Boriqua Noir...

Frightened by the cautionary nightmares of women like Louise Brooks, La Lupe, and Lupe Velez—typical examples of early starlets carelessly careening through their careers at the mercy of their beauty, tempers, and talent—I have been able to finally make sense of the story of my own crabby grandmother, the forgotten B-movie star, Kitten Lopez. Forget “The Method”; they used only the “Boriqua Noir” acting approach in her movies: the Assistant Director would poke her with the umbrella toothpick from her “water” glass, then jump back and roll the cameras. While it beautifully showcased her only emotion—fury—it added an often confusing, yet complex, note to tender love scenes.

Ironically, she’s most famous for the first Latina biker movie no one ever saw, “All Witnesses Eventually Die.” Because she thought her fanny looked too big, she refinanced her Palm Springs estate and bought up all the remaining copies on the eve of its release in 1953, the same year Brando starred in “The Wild One.” She kept the cans in her garage, hidden in shame under gallons of turquoise semi-gloss.

This from a woman who used to cat-fight Judy Garland for roles before Garland had that first little comeback in her late-twenties. (The sticky shot glasses and broken fingernails from those fights have been passed down in the family like silver.)

Never much of an original actress, we all assumed Grandma Kitten was whispering “Rosebud” all those decades on her death bed, but it wasn’t until she crawled out of bed, unsheathed her long, ragged fingernails and dragged herself over to the garage, where she pointed at the pile of paint cans and clearly shrieked, “Dutchboy!” For the first time in decades, we finally understood what she was saying. But not why. We didn’t understand¬—or really care by that point¬—why her last words were the Dutchboy brand of paint. Not even when she collapsed with her arms locked around a can of turquoise semi-gloss, coughed a delicate little choke, and died with a peaceful look of irritation.

We just assumed she was as crazy as she ever was—until years later when turquoise came back into style and we decided to paint the house. As soon as we discovered hidden cans of film underneath the first layer of turquoise semi-gloss gallons, we unraveled strips of film up to the light. Once we realized what we’d found, we held the cans over our head and danced them around what we thought was a bonfire, but were actually the nitrates bursting into flames.

I thought there was enough tonic in my vodka tonic to douse the flames made worse by the vodka ratio, but with 80:20 of vodka to tonic, it’s amazing that we even rescued an estimated .05% of the film. What remains looks like nothing more than a few black and white strips of negatives from snapshots taken during another secret Latina motorcycle road trip in 1950s. Kitten Lopez herself would’ve said, “Hush shut. It’s no use crying over spilled gimlets. Make me a martini that’d sooner evaporate instead.” (Everyone was a cynical drunk back in the ‘fifties. Even the children were drunks.)

But as I’m still relatively young—and have Grandma Kitten’s full liquor cabinet, along with the monthly stipend she left me—I have the freedom to turn on the soaps and spend all the time it’ll take spackling together what little is left of “All Witnesses Eventually Die” with refurbished writings, drawings, music, duct tape, and chicken blood. Luckily, I have no artistic goals of my own to waste my time pursuing or distract me (usually a lack of goals or talent never stops a Lopez).

Whatever comes of its reincarnation will surely be a better picture than the original 1953 version, as it’s just too much to pull off a good first Latina Biker Movie in the speedy, 18 frames-a-second, speedy dog-year life span of an actress’s career. If you’re A-list, it takes a Village to be beautiful, keep your legs and arm pits smooth, have a kid who wants to eat on a regular basis, and a husband who needs to feel like A Man at least twice a week—all while trying to maintain the heart-wrenching believability of a real human being. If you’re a B-movie actress without said Village, and stuck caring for a few soul-sucking dependents to boot, it might take a few upcoming generations of heirs to improve upon your original performance and box office take. Besides, the taxes on this estate are murder.

No one can find the original screenplay of“All Witnesses Eventually Die,” and in The Mother of all Ironies, any witnesses who would even remember the original story, are either dead or murdered. Some whisper that it’s no accident that Bob Crane and Paul Lynde died within years of each other, as they both had walk-on parts in “All Witnesses Eventually Die” as youths. The movie has become almost mythical. Some even have the audacity to claim it never existed in the first place.

It was rough going there for a moment during Kitten Lopez’s final years, but now we know she wasn’t as crazy as it seemed (they never are, are they?), and I still remember the bedtime stories my mother used to tell me about Grandma Kitten. I tend to get the Hollywoodland stories confused with tales from The Brothers Grimm: Did Alex DeRenzy smell the blood of an Englishman? Or was it the dirty sheets after his first porn shoot? And was it Robert Evans who trod on a loaf? Or one of his many wives? What’s so wrong with Door #3?

In the interest of recreating the most accurate script, truest to the original “All Witnesses Eventually Die,” I have spent the past seven years recreating the testimonies of dead witnesses by meditating, going to séances, and lap dancing spirit channelers. I took screenplay dictation from The Great Beyond, one vulgar, spittle-filled diatribe at a time. (Ramtha totally soaked me for Act Two.)

And as we resurrected these not-quite-so-dead witnesses, the irony was not lost on us. We do nothing but search for all of life’s ironic moments that give it the post-modern twist that makes us feel like we’re giving back while still consuming. So with the historical 80/20 hindsight that also realizes margarine’s unhealthy now, we get to figure out the kind of movie we’d like to see from 1953 with the scraps of footage that remain…

…Who said that time is linear, anyway?