MPM cannot take credit for this hilarious music video, starring not one but four MacArthur Park residents: Miller, Tino, Orlando, and Eduardo. All we (I) did was hang out on set the day it was filmed and take notes. Following is a list of people actually responsible for Jesús, then beneath that an article I wrote for the LA Weekly about Tino for the February 19th edition. Read that here.
TINO, from the mountains of Guatemala, wakes up at five o’clock in the morning in his little MacArthur Park apartment, and prays to God for a job. Then he walks across the street to Home Depot in search of work, any work: construction, carpentry, garden work.
That same morning, Miller Duvall, from the suburbs of San Jose, also goes to Home Depot. He’s in search not of work, but of someone to co-star in his music video Jesús. In the video, Jesús is a kind and humble worker capable of construction, carpentry, garden work.
He is also someone with gold teeth, which is really how Tino got the job and ended up co-starring in his first music video. All four of his front teeth are gold. “Miller liked my grill,” Tino said later on, blushing. He tried not to smile then, but failed, and there in the bright lights of the studio, his teeth sparkled and shone.
IT is mainly with regret that Tino talks about his decision to come to the US. In fact within only a couple of weeks it was clear to him that he should not have come at all. America was mainly a dirtier, more expensive place than he had imagined. It mainly did not live up to the myth. It mainly did not justify the roughly $7,000 he paid the coyote to get here, the days in the desert, the 13 hours spent squished beneath a spare tire in a truck. But then something like this happens and Los Angeles is again a magical place— the sort of place where a man can be discovered and made a star on the same day that started at Home Depot.
And it was not only Tino that was discovered in the Day Laborer Center in MacArthur Park, but two others, with two different looks so that t in the end Duvall had, “gold-tooth man, mustache-man, and kind-of-like dark guy.” The three of them were asked to dress as gardeners, and so they arrive on set dressed distinctly Western. They wear their nicest dress shirts and belt buckles and, in Tino’s case, a cowboy hat.
Tino is nervous. He confesses that he doesn’t know how to dance or act. It is a great relief, then, when he learns that all he has to do in the opening scene is unload gardening equipment from a truck in the driveway while the central action unfolds elsewhere, on the doorstep of where Duvall’s character lives. The action is quick: Christian missionaries come to Duvall’s house to proselytize about Jesus, who is nowhere to be seen, but then Jesús and the other gardeners appear in the driveway, and the song begins:
I may not know Jesus
But I know a guy named Jesús
He mows my lawn on Sunday
And I know he’s got no excuse
To not take care of his family
And be the best man he can be
I may not know Jesus
But Jesús is good enough for me
In the song, Duvall and Jesús are very close. In practice, Duvall and Tino are slightly awkward. They are at the Cha Cha Lounge in Silver Lake, their third location of the day, when Duvall calls for “a real bro down.” There will be hugs and high fives and foosball.
“Jugando, divertido,” Duvall explains in poorly-pronounced Spanish, waving his hands in mime. “Listo?”
The song starts to play and Duvall, now in performance-mode, throws his arms around a shy Tino, squeezing him in a full embrace. Tino blushes and starts laughing. “Cut,” the director of photography yells. “That was horrible, that was crap.”
Duvall turns to the translator for help. “This is the part of the music video where they can be themselves the most,” he says. “So far they’ve just been gardeners.”
They had been gardeners at the Cha Cha and at a multi-million dollar mansion in the hills above Los Feliz before that. Later, they would be gardeners at a studio downtown, performing choreographed dance sequences with weed-wackers, leaf-blowers, and maracas. In places like these, it is often almost too much to consider some of the facts of Tino’s life. But some of the crew members cannot help themselves and they consider them anyways. They consider that Tino married his wife when she was 14 years old. (He was 21 then; now he is 37.) They consider the photograph of Tino’s four young children that he carries with him inside a little, plastic keychain, a detail which Duvall says is “fuckin’ heartbreaking.” They consider that Tino does not know how to read or write, and was 26 before he learned how to sign his own name. He has never attended a single day of school; once when he was little, he said, teachers visited his house, and his parents hid him in the bathroom because they needed him on the ranch. The production manager shakes her head, shocked, and says, “This must be so surreal.”
But in fact, it wasn’t. Tino has always known that movies are made in Los Angeles. (His favorites are Rambo, Terminator, and Selena.) When he was 11, he dreamt that he would come here and make one. It seemed fitting, then, when, after only a week in LA, he stumbled upon a camera crew filming a police chase in MacArthur Park. (He even asked one of the crew members how he might work on a set, but decided against going to the address she gave him because he doesn’t know how to read.) It seemed fitting to Tino that Duvall found his actors at the Home Depot: Home Depot is the only place Tino knows of in Los Angeles where employers find workers. It even seemed appropriate that he come dressed as a gardener for a song that is obviously about Jesus. He connects: “Like campesinos, Jesus was poor and humble.”
Tino is tired and weary. It is nine o’clock and the band is at their fourth and final location, a huge studio with a huge white backdrop to frame the dance numbers, and there is trouble with the wave: one of the backing men is apparently not on cue, and, on top of that, he is not raising the rake high enough so that the wave takes shape. The director of photography stops his camera and turns to his assistant. “Really?” he asks.
When the wave shot is wrapped, the director of photography cancels the snowflake sequence. “Is it really that late?” asks a disappointed Duvall.
“It’s not a question of time,” the director of photography says. “But of reality.” He sends the backing band home. They are each paid $100, more or less the same amount of money that they would make in a day’s work of construction, carpentry, or garden work.
On the drive back to MacArthur Park, the men are strangely quiet. They don’t want to talk about the music video with each other and they really don’t want to talk about the music video with anyone else. “I don’t want anyone to think that I have a lot of money,” the dark one says, and both Tino and the man with the mustache nod in agreement.
The production assistant pulls into the parking lot of the Food 4 Less in her boyfriend’s bright red Audi, and Tino gets out of the car quickly to walk home. He needs to rest so that he can again get up at five o’clock the next morning, pray for work, and then go to Home Depot to find it. This has not changed, but other things will.
Months later, when Duvall visits him at the Home Depot to show him the video, Tino says that a number of the other men will no longer talk to him. “They hate me,” he says. “They think I’m a star.”
epilogue: Tino has since returned home Guatemala, tragically, a much poorer man than when he arrived. His work at Home Depot slowed to the point that he was not able to send any money home, and when he left in August, he estimated that he owed his Coyote more than $10,000. He was likely going to pay the bulk of this off by moving his wife and four children off the ranch and onto the streets of Guatemala City.