| And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself | |
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| Directed by | Bruce Beresford |
| Produced by | Tony Mark |
| Written by | Larry Gelbart |
| Starring | Antonio Banderas Eion Bailey Alan Arkin Jim Broadbent |
| Release date(s) | 7 September 2003 (USA) |
| Running time | 112 min |
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself was a 2003 television film starring Antonio Banderas as Pancho Villa. The movie's tagline is Lights. Camera. Revolution.
At the time of production, this was the most expensive 2-hour television/cable movie ever made, with a budget of over $30 million.[citation needed]
The film is based on The Life of General Villa which was shot in 1914. The actual contract that Pancho Villa signed with Frank N. Thayer and the Mutual Film Company on January 5, 1914 to film the Battle of Ojinaga still exists and is in a museum in Mexico City. The original film has been lost, but some unedited film reels of the battle, showing Pancho Villa and his army fighting Federal forces, as well as photographs and publicity stills taken from the original film still exist.
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Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Antonio Banderas) finds himself without adequate funding to finance his war against the military-run government. He also finds himself at odds with the Americans because of the Hearst media empire's press campaign against him. To counter both of these threats, he sends emissaries to movie producers to convince them to pay to film his progress and the actual battles. Producer D.W. Griffith (Colm Feore) becomes interested and sends Frank Thayer (Eion Bailey) with a film crew to develop film reels.
Thayer becomes horrified and fascinated by the bandit. He finds an enigmatic individual that is both ghoulishly brutal and charmingly captivating. The resulting film became the first feature length movie, introducing scores of Americans to the true horrors of war that they had never personally seen. Thayer sold the studios on making the film despite their concerns that no one would sit through a movie longer than 1 hour by convincing them that they could raise the price of movies to ten cents, doubling the going price at that time.
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