Peru Comes to the Vatican . . . and Hollywood

Understandably, there’s been much press coverage of Leo XIV, the newly anointed first American-born pope. Though a native of Chicago, Leo (born Robert Francis Prevost) has close link with the nation of Peru, where—after years of missionary work—he took on Peruvian citizenship. His strong emotional ties to that picturesque South American nation reminded me of Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate who died this past April at age 89.   

 Vargas Llosa was a man of letters who in 1990 nearly became Peru’s president. (He was defeated in a landslide by Alberto Fujimori, who quickly claimed dictatorial powers and was run out of the country 10 years later.) A prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Vargas Llosa began his literary career circa 1960. Though I’ve read his charming early work, known in English as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, I by no means pretend to be an expert on his entire oeuvre. Still, for a time I worked closely with his younger cousin, Luis Llosa Urquidi, familiarly known as Lucho.

 When I was Roger Corman’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons in the late 1980s, we shot many low-budget features in Argentina, taking advantage of the exotic locales and cheap labor costs that the current U.S. regime is striving to combat with tariff threats. At one point Roger was flying to Buenos Aires to check on a troubled production, but bad weather forced the plane to land in Lima, Peru. Screenwriter Fred Bailey told me what happened next: Roger “got off the plane, took a taxi into town, opened up the yellow pages, and got somebody to find motion picture production listings. Made a few calls asking who was the best filmmaker in Lima . . . they all said, ‘Luis Llosa.’ Called him up, made a deal, and was back on the airplane to Argentina within a couple of hours.”

 Through Lucho, Roger discovered a wealth of Peruvian locations: crumbling colonial cities, towering mountain ranges, a long seacoast, lots of jungle. There we shot everything from ecological thrillers (Fire on the Amazon) to a submarine drama (Full Fathom Five) to a rather fascinating Bonnie-and-Clyde-in-the Future project (Crime Zone). More than once we used the jungles of Peru to stand in for Vietnam in would-be war epics. What made shooting in Peru particularly exciting was the fact that this was the era of the Shining Path, an armed guerrilla group aiming to launch a People’s War against established government entities. One Corman production was actually briefly put on hold when the Shining Path took over a location. I’m certainly not complaining about the fact that I, as story editor, remained safe in my office in Brentwood, California.

 Of course Lucho, despite his thriving cinematic career in Peru, aspired to make American movies with prospects beyond those of the low-budget Corman world. His biggest success was a 1997 creature-feature called Anaconda, shot in South America with a big-name cast that included Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voigt, and Owen Wilson. This snake-infested horror movie grossed $136.8 million worldwide and quickly became a popular franchise. It earned money but not respect, ending up nominated for six Razzie Awards (including Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actor, and Worst Screenplay), all of which it lost to Kevin Costner’s The Postman. Still, today it’s considered a cult classic.   

Another successful member of the Llosa clan is writer/director Claudia Llosa Bueno, niece of both Mario and Lucho.  Her second feature, The Milk of Sorrow, explores the folk beliefs of indigenous Peruvians. In 2010 it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

 

 

L is for Luis Llosa, a Lucky Latino

The letter L makes me think of South America. That’s became of Fernando Lamas, and llamas . . . and my old Roger Corman buddy, Lucho Llosa.

Seems that in the late 1980s,  Roger was flying down to Buenos Aires to check on a production. Bad weather grounded him in Lima, Peru. Roger, never one to waste an opportunity, made some phone calls, asking who was Peru’s best filmmaker. Everyone said, “Luis Llosa.” So Roger contacted  Llosa, made a deal, and hopped back on the plane.

Out of that initial contact came at least ten films shot on location in Peru: everything from a Vietnam War drama to a Jules Verne adventure saga to a kinky urban thriller to “Bonnie and Clyde in the future.”  Lucho directed some of them, and produced them all, through the local company he called Iguana Productions. During that period, I learned a lot about Peru. Visually the country is a filmmaker’s delight, complete with jungle, towering mountains, grasslands, decaying colonial cities, and a seashore where the ersatz submarine we used as a set in Full Fathom Five could be parked. Unfortunately, this was also the era when a guerrilla faction called The Shining Path controlled great stretches of terrain. Concorde crews were sometimes detained by military police who accused them of representing Amnesty International. And Michael Moriarty was among the actors on one Concorde film who were briefly hassled by gun-toting revolutionaries.

Because Lucho – a very pleasant fellow -- sometimes sojourned in L.A., I learned a lot about him too. Most interesting to me was his kinship with Mario Vargas Llosa, a novelist and thinker with an international reputation. By the time Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, I was far removed from the Corman orbit. But I well remember 1990, when Lucho was excited because, at a time of widespread political turmoil in Peru, “Uncle Mario” was making a serious run for the presidency. He came close, but ultimately lost to Alberto Fujimori, whose tenure was to be marked by bribery, scandal, and accusations of crimes against humanity. Today Fujimori’s serving a twenty-five year sentence in a Peruvian prison. (The clear assumption is that the very intellectual Vargas Llosa would surely have been an improvement. But given Peru’s many problems, perhaps he was lucky not to have won.)

 Lucho himself briefly went Hollywood, directing big-budget, star-driven studio movies like The Specialist (uniting Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone) and Anaconda (uniting Jennifer Lopez and a large snake), before he returned to Lima to stay. Unfortunately for me, I’ve lost touch with him. What’s special is that his daughter Claudia  has taken up where he left off. As a writer-director, she uses her Peruvian heritage to magical effect. I saw her debut film, Madeinusa, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and I’ve never forgotten it. Her second feature, The Milk of Sorrow, made history in 2010 when it became Peru’s first-ever Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film. So the luck of the Llosas continues.