Few Bucks, Very Big Bang

By RICHARD CORLISS

What will $7,000 get you?

A Concorde round trip, New York-Paris, plus cab fare.

A frock from Christian Lacroix.

Ten months of expert baby-sitting at a Manhattan preschool (mornings only).

Less than one second of Steven Spielberg's summer epic Jurassic Park.

Or El Mariachi, the new year's most entertaining movie and sweetest surprise.

Robert Rodriguez, the film's writer, director, co-producer and editor, describes his action comedy -- about a singer-guitarist mistaken in a Mexican border town for a killer who totes his artillery in a guitar case -- as "a taco Western." We'd call it a rough, funny Mad Mex. Now all Hollywood is calling Rodriguez because Columbia Pictures is distributing his movie. Not bad for a 24-year-old who raised nearly half the film's budget (okay, $3,000) by serving as a "lab rat" in a medical-research project in his hometown of Austin, Texas.

How nice, you may be thinking. A Mexican-American filmmaker -- not enough of those. And thrifty too. Rodriguez, the third of 10 children of a nurse and a sales manager for a cookware firm, does seem an exemplary gent. To impress on his younger siblings the value of an education, he has resolved to take the last three courses he needs for his University of Texas degree. But goodwill doesn't make a good film. And one of El Mariachi's zestful pleasures is that you can enjoy it without awarding it affirmative-action points. It's a real movie, high but not woozy on its own cinematic verve, and Rodriguez is the goods -- not just for what his career promises but for what his film delivers.

The plot is familiar: a gentle stranger (Carlos Gallardo, who also co- produced) in a tough town; a mysterious woman with a nasty patron; and in 82 minutes, 15 perforated corpses. But that's just the outline. Rodriguez, who's been making films since he was 12, and whose short comedy Bedhead won prizes at 14 festivals, realizes that even splattered blood can get tired if there's no wit and bustle in the execution. His mentors -- Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Sam Raimi -- knew how to do it, and Rodriguez is a fast learner. Every shot (of an astounding 2,000 in the movie, about four times the average) is an aerobic workout for the eyes -- a delirious too much of a muchness.

To Rodriguez, this calculated hysteria is an expression of family values. "That's the way it was in my family," he says. "Kids were always running around all over the place all the time. That's what things looked like to me." But really, the movie's script and style were born of necessity. Rodriguez built the screenplay around the assets available to him for the 14- day shoot in Acuna, Mexico: a hotel, two bars, a school bus, a motorcycle and a pit bull. All became elements in the story -- plus a turtle found on the road. He laid on the gore to please his intended audience of Mexican videophiles and added a strong female character just to twit them. "If I thought a lot of people were going to see this," he says, "I would have changed a lot of things that people ended up liking."

On El Mariachi, Rodriguez was the entire crew. And except for the lead actress, who received $225, his amateur actors worked for free. For that reason, he says, "I didn't want the cast working too hard, so we wouldn't rehearse the script. I'd feed them a few lines, they'd say it back to me, we'd + shoot one take, I'd tell them to forget that line, and we'd go on to the next. I shot it all silent and then synchronized the sound by hand. It was a tremendous amount of work. But I'd rather work hard and have a movie than have nothing."

At first, Rodriguez was going to make three Mariachi movies for the Mexican video market, with each sequel financed by the previous film. "Then I was going to clip together the best scenes for a demo film to get backing for a real feature film, like sex, lies and videotape or Reservoir Dogs. And then I was just going to explode out of nowhere. That was the original plan." The scheme has the sweet logic of youthful ambition behind it. What a pity overnight success got in the way.

The infant auteur is a hot item now. "They love me out there," he says. "They know they can save so much money with me." But some proposals have Faustian fine print. One studio exec told him that El Mariachi was "a great little movie." Now if he could just remake it, with the mariachi a rock guitarist who gets wounded and taken to an Indian reservation (Dances with Wolves), where a mentor nurses the lad back to health (Star Wars) and trains him to fight (The Karate Kid). "They were treating me like a prize racehorse," he says with admirable skepticism, "but the prize racehorse could break his ankle. Then they shoot him and get a new one."

Now Rodriguez has a two-year deal with Columbia and is planning a sequel to El Mariachi. "I told Columbia I'd sign with them if they let me stay in Texas," he says. "I wanted to be near my family. Near my inspiration." And away from Hollywood, where mediocre $70 million movies are more common than terrific $7,000 ones. "The only way I would want to make a $70 million movie," says the frugal phenom, "would be if it looked like $700 million."

Moviegoers have been looking for someone who'd bring sense and snazz back to pictures. Sign here, young man.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York