Movie Info

In 1914, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Antonio Banderas) finds himself without adequate funding to finance his war against the military-run gove...(read more...) rnment. He also finds himself at odds with the Americans because of the Hearst media empire's press campaign against him. To counter both of these, he sends emissaries to movie producers to convince them to pay to film his progress and the actual battles. Producer D.W. Griffith (Colm Feore) becomes interested and sends Frank Thayer (Eion Bailey) with a film crew to develop film reels. Thayer becomes horrified and fascinated by the bandit. He finds an enigmatic individual that is both ghoulishly brutal and charmingly captivating. They become very close and along months, Frank makes the first feature five reels length movie, "The Life of General Villa", when the usual was two reels only. After edition, another reality about Pancho Villa is screened for the audience. The resulting film became the first feature length movie, introducing scores of Americans to the true horrors of war that they had never personally seen. Thayer sold the studios on making the film despite their concerns that no one would sit through a movie longer than 1 hour by convincing them that they could raise the price of movies to ten cents, doubling the going price at that time.

Director: Bruce Beresford

MPAA: Unrated

Release Date: Dec 31, 2003

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Eion Bailey, Alan Arkin, Jim Broadbent, Matt Day, Michael McKean, Colm Feore, Alexa Davalos