Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution

On 3 January 1914 Pancho Villa became Hollywood’s first Mexican superstar when he signed an exclusive contract with the Mutual Film Corporation. In return for $25,000 he agreed to keep other film companies from his battlefield, to fight in daylight wherever possible and reconstruct battles if the footage needed reshooting. Now the subject of an HBO film starring Antonio Banderas, Villa is one of the main protagonists in this account of the American movie industry’s fascination with the events of the Mexican Revolution. Through memoir accounts and newspaper reports, it charts the progress of the documentary filmmakers who went to cover events in Mexico. In so doing, it reveals much about how Mexico was constructed in the American imagination and how the film reinforced and justified American expansionism and radical and social prejudices.