Luis Valdez to appear at El Paso's Plaza Classic Film Festival with 2 film screenings
This will be the 18th year for the El Paso Community Foundation's film series, which will run from July 17-27 in and around the Plaza Theatre.
Valdez will appear for on-stage interviews before two of his classic movies — 1987's "La Bamba", about Mexican American rocker Ritchie Valens, at 7 p.m. Friday, July 18, and "Zoot Suit" (1981), considered the first major Chicano feature film, at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 19. Both events will take place at the Plaza Theatre.
Tickets for each program will be $10 and will go on sale with the rest of the Plaza Classic Film Festival schedule, starting Tuesday, June 10, at the Plaza Theatre box office (no service fees) and Ticketmaster.com (with service fees).
Valdez is one of the most important American playwrights and filmmakers living today. He has been successful in theater, television and film.
He wrote "Zoot Suit," which explored Los Angeles' racially motivated Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1942 and 'Zoot Suit Riots' of 1943, debuted in Los Angeles in 1978 and became the first Chicano play on Broadway a year later. La Bamba was written for the screen and starred Lou Diamond Phillips. Both films are preserved in the National Film Registry.
Valdez founded the Obie Award-winning theater company El Teatro Campesino in 1965 in California's Central Valley, joining César Chávez in his United Farm Workers' rights movement. It is the longest-running Chicano theater in the United States, according to a news release.
The prolific 84-year-old debuted his latest play, "Adiós Mamá Carlota," on May 10 at El Teatro Campesino Playhouse.
Valdez's honors include the Presidential Medal of Arts, Mexico's Aguila Azteca Award, and the Peabody Award for his 1987 PBS documentary, Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution.
The 18th Annual Plaza Classic Film Festival will take place from July 17 to 27.
This year's Plaza Classic Film Festival will feature 100 movies over 11 days, including "Cabaret," "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", "The Godfather Part II", "Notting Hill", "Saving Private Ryan", "Toy Story", "Schindler's List", "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back", and many more.
Festival passes are on sale for $200 now and include access to almost all ticketed festival movies, reservations for Philanthropy Theatre movies, special events, and discounts at nearby eateries.
Festival tickets go on sale June 10 at the Plaza Theatre box office and Ticketmaster.
More: Free summer concert series in El Paso: Your guide to outdoor music
María Cortés González may be reached at 915-546-6150; mcortes@elpasotimes.com; @eptmaria.bsky.social on Bluesky, and @eptmariacg on TikTok.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: 'La Bamba' director Luis Valdez joins Plaza Classic Film fest lineup
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Los Angeles Times
17 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
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This essay is adapted from Merrick Morton's 'La Bamba: A Visual History,' published by Hat & Beard Press. 'Dance!! Dance!! Dance!! to the music of the Silhouettes Band!!' read the handbill. The Silhouettes featured Ritchie Valens — 'the fabulous Lil' Richi and his Crying Guitar!!' — at a 1958 appearance at the San Fernando American Legion Hall in Southern California. He was 16 years old. The Silhouettes was Ritchie's first band, and they launched him into history. But a silhouette itself is an interesting thing: You can see the general shape of something while you hardly know the figure casting the shadow. Valens' musical story begins with the Silhouettes, and we have been filling in his story, and projecting ourselves onto it, ever since he left. A founding father of rock 'n' roll, he would lose his life barely a year later, when the plane carrying members of the Winter Dance Party Tour — Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Valens — crashed on Feb. 3, 1959, in an Iowa snowstorm. A Chicano icon. A stranger. Ritchie was a kid playing his guitar to make money for his family and one song he played was a version of 'Malagueña.' The number was rooted in centuries-old Spanish flamenco music that had spread in all directions, becoming a classical music melody and a Hollywood soundtrack go-to by the 1950s. In his hands, it became a catapult for guitar hero god shots. 'Malagueña' communicated experience and rico suave flair to his audience. Meanwhile, his mom was selling homemade tamales at his shows in the American Legion Hall. This guileless 17-year-old, Chicano kid from Pacoima found a way to introduce himself to America by taking something familiar and making it feel like nothing you had heard before. From the beginning, Ritchie heard the possibilities in turning a familiar sound forward. He saw, even as the teenager he will forever be to us, how in reinventing a song, you could reinvent yourself. Listen to 'Donna,' the heartfelt love ballad that felt familiar to Chicano ears, listeners who for years had tuned in to Black vocal groups. In the process, he cleared the way for so much great Chicano soul to come in the next two decades. Most of all, of course, listen to 'La Bamba.' A centuries-old song from Veracruz, Mexico; the tune has African, Spanish, Indigenous and Caribbean DNA. In the movie, he encounters the song for the first time when his brother Bob takes him to a Tijuana brothel, but however he first heard it, Valens viewed it as a prism, a way of flooding all that was in front of him with his voice and guitar. The music he made came from Mexico, and it came from Los Angeles, where 1940s Spanish-language swing tunes, Black doo-wop sounds and hillbilly guitar-plucking were mashed together in a molcajete y tejolote. Most of all, it came from the radio, which lined up sounds that were not like the ones that came right before and blasted them out on AM stations from corner to corner across the Southland. Radio devoured difference and transformed it, and if Ritchie is now regarded as a pioneer of Chicano music, he was in his own, brief time, a product of AM democracy, a silhouette with a spotlight shining on him. Danny Valdez knew all the songs. In the early 1970s, the artist and activist had released 'Mestizo,' billed as the first Chicano protest album put out by a major label. The singer-songwriter and his buddy Taylor Hackford would drink beer, belt out Ritchie Valens songs and make big plans. They talked about someday shooting a movie together, with Valdez playing Ritchie and Hackford directing. 'Neither of us had a pot to piss in,' said Hackford, 'so we never made that movie.' But years later, after Hackford had a hit with 'An Officer and A Gentleman,' Valdez called him and raised the idea once more. There were many steps to getting 'La Bamba' on the screen, but it began with an understanding that it would be about the music. That meant they had to make the music feel alive — namely the handful of recordings produced by Bob Keane that Ritchie left behind. The owner of Del-Fi Records, Keane was a guiding figure in the singer's life, recording his songs, urging him to mask his ethnicity by changing his name from Richard Steven Valenzuela and giving him career advice. Keane booked Gold Star Studios, cheap at $15 an hour, and brought in great session musicians as Ritchie's backing band, including future Wrecking Crew members Earl Palmer and Carol Kaye. But the recordings he made were not state of the art, even in their own time. 'They weren't high-quality,' said Hackford, comparing them to the early Ray Charles sessions for the Swing Time label. 'I had a commercial idea in mind, of music selling the film, of people walking out of the theater singing 'La Bamba' who had never heard of it before,' he said. That meant he needed contemporary musicians who understood the records and could re-record Ritchie's songs and reach an audience that was listening to Michael Jackson, Madonna and George Michael. Ritchie's family, including his mother, Connie, and his siblings, had already heard that Los Lobos were playing 'Come On, Let's Go' live in East L.A. When the band played a concert in Santa Cruz, where the Valenzuela family was living by the 1980s, a friendship grew. 'Danny and I knew Los Lobos in the '70s when they were just starting out,' says writer and director Luis Valdez, 'when they were literally just another band from East L.A. We were very fortunate that they were at that point in their career where they could take on this project. Without Los Lobos, we wouldn't have Ritchie. David Hidalgo's voice is incredible. I don't think we could have found other musicians to cover him. They come from East L.A., they're all Chicanos. They were paying an homage. We happened to be in the airport together when they got the news that 'La Bamba' had become number one in the national charts.' 'They called themselves the spiritual inheritors of Ritchie Valens,' says Hackford. 'And they went in and re-recorded Ritchie's songs plus several that he had played in concert but never recorded.' Now Hackford had his own album of old tunes that turned in a forward direction. Next, Hackford made sure there were roles for modern performers to play the classic rockers from the Winter Dance Party Tour. He cast contemporary performers who could re-record their material too: Marshall Crenshaw as Buddy Holly, Brian Setzer as Eddie Cochran and Howard Huntsberry as Jackie Wilson. Then there's the surprise of the first song heard in the film — a rumbling version of Bo Diddley's 'Who Do You Love?' that had Carlos Santana, hired as a soundtrack composer, playing with Los Lobos, and Bo himself offering a fresh vocal over everything. 'We were so happy to have the touch of Carlos Santana as part of Ritchie's story,' said Luis Valdez. 'It's his guitar that underscores a lot of the scenes and he had a theme for each of the players. We screened the whole movie for him first and he was very moved by it and ready to go right away once he saw it without his contribution. He was alone on the soundstage at Paramount, where we recorded his soundtrack, doing his magic with his guitar. He became a great friend as a result of that. It's incredible what an artist can do.' The original soundtrack recording topped the Billboard pop charts and went double platinum. Hackford loved pop music; his first feature film, 'The Idolmaker' (1980), was a rock musical. Releasing hit music became a key promotional element of the package. In advance of 1982's 'An Officer and a Gentleman' came 'Up Where We Belong' by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. It went to No. 1 a week after the opening. For 1984's 'Against All Odds,' he selected Phil Collins to sing the title cut, a song released three weeks before opening; the song soon went No. 1. 1985's 'White Nights' had two No. 1 songs, Lionel Ritchie's 'Say You Say Me' and Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin's duet 'Separate Lives.' One looming problem for 'La Bamba' was that the 1987 moviegoing public was not familiar with the name Ritchie Valens. Hackford had ideas for that as well. He set out to introduce him to contemporary audiences — convincing the studio to fund a unique teaser trailer to run weeks before the official movie trailer went into theaters. The producer assembled a parade of familiar faces to reintroduce Valens. 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