By the 1990s, the Cheech and Chong legacy had grown enough to be a seminal influence on a new generation of filmmakers who had grown up watching them. Admittedly, they were young when they were watching the films, but time after time I heard the same story. They were turned on to Cheech and Chong films by their parents.
The same can be said for Cheech and Chong records. Whole families used to listen to them on cross-country trips. Big brothers used to let their little squirt brothers and sisters listen to Big Bambu while their parents were away. A lot of kids used to change album covers so that the Moody Blues albums contained Cheech and Chong records. Many families told me that they had a secret language based upon knowledge of certain movies.
Tommy and I once met this girl who told us that when her father got out of prison he found out that she was listening to our records. So he ran over them with his car in the driveway. He then yelled, “An’ you tell ’em, ‘Don’t try to changes your names cause I’m hep to ya!’”
Well, you can’t argue with that.
In a pretty short time, a lot of these kids started making films and records and doing stand-up. They had been listening to our records all along. But it was in film that we were most influential. It didn’t matter if they were rappers or country singers or rockers or Latinos or whatever. We appealed to everybody right across the board. It didn’t matter if they were stoners or not… but it didn’t hurt, either.
What it had to do with was a sense of time. In our humor, time was malleable, it stretched and bended and took its time. The things that came out of it were juvenile and sophisticated at the same time. If we told corny jokes, they were the funniest corny jokes. If we got surreal, we made fun of the surreal. The studios didn’t understand us. They just knew that we made money, so for the most part they left us alone. But the influence was there, and it was shared amongst the kids growing up.
About twenty-four years ago, I started hearing about this young filmmaker from Texas named Robert Rodriguez. He had made a feature film with very little money and a borrowed camera. That film, El Mariachi, was attracting a lot of attention on the festival circuit. It was a big winner at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. Hollywood came a-calling.
I met Robert at a screening at the Directors Guild in Hollywood. We introduced ourselves, and he said he was a big fan and had grown up on us. He was dealing with the studios at the time, and they were giving him the same runaround that they give everybody.
The oddest thing about the studios is that no matter how much they want you, they need you, they’ve got to have you, as soon as you sign, you get thrown into the “swamp of development” where they try to get rid of everything that is unique about you. They constantly try to change you into something that they can understand but, more important, control. Robert was mired in that swamp at the time. I invited him and his wife, Elizabeth, who was his producer, out to my house in Malibu to relax and enjoy the beach.
(Coincidentally, that same night at the screening, I was introduced by my actor-friend Pepe Serna to a young actress he was working with. Not very many times in your life do you meet someone who you can tell right away is going to be a big star. This young woman was one of those people. There was just no doubt about it. The next morning, I told my friend and lawyer Stan Coleman that I had met this girl named Jennifer Lopez and that there was something special about her. It was an understatement, to say the least.)
Robert and Elizabeth came out to the beach and spent the weekend relaxing, eating, and bodysurfing the waves at Matador Beach. We all had a great time, and during the course of the weekend he showed me a short film he had made as a student at the University of Texas. It was called Bedhead, and it featured his two sisters and his little brother. Robert comes from a family of ten children, and family is very important to him, a feeling that translates over into those he works with as well. It was a family film that nobody really knows about, especially in the wake of the blood-and-guts features that followed.
Bedhead was hilarious, but what was most unique about it was its visual style. Robert was developing his own style of quick edits and zooming camera shots that really needed no dialogue. You understood the story immediately by the way that he presented it visually.
One of the unique things about Robert as a director is that he operates the camera at all times, so he is looking through the lens at you while talking to you. He’s paying that much attention to how it looks. If you understand this as an actor, you start to pay attention to where the camera is and how close or far it is from you. You start to come up with things that need no dialogue, but still tell the inner workings of the character. That was how I developed my approach to my character and his toothpick in Desperado. The action of the toothpick told exactly how he was feeling; confident, nervous, afraid, sarcastic. I loved the interaction I developed with Robert. It was music to me, and it was exactly how I approached humor and acting.
When he finally got Desperado, his first feature, off the ground, he cast me in the part of Short Bartender. Typecasting, I guess. During this time, I started a routine with him that I continue to this day. When I knew he was making a new movie, I would call him periodically and ask him, “How’s my part coming?” We would both laugh, but I’ve made seven movies with Robert. You take nothing for granted as an actor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been assured that I have a part only to see it slip away. I really appreciate Robert’s loyalty to me and all of the ways he has found for us to work together so often.
The making of Desperado was action-packed and intense. I was working with a group of fairly unknown but extremely talented actors who were about to become much bigger. Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas would become an internationally famous action star. Unknown Mexican telenovela actress Salma Hayek would burst onto the screen and become a worldwide object of desire. Steve Buscemi would go on to star in the big HBO hit Boardwalk Empire. Danny Trejo would be introduced as the ultimate bad guy whose face, body, and tattoos said it all. Quentin Tarantino was an up-and-coming director who had just made his first feature, Reservoir Dogs. He and Rodriguez had become buddies on the festival circuit, and Quentin would write the next feature that Robert would direct, From Dusk Till Dawn.
One afternoon, Robert called me and said that he was sending over the script for his new movie and to let him know what I thought. The script, by Tarantino, arrived and I settled in to read it. It was to star TV actor George Clooney in his feature film debut. George had a long TV résumé and had turned out more pilots than the Air Force Academy. Now he was starring in the mega-hit network drama ER, but oddly enough he had never starred in a movie.
The reading was going along just fine. It was a kidnap/escape story involving Harvey Keitel and Juliette Lewis as the victims and George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino as the bad guys. They were on the lam and decide to pull into a Mexican dive bar in the middle of the desert. Everything looks cool until everyone in the bar turns into vampires.
It was in the middle of the script around page fifty. I flipped back a couple of pages to see if I missed anything, but no, out of the blue… everybody turns into vampires. OK, whatever. I thought, Either this is going to be a big cult movie or it’s going to throw a big pail of cold water on everyone’s career. So buckle up and let’s go.
A couple of days later Robert called again and said that they were having a reading of the script, and would I come in and read the part of Chet Pussy.
Hmmm, sounds Shakespearean.
So I show up and there’s Robert, Quentin, and Harvey Keitel, and only a few more people at a very long table. Right away Rodriguez says that some people couldn’t make the reading, and would I mind reading two other parts as well?
Sure, no problem.
I was having a ball switching accents and attitudes between the characters, but when I got to Chet Pussy, the dam burst. Chet was the barker outside the Titty Twister, the bar where all the action was to take place. He was a character I had seen live and in person every time I went down to Tijuana. He, or somebody like him, was at every bar along the strip in TJ. I could do this guy in my sleep, and so I went for it.
Robert and Quentin were laughing out loud but dramatic tough guy Harvey was laughing the most. I read two other characters that I really didn’t pay too much attention to, then thanked everybody and split. By the time I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from Robert saying that he and Quentin wanted me to do all three parts.
Cool. Do I get paid three times?
When we finally got on the set, the first scene was the explosion of the bar that occurs at the end of the movie. So there we were in the middle of a dry lake bed out near Barstow. They had constructed an elaborate, three-story façade of the Titty Twister complete with flashing neon and twirling pasties. On “Action,” we were all supposed to run for our lives out of the bar and then go to a certain mark and turn around to watch the bar explode. Robert had a crew with a big fire hose stationed just out of shot ready to douse the flames.
Robert called “Action,” and we all ran out of the bar and hit our marks and turned around. As soon as we did, boom, there was this big explosion, and the front of the bar burst into flames.
“Cut, cut, cut!” yelled Robert. “OK, turn on the hoses.”
The hoses got turned on and shot out a mighty stream of water that landed about ten feet short of the flames. Much shouting went on back and forth until everybody realized that the water would never reach the flames. A good half of the set got completely burned until somehow, using any means they had, including throwing dirt on the flames, they got the fire out.
Nice first shot.
We were all wandering around in the desert where the temperature had now climbed to over a hundred degrees, wondering what to do next. Suddenly, way off in the distance we saw a swirling dust cloud forming at the distant shore of the dry lake. Everybody was oddly fascinated until we realized that the cloud was building in size and speed… and was heading straight at us.
I wouldn’t say that everybody panicked, but whatever you call the thing just below it, that was what they did. The camera crew did the quickest thinking as they grabbed their million-dollar cameras and ran for the nearest airtight shelter and wrapped their equipment in blankets. The dust storm was on us before we knew it, and the whole crew dove for cover wherever they could. It was like being stung by needles for five minutes. When the storm passed, Robert called for a time-out until they could figure out what to do next. What they figured out was that we would stop shooting for the day and start shooting again as soon as it was dark. I would take a movie crew into battle anytime, anywhere.
At this point, I was ready for anything, so it made sense that the first shot up was Chet Pussy in front of the Titty Twister yelling:
“Pussy, pussy, pussy! We have every kind of pussy! White pussy, black pussy, brown pussy, red pussy. Wet pussy, slippery pussy, apple pie pussy!”
That scene has become one of the most quoted of any I have ever done.
Needless to say, I had a lot of fun on that movie. I got to hang out with George Clooney, who turned out to be the coolest, most fun-loving guy… and was a big Cheech and Chong fan.
I would have paid to watch Salma Hayek dance seminaked with a big albino python around her neck. Instead I was being paid to watch her. I don’t know how that many curves can fit into that petite a woman. I could have sold my seat at the end of the runway a thousand times over.
I spent a lot of time with Tito Larriva, who did much of the music. Tito was a mainstay of the LA punk scene, and he gave the picture an edgy sound that set it apart from anything else that was out there.
From Dusk Till Dawn was released and became a big hit, and it has remained a cult classic to this day. What really emerged after this movie and on into Robert’s next movies was his use of a heavily Latino cast without calling specific attention to it. He cast these movies as they would occur in the everyday world of his native Texas. He really reflected the world as he saw it. Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, and Latinos were not excluded from his movies; they were specifically included because they represented reality. It was a major breakthrough in the film world.
It was the same mind-set we used in the Cheech and Chong films. From my point of view, we represented regular hippie street culture, and everybody agreed by making them huge hits. We put that mind-set out there, and many young filmmakers agreed by doing the same thing in their movies.
I kept on working with Robert Rodriguez and always had the best time, although I noticed a trend and pointed it out to him. I got killed in every one of his movies, as did a lot of other people. I started telling him, “Robert, you know when you kill me, your movie’s over. So you might want to kill me later.”
He would nod and laugh and then kill me again in his next movie.
At least the star power of the killer got raised when he had Johnny Depp kill me in Once Upon a Time in Mexico. It was a real treat working and hanging with Johnny Depp, who is the nicest and most gentlemanly actor I’ve ever worked with.
Finally, Robert listened to my advice when he cast me in Machete as Padre, the priest and brother of Machete.
Machete had the most bizarre path to the silver screen. It started out as a faux trailer that was inserted between two movies in Grindhouse, a collaboration between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino… and then it went away.
But it didn’t go away. It started picking up chatter on the Internet, and people wanted to see the movie and… what’s up? It finally picked up enough steam and they made the movie.
I LOVE Machete. It horrifies me and cracks me up at the same time. Danny Trejo is given a shot as a romantic lead and he puts his head down and runs with it. It has convulsive energy.
So finally Robert killed me later (a crucifixion, as I recall). Nice touch… and he told me that he had discovered something. He said he learned the strength of introducing a new character halfway through a movie. Cool, Robert. How’s my new part coming?
But if I had to pick my favorite Robert Rodriguez movie, it would have to be Spy Kids. It was Bedhead with a budget. That same rhythm, that same kid’s point of view, that same sense of fun and silliness that he showed me out in Malibu had matured to major-league level. He hit that one out of the park. It has such great heart and true emotions. It was bravura filmmaking by Robert and has become a classic. It was a real pleasure to play Uncle Felix (“I’m not your uncle!”) and to be in all the Spy Kids movies.