ZOOT SUIT: THE MAN, THE MYTH, STILL LIVES (A Conversation With Luis Valdez)

When Luis Valdez' play Zoot Suit was initially performed in the downtown area of Los Angeles, it was in a theater that now occupies what was once a barrio where the pachuco roamed free. Luis Valdez' perseverance in bringing that myth to life in his successful 1978 play has now been brought to the American film screen with wonderful precision. In its transition from play to motion picture, Zoot Suit has been revised with great care to de tail. It has been honed razor-sharp. And while I found the original production somewhat un wieldy in length and somewhat bombastic in its rhetoric, both of these elements have been cut in the right places and a more mature work emerges on screen. It is a long haul from the agricultural fields around San Jos?, California, to the bright lights of Hollywoodland, but for Luis Valdez that has always been part of what he ultimately wanted to achieve and what he plans to continue achieving. However, his first love has been theater ever since he was a small child fascinated by papier-mach? masks in a rural school. In 1965, he founded El Teatro Campesino as part of the farmworker struggle in California to achieve better wages and unionization. The Teatro's plays, or actos as Valdez called them, were often full of humor and politics, and most important of all, they struck home with the farmworkers for whom they were intended. About seven years later, the Teatro separated itself from the UFW to devote itself to its craft. The troupe toured Europe with great success, won a prestigious Obie, and some of their plays including Los vendidos and La carpa de los rasquachis were produced for public television with critical success. It then fell to Valdez to produce a work that would bring his vision and creative talents into the theatrical mainstream. As he would later tell me, "... America understands individual success." Zoot Suit proved to be the vehicle that made that success possible. It also provided the first permanent home for El Teatro Campesino with its financial returns. Zoot's success also gave Valdez the opportunity to have complete artistic control over the ul timate film production of his play. He came to a suitable agreement with Universal Pictures. Originally scheduled to be filmed in 1980, the actors' strike forced the filming's postponement until January, 1981. In a little less than six months the film was completed and previewed for the press. Undoubtedly, the critics will have to find their own superlatives to describe Valdez' adap tation of his work, for although Zoot Suit was filmed at the Aquarius Theater in front of a live audience, it goes beyond anyone's conception of what can be done in such an environment and with a limited budget of around three million dollars. The decision to not make a realistic docu drama of the original Sleepy Lagoon Incident proves to be the film's saving grace. For in letting the symbolism, fantasy, and myth dominate, Zoot Suit becomes what can only be described as an uncanny recreation of the Chicano experience in the 1940s as seen by Henry Reyna and orches trated by El Pachuco. It is the first time in an American film that this has been done with such sensitivity and ?dare we use the word ?intelligence.