It is never enough. He spends a month in a research hospital as a test subject for a new cholesterol drug just so he can finance his next film. His resources are limited. He has a few thousand bucks, a turtle, a guitar case, and a small town, so he makes a movie about a mariachi musician who arrives in a Mexican border town at the same time as a hit man. EI Mariachi, which costs him $7,000, ends up grossing more than 290 times 114 rober t rodriguez: inter views that amount, a triumph that confounds everyone, especially him. “Here was a movie made in Spanish for the Mexican home video market,” he says. “I thought, ‘Nobody will even have to know I made it. There’s a bunch of Robert Rodriguezes out there. If it goes badly, I can just blame it on some other Robert Rodriguez.’” The story continues, as it sometimes does, with the man living like a king. At thirty-five, Robert Rodriguez sleeps in a castle and works in a dungeon. In the straw-colored hill country outside Austin, the director lives on sixty acres with his wife and college sweetheart, Elizabeth, and their three young sons, Rocket, Racer, and Rebel. The riverside compound has crenellated walls, rocky moats, and windowless chambers to fortify the family against heat and scorpions and whatever else might be lurking out there. Because he can do almost all his work here (he has a mixing stage, an editing suite, a music studio, and enough wired gadgetry to launch a space shuttle), Rodriguez rarely has reason to leave. “I once saw Frank Zappa’s house in L.A.,” Rodriguez says, standing outside a stone carriage house that has become his production office. He is tall and wiry with raven-black hair, and is almost never seen, inside or out, without a cowboy hat or colorful bandanna—or both—on his head. He says they keep the ideas inside. “Zappa had an underground vault where he stored all his tapes. Once I started making a little money, I decided I needed a place like that for my guitars and props and toys and computers and stuff.” Distant as it is from the centers of the entertainment industry, Rodriguez ’s kingdom is a sovereign state where the normal rules of moviemaking don’t really apply. Although he employs a coterie of sound engineers, mixers, and editors, he does an astonishing amount of the labor himself. It’s part of what his friend and consigliere Quentin Tarantino calls “Robert’s obsessive one-man-band approach to everything.” George Clooney, who has appeared in three of Rodriguez’s movies, considers the director’s methods “almost post-Hollywood.” For example, Rodriguez has spent much of 2003 working on two ambitious projects simultaneously, without...

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