WHAT ABOUT BOB

60 YEARS AGO IN MEXICO: TALE OF AN IGUANA
By Bob Schulman

Robert M. Schulman was one of the most prolific travel writers of the last many decades. Born in Brooklyn,Bob passed away at age 84 in Denver, CO in December 2017. His contribution to the travel industry started in 1993, he was one of the principal founders of Frontier Airlines, serving as the airline’s VP of Corporate Communications. Prior to his work for Frontier, Bob was a PR exec for Reno Air and before that for an earlier version of Frontier, Eastern Airlines and Mohawk Airlines. He grew up in Malibu, graduated from California State University at Long Beach and served in the U.S. Army in Korea during the Korean War. His passion for travel and writing about the Caribbean and Mexico led him to rare and popular destinations. His stories appear in dozens of publications including the New York Times, the Huffington Post and Watchboom.com, the precursor to European World Travel. Bob was a member of the Society of American Travel Writers and is survived by his wife and two sons. We bring you Bob’s inimitable travel reviews, writing that has no shelf life, to enrich your own journeys.

Go behind the scenes of the troubled filming of the movie classic, Night of the Iguana. Find out how the flick’s famous director John Huston used a daring threat to get the film back on track. And how a torrid off-screen romance between two super-stars helped turn the film’s location – a tiny Mexican fishing village – into a world-class resort.

A half-century ago a movie called Night of the Iguana was being filmed in the little Mexican village of Puerto Vallarta – and the project was going horribly wrong. It was running weeks behind schedule, mainly due to bickering between members of the cast and their take-me-alongs. Some wouldn’t even speak to each other.

Carlos Munguia, Puerto Vallarta’s official historian before he died several years ago, was a local consultant to the movie’s famous director, John Huston. “Old wounds from past romances were festering (on the set),” Mungia recalled in an interview.

Some examples: Scowling at Richard Burton, one of the stars of the movie, was actress Elizabeth Taylor, his lover who’d shown up to keep an eye on the notoriously philandering Burton. Taylor was said to be furious that Burton had brought his PR man Michael Wilding (one of Taylor’s ex-husbands) along. And Ava Gardner, another of the film’s top stars, was less than happy that co-star Deborah Kerr had shown up with her husband Peter Vietel (who at one time had been “an item” with Gardner).

Still another guy in the cast was said to be a jilted partner of a guy in the camera crew.

According to Munguia, Huston took these and other warring ex-lovers aside and gave them loaded, silver-plated pistols. “Now,” he said, “you can either shoot each other or shoot the film.”

He made his point. The production got back on schedule.

But it wasn’t the movie that drew hundreds of reporters from around the world to this tiny fishing village. It was the sizzling off-screen romance of Burton and Taylor, both larger-than-life figures – and both married to other people at the time – that made this movie worth so much ink and airtime.

Between snippets of the couple cavorting around town, the media sweetened its coverage with shots of the city’s sundrenched beaches and the old-world charm of its cobbled lanes and colonial architecture. The town got millions of dollars worth of free publicity, and it hasn’t been the same since.

Fast forward to today, and Puerto Vallarta is one of Mexico’s most popular resorts, hosting millions of visitors a year in a seemingly endless line of high-rise hotels lining the beaches of an immense, crescent-shaped bay. Together with its neighboring marketing partner, the 192-mile-long Riviera Nayarit, the area is now one of the largest resort destinations in the world.

What about the movie? Was it a hit? Released in 1964, Night of the Iguana turned out to be a blockbuster, coming in as the 10th highest grossing film that year. It scored nominations for four academy awards, one of which took an Oscar.

What did an iguana lizard have to do with the film? Shortly before the final scene, “T. Lawrence Shannon” (the rum-soaked, defrocked priest played by Burton) frees a six-foot-long iguana being held for the stewpot in a run-down hotel owned by the widowed “Maxine Faulk” (Ava Gardner’s character).

The long-tormented Shannon explains (in a metaphor for himself) to Faulk why he did it: “I just cut loose one of God’s creatures at the end of his rope … so (the lizard) could be free from panic and scamper home safe and free. An act of grace, Maxine.”

Shannon and Faulk free themselves in the last scene when they decide to couple up at the hotel and look out for each other.

_{First printed in WatchBoom.com December 2013}