for ala. who went there too.
∞
Without John Huston’s 1963 film The Night of the Iguana, there would not exist today the gringo tourist mecca of Puerto Vallarta.
Before Huston & Co. arrived to transfer the prizewinning play of Tennessee Williams to the big screen, Puerto Vallarta was an unknown, “undiscovered” village just entering the age of electricity. As The Night of the Iguana became one of the most publicized film shoots in the history of the movies, the town was transformed from a sleepy backwater on the heat-plagued west coast of Mexico into one of the most attractive jetset destinations on the globe.
Ray Stark brought the Iguana property to Huston. The rookie producer had put but one film upon the screen when he acquired the rights to the play, believing it “would make a wonderful picture, especially in Mexico. John, of course, was the guru of Mexico. I just got him at a lucky time when he wanted to go back there.”
Huston had shot The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Unforgiven in Mexico and had planned to lens The Misfits there until overruled by that film’s writer/producer, Arthur Miller.
Williams had specified Acapulco as the location of his play, but Huston scoffed at the notion of staging his film there. He sought a place more wild and forlorn, one that would reflect the torment of the work’s characters, particularly protagonist T. Laurence Shannon.
This defrocked clergyman, locked out of his church for fornicating with a young parishioner, finds himself adrift, awash in alcohol, reduced to escorting elderly churchwomen on fourth-rate bus tours through fifth-rate sites in Mexico and the southwest US. The Night of the Iguana is, in Huston’s words, the story “of a man, desperate and full of despair, at the end of his rope.”