“You cannot compare any of those characters to each other,” he says. The actor says he was careful not to repeat himself early in his career so that he could avoid pigeonholing. La Bamba was the first of three consecutive hits for the fledgling performer: Phillips followed up with the urban high school drama Stand and Deliver (1988) and the buddy Western Young Guns (1988). (Photo: Ron Galella Archive/Getty Images) We proved that a Latinx-centric story could be a box-office success.”Įsai Morales and Lou Diamond Phillips attending the preview party for "La Bamba" on Jat Lucy's Surfeteria in New York City. It’s still a very tough proposition to mount all-ethnic casts. It’s taken me a while to embrace that, and own it, and go … ‘We changed some minds.’ Because Hollywood sees green. “I can look back at that now and with all humility say, ‘Yeah, the amount of inclusion and diversity that we’re seeing today began with movies like La Bamba. It was a pioneer, it broke down barriers. This sort of thing hadn’t really been done at this point of time to this extent. “It was also one of the reasons we were managing our expectations. There were not many films by Latinx directors (Mexican-American filmmaker Luis Valdez), starring multicultural leads (Phillips is of Filipino, Southeast Asian and European descent) or featuring predominantly Latinx casts being financed and released. Lou Diamond Phillips performs in a scene from the film 'La Bamba.' (Photo: Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)Īside from the story, the ethnic makeup of the La Bamba cast and crew was unusual for Hollywood in the ’80s. Indeed, La Bamba grossed over $52 million and helped turn both the late Valens (who had a sting of three hits - “Come On, Let’s Go,” “Donna” and “La Bamba” - over an eight-month span between 19 before he was killed at the age of 17 in a plane crash) and Phillips into household names. This could go through the roof.’ And it did.” But we saw the movie and were like, ‘Whoa, we might be onto something here. People didn’t go, ‘Well that’s gonna be a hit!’ They didn’t know. “The expectation was, ‘OK, here’s an unknown kid from Dallas, Texas, playing an obscure Mexican American rock ‘n’ roll star basically an independent film made for $6 million,’” Phillips told Yahoo Entertainment in a recent interview (watch above) about the film, which he had auditioned for while teaching acting far from from Hollywood in Arlington, Texas. Game Changers is a Yahoo Entertainment video interview series highlighting the diverse creators disrupting Hollywood - and the pioneers who paved the way.Īccording to Lou Diamond Phillips, no one foresaw “industry-shifting box-office hit” while making La Bamba, the 1987 favorite about the tragically short life of 1950s Chicano rocker Ritchie Valens.
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