Baja Hollywood

ATOTONILCO DE TULA, Mexico —  The dust hangs in the morning haze over a dozen gritty cement quarries, gaping orange craters gouged into a landscape too dry and too desolate to yield much more than agave or an occasional minimum wage. For a few dollars a day, local workers with pickax and shovel start early and labor as they have for more than a century--by hand--filling trucks with the raw material for high-rises, highways and high-priced homes in the Mexican capital an hour’s drive to the south.

Most of these mines, however, are empty now, abandoned when recession and competition combined two years ago to shutter a local cement factory, taking away hundreds of already scarce jobs.

But wait. Up on that ridge. Perched on a sheer face of the long-abandoned Tlamaco Mine. Flashing swords. A cracking whip. And the mark of the Z.

It’s Zorro!

Well it’s two Zorros, actually: actor Antonio Banderas and his Oscar-winning “master,” Anthony Hopkins. And the mine they are working in is full of life--and money--teeming with cameras, lights, action and a cast of hundreds, all of them laid-off local cement workers now earning well above minimum wage as Hollywood extras.

Their role: Mexican peasants, enslaved by Spanish conquerors in Southern California 150 years ago. Zorro’s role: To liberate them from their poverty.

In a way, Zorro already has accomplished this task, as Hollywood fantasy and Mexican reality have become inseparable here at one of the biggest film locations ever built in Mexico--a huge symbol for an industry that this nation hopes will help turn its struggling economy around.

“This is an historic event for us,” says Epigmenio Gonzalez Borja, the mayor of Atotonilco de Tula, as hundreds of townsfolk--dressed in rags and chained at the feet--slave away for the cameras in the nearby mine set; not far away, other locals are laboring in real mines.

“When the factory closed down here two years ago,” the mayor explained, “it paralyzed this town. Some 500 people were fired, and most have gone without work since then. Even though this is just a temporary project, it gives the townspeople some work for two or three months. For us, the filming of ‘The Mask of Zorro’ here gives us a chance to breathe again.”

This scene in rural Hidalgo is testimony to what Mexican officials and Hollywood producers and actors say is fast becoming the latest film trend: making movies in Mexico. With a direct investment of about $20 million here, TriStar Pictures, for example, is shooting south of the border every scene of “Zorro,” an ambitious remake of the action-adventure classic.

When “Zorro’s” principal photography ends here in the next week or so--the film is scheduled for Christmas release--producers Doug Claybourne and David Foster will have employed more than 7,000 Mexican extras at haciendas, beaches, mines and other locations scattered across five Mexican states.

They will have paid top dollar to scores of talented Mexican technicians, costume designers, camera crews, set managers, actors and grips--and exposed them to a major Hollywood production 100 times more costly than the average Mexican film. And they will have changed a half-dozen small towns like Atotonilco de Tula for years to come.

That is just what the Mexican government has had in mind since it actively started courting Hollywood and European filmmakers more than two years ago.

Cut to the second-floor chairman’s office at the government Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. Here is a color-splashed, state-of-the-art complex where “Zorro” and a half-dozen other foreign productions are shooting interiors this year.

As he leans forward in his producer’s chair, Jorge Santoyo Vargas, 44, is straight out of central casting: Leather pants, fur-lined leather coat, button-down collarless shirt and salt-and-pepper beard.

Santoyo, head of Mexico’s National Film Commission, also wears a beckoning smile. But beneath this warm exterior, the career filmmaker means business. Big business. Hollywood business. Mexican business. “Filmmaking,” he says, “is the future of Mexico. . . . Our goal is to make Mexico the idyllic location for movie making in the world.”

As chairman of the nonprofit government body created two years ago to entice Hollywood and its millions south of the border, Santoyo already has racked up some impressive credits: Eight major foreign productions filmed in Mexico last year--among them, Baz Luhrmann’s box-office hit “Romeo & Juliet” and James Cameron’s mega-budget “Titanic,” still tentatively scheduled for release in July.

Already this year, six more major foreign movies are in production. They include John Sayles’ experimental, Spanish-language “Hombres Armados” shot in the poverty of Chiapas, and sequences of “The Game,” starring Michael Douglas, shot on the streets of Mexicali.

The Mexican countryside is filling fast not only with visiting film crews but with permanent evidence that Hollywood is hot for Mexico.

Look no farther than sleepy Rosarito Beach, a half-hour south of Tijuana, where 20th Century Fox invested millions of dollars last year to build a fully equipped studio and sprawling location set for “Titanic.” The company plans to reuse and rent out the facility for other productions.

“I think that almost exclusively the effects of this project have been positive,” said Hector Javier Huerta, private secretary to Rosarito’s mayor. “The project has helped fight unemployment on one hand, and on the other it has been an indirect source of employment.”

Huerta said 20th Century Fox’s estimated $22-million studio investment has spawned new luxury hotels, restaurants and recently approved plans to build an international airport in town. City and federal officials also solved an early controversy over the Punta Morro fishing cooperative that was displaced by the studio when Mexico City granted the fishermen a concession to occupy a southern corner of the studio’s beachfront land.

“The effects have been both economical and social,” Huerta said. “From the time that 20th Century Fox officially announced that they would invest hundreds of thousands of dollars here, it gave us an image of prosperity.”

What’s in all this for Hollywood? Cheap labor, a favorable dollar-to-peso exchange rate, highly skilled local talent and an array of natural deserts, jungles, caves and coastlines in one of the most biodiverse nations on the globe--many of them now cataloged and computerized atChurubusco Studios’ library.

What’s in it for Mexico? Roughly one-third of all production costs, Santoyo says. It means hard-currency income in a nation hungry for the kind of foreign investment that is spread through every level of the economy. This year alone, Santoyo says, foreign filmmaking will net Mexico more than $100 million.

There are hurdles, to be sure. Topping the list, according to “Zorro” co-producer Claybourne and Rosarito’s city officials, are new Mexican Treasury Department regulations that took effect Jan. 1. They, for example, let the government impose a tax of up to 30% of the wages of visiting actors. And despite government efforts to streamline the bureaucracy, visiting producers are still tormented by laws and regulations that can cause costly and maddening delays.

Although Claybourne said that “Zorro” is unaffected by the new tax regulations--work on it began last year, before the measures took effect--he and other Hollywood producers are fighting the rules for the sake of future productions.

“Mexico,” he noted, “is such a wonderful place to shoot. They have a lot of great locations, new and fantastic stages. . . . But the government has to make sure they’re looking at the long term and not the short term if they want to build this business up.”

Based on his own experiences, Claybourne has been talking to top officials about ways to cut Mexico’s red tape.

It took his production team two months, for example, to get 20 antique, vintage-1762 Brown Bess flintlock rifles and high-tech special-effects explosives through a snarl of Mexican army and trade ministry regulations. It wasn’t until Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo’s chief of staff personally intervened that Mexican customs released the equipment, he said.

Still, co-producer David Foster offers his historic perspective on working here: He spent 11 weeks in Mexico in 1981 filming Ringo Starr’s “Caveman,” shot on location in Durango, Puerto Vallarta and Mexico City. At every step of the way, he recalls, Foster had to pay hefty bribes--corruption that he said has been absent during “Zorro.”

“Someone’s hand was always out [before]. There should have been a flood of films being shot in Mexico years ago, but they always tend to shoot themselves in the foot,” Foster said. “This time, though, they just might succeed. It’s 1,000 times better now than it was in 1981. The most essential thing now is getting rid of the red tape.”

“Zorro” has shown why it can be advantageous to make movies in Mexico. “We are trying to make a big movie. And we’re going to get a much bigger movie for the $20 million that we’re going to spend in Mexico than we would have gotten in the United States,” Claybourne said, adding that he would have to double the $4 million TriStar is spending on set locations here if they were built in America.

Just how big is the “Zorro” production? Cut to Atotonilco de Tula.

Bob Huffman, a Hollywood-born construction foreman, is making his rounds of the 80-foot high, 1,000-foot wide, circa-1830 gold mine he built at an abandoned cement quarry. He tosses out statistics about what this took: Three months of labor, 92 tons of lumber, three tons of nails, hundreds of local workers, many explosive charges, and a lot of ingenuity to build the backdrop for sword fights and slavery in this once-forgotten mining burg.

Still, Huffman concedes, it is the natural attributes that make this location work. As Claybourne explains: “We’re using a lot of Mexican people, Mexican actors, Mexican technicians. We’re using Mexico to its best advantages.”

For Southern California, this production has its ironic elements: “The Mask of Zorro” is set not far from Hollywood in the 1830s, when California was still part of Mexico. But Hollywood today is, well, different. And Hollywood had to come to Mexico to find locations that still look as Hollywood did 150 years ago.

“We can’t be in Monterey or in Los Angeles--too high-tech, too many telephone poles,” Claybourne explained. “There’s not enough of California left in California for it to look like California.”

Here in Mexico, what “Zorro” director Martin Campbell--fresh from his successful “GoldenEye”--hopes to create is a realistic action-adventure film that is fun. He praises his Mexican extras for adding a special touch, saying they “are fantastic. They’re far better than the professionals; they’re totally believable.”

For Anthony Hopkins, who looks for any opportunity to lavish praise on this nation and its people, “Zorro” offers a chance to be a swashbuckler. “I’m 59 now, and I have a whole new career. It’s lovely,” he says, during a break from intense bullwhip training with Bob Anderson, who is the film’s swordmaster.

Hopkins added that he “loves being in Mexico. I’m always astonished by the color. The women. The colors they wear. Beautiful colors. Beautiful women. It’s all an affirmation of life.”

Fans here also are affirming Hopkins’ star power. He is so well-known here that he is often mobbed on the street. His Oscar-winning “Silence of the Lambs” performance, dubbed in Spanish, is aired almost monthly here.

And yet with all this attention and with genuine humility, Hopkins deferred to his co-star in offering yet another reason he wanted to be Don Diego de la Vega in this film.

“Antonio Banderas is a young, good-looking actor,” Hopkins said. “He brings the young women into the theater. I figured I may as well get on his coattails.”

For Banderas--who offers equally high praise for colleague Hopkins, whom he calls an acting “master”--”Zorro” is a movie with a message, one that he says makes Mexico even more apt a setting for its production.

“There is an important message here in ‘Zorro’ for the entire Hispanic community,” the 36-year-old Spanish-born actor says. “Zorro is the only Hispanic hero ever created in Hollywood. He fought for justice. He fought against poverty. This is an especially important model for kids, especially today and especially here in Mexico.”