In The Perfect Game, Cheech Marin has a small part as a kindly priest. He helps organize a group of stickball-level kid baseball players in the steel town of Monterrey, Mexico, as they make it to the 1957 Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA. Getting a quick interview with Cheech Marin is more than a chance to meet someone who entertained me as a kid; it’s more than just the nostalgia for the moment of unwrapping a copy of “Big Bambu” by Cheech and Chong on Christmas morning 1972. Rather it was a chance to encounter a really irreplaceable supporting actor: the man who can rest assured that, whatever else happens, his 10 minutes of the movie will be perfection. In the right hands—this will happen some day—Cheech will find his best role.
For years, Cheech was half of the highly successful team Cheech and Chong. Currently celebrating some 30 years together, the duo is wrapping up an 18-city tour.
The perfect comedy team is a tall skinny guy and a shorter plumper guy—basically Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Somehow this kind of physically mismatched partnership illustrates the millennia-old human comedy of Body and Soul, and C and C were no exception, with Tommy Chong as addled pacific hippie who thought he was the brains, THC’d into a false stupor of serenity, and Cheech Marin as nerve-wracked, lecherous streetwise Chicano buddy, who knows the wolf is at the door and likely the cops are right behind the wolf.
Maybe Cheech and Chong were at their finest as a pair of wandering truckers in the New York City night in Scorsese’s After Hours.
As for the movies they made as stars, no argument here with the consensus that Up in Smoke (1978) is the best. I’m still tickled by passages in Still Smokin (1983) regarding Amsterdam’s Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton Film Festival (and the benighted Dutch handler addressing Cheech and Chong as “Mr. Burt and Mr. Dolly”). I wonder if the mural of these two muggles-fanciers still overlooks a canal in that city? A friendly sight it was, when one was so far from home and slightly unnerved from the hash. There’s apparently still a cafe named for Cheech and Chong slightly away from the tourist district.
Marin is busy as always: co-starring in the soon-to-be-released long version of the Mexploitation actioner Machete, originally a spurious trailer in Grindhouse; Marin will be playing the lethal Fr. Benito del Toro (“God forgives—I don’t!”). And on a more benign level, Marin will be a voice among the toys in this summer’s Toy Story 3.
METRO: Do you ever get down to San Jose?
MARIN: I like San Jose a lot. I go and hang with the peeps down there every now and then. I worked with Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, and I worked with the San Jose Art Museum, too.
METRO: Had you been a baseball fan before working on The Perfect Game?
MARIN: I’m a Dodgers fan. There was a time when baseball was my life. I was in Little League when the story of the Monterrey Industrial team happened. It was a huge story. It was just three years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, and it was the first year they allowed international teams in the Little League. I was exactly the same age as these kids. I was baseball crazy as a kid, and the Monterrey team were my heroes. I look at the picture of that Monterrey team, and my little league team looked exactly like them: little, brown, and wearing big crowned baseball hats.
METRO: What was your background, and what position did you play?
MARIN: My parents are from L.A. All my grandparents are from Mexico: Guadalajara, Tepic, Culican … and one from Tucson, back when Tucson was part of Mexico. My parents were born in East L.A., and I was born in South Central. Raised there in South Central too, but when I was about 10 we moved to Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley.
I played Little League in Granada Hills. I played shortstop and second base. I was a pesky leadoff hitter, and I stole bases. My aim was to get on base somehow and start some shit. Coincidentally—two years after I left the team, they went to Williamsport.
METRO: Where did you shoot The Perfect Game?
MARIN: We started filming in Mexico, and we were there for a while. A little bit of it was shot in Monterrey, but not much. We lost our funding and then got it back, and then we lost it again. This was a film that had nine lives. We made the whole movie twice: we started out at the beginning and then did it again. Bill (director William Dear) came in… he got the best out of the kids. The film was mainly shot in and around L.A.
METRO: The film’s made very economically, with a lot of stock footage.
MARIN: I thought they did a good job with it. There was an original film called Los pequenos gigantes (1960), that was mostly documentary. We used a little of it, the scenes of the kids at the White House meeting Eisenhower and so forth. The Monterrey players didn’t like that 1960 movie, and they made a pact saying they wouldn’t give the rights to their story away unless they all agreed on a script. It’s such a great story, you couldn’t make it up.
METRO: You’re very good at playing sinners; was it hard to play someone like this priest, who is unambiguously good?
MARIN: No. I was raised Catholic, I was an altar boy and went to Catholic school. The Mexican priests had a very different demeanor, they were avuncular to the kids. They were disciplinarians without being harsh. I wanted to convey that that he had a different relationship to the kids than the priests I’d seen in the movies. He wasn’t one of the kids, but he was kind of one of them.
METRO: Had you wanted to be a priest?
MARIN: Sure! Every kid at Catholic school at some point wants to be a priest. Most of them get over it, thank God. I had been accepted to junior seminary out of 8th grade, and that’s when I started going to parties and meeting girls, I said, ‘I dunno about this—do priests have girls? No? They don’t? Maybe I won’t be a priest in this lifetime.’
METRO: I had a catechism book that showed this little toy train set with the different stations on it, representing the different levels in the Catholic church with “monsignor,” “bishop” and so forth as little stations on the toy railway, with “Pope” at the end of the line. I thought, that’s where I’m going! I’m going straight to the top! But then I found out about girls, too. Anyway, can’t wait to see Machete.
MARIN: I play a lot of priests. I played like four priests in a row, man. I need promotion to cardinal or pope, just like that train set! Pope Cheech the First!
METRO: An all-time favorite moment: the bullhorn scene in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). Was it improvised? It’s funny as hell, but it’s also a key moment in the film: it’s when you know things are getting really, really lowdown, and you’re about to enter the worst bar in the world.
MARIN: The dialogue was written, for the most part, but not in any particular order. I knew how to do it because I’d been to TJ [Tijuana] and had seen those barkers on the sidewalk. That speech was mostly about the rhythm because I could make up any kind of pussy I wanted! I’d read it aloud at a table reading for the movie, some of the actors hadn’t shown up so I did two or three parts. I got a call from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino as soon as I got home.
I read the From Dusk Till Dawn script when I got it (pantomimes flipping the pages)—OK, they do this stuff, they do that stuff. They, whoa!, turn into vampires! This is either going to be a big cult favorite or it’s going to dump a big pail of cold water on everybody’s career. But let’s do it!
METRO: You’d met Robert Rodriguez before, yes?
MARIN: Yeah, I had done Desperado. I also knew George Clooney, because he was an actor you saw around a lot. And Tarantino, he was an actor in Desperado. Robert is an interesting director, because unlike a lot of them he operates his own camera. He looks through the viewfinder himself, so you’re making faces for him. It’s not so much about his dialogue, though the dialogue does stand up—your attitude to the camera gives Rodriguez’s films their rhythm.
METRO: Having been to the excellent show of your Chicano art collection at the DeYoung, I’m wondering if you have plans for a permanent place for it.
MARIN: I don’t know if it will be distributed among a lot of museums or one place. My kids will get some. I’m still collecting. What I want to do is keep promoting Chicano art worldwide. We just did a show in Madrid, and one in Guadalajara. And I want to send the paintings to the Pacific Rim, to Australia and Japan. I look at my next 20 years, if I live that long, and I want to spend it promoting this art. What’s important is a repetition of message. My mantra was “You couldn’t love or hate Chicano art unless you saw it.”
It used to be banned from museums because they viewed it as agit-prop folk art. My view is that these Chicano painters were world-class painters with a certain subject. If you like good painting, you’d like it. When I first started the tour, it was like “Chicano art is not art.” And then it was, like, “Chicano art is OK. But if it’s an American school of art, where does it belong in the hierarchy?” Chicano art overlaps into a lot of territories, not strictly abstract-expressionist.
METRO: Not quite West Coast art, either.
MARIN: This has almost been undetected, but we’re in the biggest wave of immigration ever in the history of this country, and 85–95 percent of it is coming from Mexico. What’s different is that once the immigrants were going straight to the Sunbelt, and now they’re going to every state—North Carolina, Mexico. Most are under 25 years old, too, prime baby-making years. So the art here is going to reflect their experience.
