Robert Rodriguez is very much a film maker on the up and has been for a number of years. In 2005, following the release of his film "Sin City"; he was ranked as one of Hollywood's 50 most powerful people by Premiere magazine.
In fact, Robert Rodriguez has done so much, having written and directed a number of very successful films, including his "Mariachi" trilogy and the "Spy Kids" trilogy and directed "From Dusk Til Dawn"; it seems strange to think he has only really been on the scene for less than fifteen years and is still only in his 30s.
But life wasn't always so good and so successful for Rodriguez. In 1991, he was thinking about getting into college to study films and contemplating his first attempt at making a feature film having had some success, if only in his own home town, with some of his short films. Whilst Rodriguez aimed to be making major films in the future, his only aim at this point in time was to make a film and try and sell it for a small profit to a company specialising in Spanish language straight to video film releases. This is basically Rodriguez's diary of what happened to him and his plan.
Short of money to make the film, Rodriguez jumps at the chance to earn some, although to tell you how he achieved it would spoil part of the magic of the book. He also gets the chance to write the script and finds one of his main actors quite by accident. Whilst he has always believed that he could make his own feature film, it is at this point where his plans really start to come together. We then follow him through the making of the film and everything that happened afterwards, from editing it to the completed version, to his attempts to sell it.
The story is told in a diary style, being supposedly extracts from the journal he was keeping at the time. I think he's either a diary writer or he wanted to keep track of how this, his first real feature film, went so he could learn from it later. It certainly wasn't written with a view to selling it as he never really had all that much hope of selling the film for too much money.
The diary format means that we have full access to what Rodriguez is thinking and feeling a lot of the time. You can see his emotions move from excitement to a kind of depression when people keep telling him his plans won't come to fruition and a kind of determination to prove everyone wrong. Then there is the hectic nature of the filming itself and all the work and the attention to detail involved in the filming and editing to make a final product. Then there is the large scale confusion, impatience, wonder and delight that followed as the film "El Mariachi" kept getting closer and closer to being Rodriguez's dream come true.
What helps most with this book is that because Rodriguez is mostly writing for himself, not for anyone else, it has a nicely laid back style. The whole book feels as if he's just having a chat with us and writing down the first thing that comes into his head. "El Mariachi" took him on quite a wild ride from start to finish and you can feel the ups and downs with him and get a true feeling of how to make a film from start to finish and how Hollywood can treat people.
However, the narrow focus of the book does mean that it would only really appeal to a limited number of people, despite the very easy to read style and the flashes of good humour running through it. If you're a fan of Rodriguez in general, or "El Mariachi" in particular, then this is a great story and this is why I read the book in the first place.
However, it can also be a useful learning or reference tool for anyone studying media or, especially, film studies or for those who want to make their own films or are a fan of independent cinema. For anyone who falls into these groups, of additional interest will be the "Ten Minute Film School" sections and the script, which appear as appendices to the book. The latter is just to show the formatting and how Rodriguez did it, but the former is a lesson in how to do things the way he did in the world of film making and is a feature that he has also subsequently added on to DVD releases of many of his films. I enjoyed this less than the majority of the book, as I'm a film fan but not a film maker.
The major downside to this book is that it now appears to be out of print and is very difficult to track down. Copies do occasionally appear on eBay and the Amazon Marketplace, but the cheapest I have seen one for is £6.99, but copies will regularly be listed at over £20.00, so you do need to be careful on price and condition. Abebooks also have occasional copies, with the cheapest I've seen being $7.50, but the same warning as for the Amazon Marketplace again applies. Or all book sellers, the only one offering new copies is Play.com for £9.99, but they have had the book listed as being out of stock for a number of months now, and I don't believe they would have the stock to honour an order in a hurry.
That said, if you're of the kind that would get something from a book such as this, be it entertainment or educational, it's well worth keeping an eye out for. A story like this doesn't come along terribly often and when it does, it's not often told in this much detail or this well. If you're a Rodriguez devotee or a film maker, this is one book you must read.
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