Leon Ichaso, a prolific writer-director whose work in television and features stretches back some two decades, actually soldiered alongside Miguel Pinero, the ex-con Nuyorican playright-poet-actor who’s the subject of his new biographical film, some years ago on “Miami Vice.” But having been warned about Pinero’s penchant for recklessly using people and circumstances, he had no desire to get together with him. “I had heard, while working on ‘Miami Vice,’ of Pinero sneaking into the wardrobe department and stealing two hundred pairs of shoes, and stuff like that,” Ichaso recalled during a recent Dallas interview. “And people were saying, ‘Watch out. Pinero’s gonna drop by to say hello–hide your wallet.’ I did meet him in New York City in 1981. I was with a friend in Central Park, and this guy crawled out from underneath some bushes, scratching. This man had fallen asleep on an anthill. It was insane. Then he came over to my friend and said hello. And he said, ‘I was writing a play and I passed out on that anthill.’ Then he said, ‘I gotta go, man. I gotta go to the public.’ I thought he meant the public bathroom. But he meant [Joe Papp’s] Public Theatre, which is New York’s most prestigious theatre. And my friend says, ‘That’s Miguel Pinero.'”
Pinero was a famous figure on New York’s Lower East side in the 1970s and 1980s–famous for his hard-hitting, prize-winning play “Short Eyes” (filmed in 1977), for his rough charm, for his habit of taking advantage of his friends’ generosity, and for the everything-be-damned lifestyle that brought him to an early death. (“He was totally defiant in the way he went about things,” Ichaso summed up.) Ichaso was moved to undertake a film about him partially because the subject called up memories of a favorite picture, the Alec Guinness-Ronald Neame filmization of Joyce Cary’s “The Horse’s Mouth” (1958), about a eccentric painter who marches to the beat of his own drummer. In his picture Ichaso employs a deliberately fractured, impressionistic approach to capture the artist’s own perspective on life. His objective, he explained, was “to kind of create that disorder, to maintain a kind of anarchy aesthetically, to kind of make an artistic chaos much in the way he moved–to build a structure for a man who didn’t know structure, therefore creating this style that might allow us to come close to the experience rather than watch it from afar.”
“Pinero” stars Benjamin Bratt in the title role, a casting choice which even Ichaso admits seems unlikely. (Many, including John Leguizamo, had been interested in the project but eventually dropped away.) Bratt, Ichaso remembered, had originally met with him only to say that he loved the script but “I’m not your man,” which the writer-director now sees as a clever reverse ploy that eventually persuaded him the actor was right for the part. And he has nothing but praise for Bratt’s performance.
“He immersed himself in the character of Pinero until he became unrecognizable as we know him from his previous work,” Ichaso marveled. “He was watching tapes [of Pinero] every day, until at some moment that man jumped out of the screen and into his face and into his soul.” Ichaso recalled one day when the crew was shooting on location: “Outside St. Vincent’s Hospital doing a scene, he sat on the sidewalk, ranting. And somebody came by and gave him a quarter. And it was like the biggest compliment in the world.” He added: “When the Pinero family came to the set to watch him, I remember they were touching him like [he was] a ghost.”
Many performers who knew the real Pinero–like Rita Moreno and Jaime Sanchez–appear in Ichaso’s picture, which was shot on many of the locations where the events actually happened. When asked why they, and others who had often been treated badly by so difficult a man, still felt so solicitous of his memory, the writer-director had a ready answer: “His talent. Even though his body of work does not justify this kind of grievance, people knew he was a talented man.” Joseph Papp, for example, stood beside him even through difficult times (Pinero once stole the boxoffice receipts for his own play), because he believed, in Ichaso’s words, “Here’s a guy who has a voice, who is unusual.”
The reaction to the picture from those who personally remember its subject has, Ichaso noted, been very positive. “The people that were there–that knew him [on] the Lower East Side, and the people that have come to the screenings, [say] it’s somehow an anthem to that whole movement, and to that character. Everybody was responding to the nuances, the bits and pieces, that made it real.”
“Pinero” is a Miramax Films release.