There is a moment near the end of Champion, Joe Eckardt's award-winning documentary about iconic Mexican-American actor Danny Trejo, when Trejo says, "I'm the best Danny I can be today. And tomorrow I'm going to be a better Danny. And by the time you see this video, I'll be great!"
Trejo laughs. It's a self-deprecating laugh, but the truth is, there are a lot of people who already think Danny Trejo is pretty great, and it has nothing to do with the nearly 200 movies and TV shows he's appeared in, or that he's about to blast his way onto the big screen as the star of one of the most eagerly anticipated action movies of the year, Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis's bruising Grindhouse spinoff Machete, opening Friday, September 3rd. (To read my article about the film, click here)
As shown in Eckardt's documentary, what makes Trejo so remarkable is his own powerful back story and his passion for helping others. A former gang banger and ex-con who has done hard time in California's toughest prisons, Trejo views his celebrity as simply another useful tool in his crusade to keep young people from making the same destructive choices he once made.
"Acting is like the biggest hook that I've ever had," Trejo explains in the film, "because my passion is talking to kids. My passion is to keep kids from going down the same road I did...Any time I walk onto a school campus, the kids that don't usually listen want to hear what I've got to say. So that's been an absolute blessing, that's almost a gift from God. Like saying 'Here, I'm going to make you this person so these guys will listen to you.' And they do."
One of the reasons they listen to Trejo is that he has the kind of street credentials few people are able to accumulate without ending up dead or in prison. That the former child addict who smoked his first joint at the age of 8 and was mainlining heroin by the time he was 12 is alive at all, let alone about to star in a major movie, is extraordinary even by the outlandish standards of Hollywood happy endings.
One might even call it a miracle.
"I'm not ashamed to say that without God, I wouldn't be here," says Trejo in the film. "In fact," he adds, "I'm proud to say it, I'm sorry I said I'm not ashamed. I'm very proud to say that without God I wouldn't be here."
Champion, which was written by Eckardt's co-producer Cecily Gambrell and won Best Documentary at the 2005 Phoenix Film Festival, tells Trejo's story mostly through his own sometimes painfully raw recollections, with occasional asides from a handful of the many stars he's worked with over the years such as Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Steven Buscemi, and director Robert Rodriguez.
A film consisting largely of somebody talking about themselves might ordinarily bore the chrome off a hubcap, however Danny Trejo is no ordinary subject. When it comes to tough guys, they don't come much tougher than Trejo. At the height of his career as a gang banger and armed robber, he was like The Expendables all rolled into one, except those guys were play acting and Trejo wasn't.
"We had shootouts from car to car," Trejo says matter-of-factly. "But if you're dead drunk, and you wake up the next day and your car's full of bullet-holes, you're like wow, must've had a good time! You're all full of blood and you're just praying to God it's not yours, but if you stay drunk enough, you don't care whose it is."
"My gang consisted of nothing but guys that had been thrown out of other gangs. For whatever reason, like too violent, or drunks, or coke fiends...we would go into parties and everybody would leave because of the reputation and the violence that we brought with us. And at that time a lot of people weren't carrying guns. We did."
"We had a lot of pistols," Trejo says wryly. "And you don't really want to mess with somebody who's got a lot of pistols."
When Trejo tells his hair-raising stories about robbing liquor stores with live grenades just for kicks, or how he used to walk into rival gang parties by himself, hoping that somebody would start something--he does so without a hint of irony or braggadocio. "You've got to remember," he says, "people aren't scared of tough guys. People are scared of crazy people."
That craziness evolved as a survival mechanism for Trejo, who grew up in the LA suburb of Pacoima surrounded by drugs and violence, with a father whose only physical contact usually came at the end of a balled-up fist. "I got straight-out punched," says Trejo. "There were times when he almost choked me unconscious."
Danny's first arrest came at the age of 10, when he was charged with assault and battery after accidentally hitting a neighborhood girl during a game of hit the bat.
"It was a game we used to play in the middle of the street," Danny explains. "She ran into the house screaming 'Danny hit me with a bat!', so all of a sudden the police came and I took off!"
It wasn't long before they caught up with Danny. For the 10-year old Trejo, it was a harsh introduction to a criminal justice system that he would come to know well.
"When they would arrest you, they would take you to Georgia Street," Trejo recalls. "Every Monday they shipped you out to juvenile hall, so if you got busted on Tuesday, you sat in Georgia Street until the following Monday. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Georgia Street got people from all over Los Angeles....so all of a sudden, you had three hundred guys in a room built for sixty. It got pretty intense."
It was the first of many run-ins that Danny would have with the cops, and as a youthful offender he quickly learned an unusual set of survival skills.
"You started realizing real quick, only the strong are going to survive here, now how do I become a strong guy? You grab somebody by the neck and bite them, and all of a sudden people want to leave you alone. It's wait a minute, this guy's nuts!"
The one bright spot in young Danny's life was his uncle Gilbert, who was only about six years older than Trejo, and was more like an older brother than an uncle. A charming, charismatic tough guy who looked a lot like Charles Bronson, it was Gilbert who introduced Danny to the anesthetizing joys of weed and smack, and who later initiated him into the world of drug-dealing and armed robbery.
"He was kind of the outcast," explains Trejo, "and that was the guy that I followed. He was going to juvenile hall and getting into trouble, and using drugs, and so I just fell right into it. He was like my road dog." Trejo chuckles. "We went to the penitentiary together, we did robberies together, we literally did everything together."
It was during this period that Danny met a man named Eddie Bunker, a shrewd career criminal who would later become a successful novelist and screenwriter. Bunker, who died in 2005 shortly after being interviewed for Eckardt's documentary (he was 71), is known to most people as a writer and actor. In the 70s and 80s he published the acclaimed crime novels No Beast So Fierce, The Animal Factory, Dog Eat Dog, and Little Boy Blue, and later appeared as a supporting actor in such films such as Andrey Konchalovskiy's Runaway Train (1985), which he had written the screenplay for, and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), where he played the mustachioed "Mr. Blue."
When Trejo met Bunker in the early 60s, Bunker was masterminding robberies, the plans for which he would then sell to guys like Danny's uncle Gilbert. "I used to plan robberies and sell them," Bunker explains in the documentary. "And I sold his uncle Gilbert a few robberies. Three or four, I don't know."
According to Trejo, the robberies eventually became as addictive as the cash for Danny's uncle. "He'd have eighteen thousand dollars in his pocket and go rob a liquor store for eighty bucks."
Gilbert's influence wasn't all bad, though. He taught Danny how to box, a skill that would serve Trejo well during his subsequent stints at Folsom, Soledad, and San Quentin, where he not only survived, he excelled, going on to become lightweight and welterweight champion of every institution he was in. The boxing earned him respect, but prison life was hardly a cakewalk, even for the quick-fisted Trejo.
"You've got to understand," Trejo emphasizes, "prison is the only environment in the world where you're going to be either predator or prey. It's simple. The choice is yours. And you might make the choice to be a predator, and I might make the choice to make you prey. It's a constant reinventing of yourself every day, to let people know, yo, don't mess with me, man, because I'll kill you."
Eventually Danny's luck ran out, such as it was. After spending over a decade in and out of institutions and prisons, Trejo's dark night of the soul came in 1968 at Soledad prison, where he was doing a five-year stretch for selling sugar to undercover Federal narcotics agents.
"Cinco de Mayo was when I went to the hole in Soledad," Trejo grimly reflects. "There was a riot in Soledad, and me, Ray Pacheco and Henry Quijada went to The hole."
In prison terminology, "The hole" meant solitary confinement, something Trejo describes as "hell on the installment plan."
"Because what they have just decided is that they can't control you, and this is prison."
The trouble had started when Trejo, Pacheco and Quijada were watching a prison baseball game. Danny began joking with Pacheco that the third baseman was going to "beat his ass." Pacheco, who wasn't thinking clearly due to recent shock treatments, suddenly left the bleachers and went after the ballplayer, after which, in Trejo's words, "all hell broke loose."
In the aftermath of the melee, Trejo, Pacheco and Quijada were charged with attacking a guard, a coach, and a ballplayer. Under California law in the 1960s, judges had enormous latitude when passing sentences for crimes committed in prison. Because Trejo was an incarcerated multiple offender, he could have been sentenced to life imprisonment if convicted on any one of the charges. Trejo was facing three.
"I was sitting in the hole," says Trejo, "and it's like I knew, it's all over. It's just done, I'm through. I'm 24 years old and I'm through."
With no hope and nowhere to turn, Trejo uttered a simple prayer. "I said God, if you're there, then it's going to be alright. And if you're not, I'm screwed. And that was my prayer. I've never forgotten it. And that was just a complete turning point in my life."
And a miracle happened. The guard refused to testify. Of the other two guys, one couldn't be found and the other said he didn't know who had hit him. The charges were dropped.
"For any of you wondering if God works, man..." Trejo stops talking, temporarily overcome.
It's a powerful thing to see a man as fearless and formidable as Danny Trejo humbled by the unknowable. It happens several times in Eckardt's film, usually when Trejo talks about the miracle at Soledad.
The first thing Danny did was to sign on with Alcoholics Anonymous. At the time he was still in solitary confinement, and had only half an hour each day when he could walk around the track in the exercise yard. He used the time to meet with his prison AA counselor.
Years earlier, Trejo had been to an AA meeting, though entirely by accident. He was 15 at the time. He and a group of friends had decided to crash what they thought was a party. Danny, who was already wasted, had walked through the door carrying three bottles of wine and a half pint of whiskey. To Trejo's surprise, the boys were invited to stay.
"This guy whispered the curse of Alcoholics Anonymous," Trejo remembers. "He said 'Danny, if you leave, you'll either die, go insane, or go to jail,' and it took me about twelve years, but I definitely proved that guy right. I went to jail, I went to jail, I went to jail."
Trejo was in the hole from May 5 through August 23rd, 1968. He walked out of Soledad almost a year to the day later, on August 22nd, 1969, and never looked back. The first thing he did was go to an AA meeting.
"I think that's one of the reasons that I'm still out," Trejo says. "If it wasn't for God and twelve step programs, there's no way I'd be here."
But for Trejo, attending AA meetings wasn't enough.
"I had to get out of myself," he explains. "I had to start helping other people, because prison makes you so self-centered, so into yourself--you have to protect yourSELF...and I was told the only way I was ever going stay out of prison was to start helping other people. So that's what I started doing."
Trejo volunteered as a suicide prevention counselor and later went to work for LA's Narcotics Prevention Program before becoming a professional drug counselor.
"I didn't set out to be an actor, I was a drug counselor," says Trejo. "I worked for Western Pacific Rehab in Glendale. I still work for them...we have seven detoxes throughout Los Angeles. We detox drug addicts."
"Danny is one of the shining examples of someone who went through it all and came out the other side, and now shares his experiences to heal people," says friend Dennis Hopper, who also appears in the film. "The work that he does in AA and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, just tremendous work. He's probably gotten more people sober than anybody I know." (Dennis Hopper died of prostate cancer in May 2010. He was 74.)
Trejo's old friend Eddie Bunker echoes the sentiment. "That's one of the reasons I helped him at the start, because he's done so much for other people. He takes people that are homeless, like drunks and ex-convicts and he'll put them up at his house for awhile until they get on their feet, and he'll take them to AA."
It was Danny's tireless work as a drug counselor that led to his unexpected shot at the movies. One night at eleven o'clock, one of the young guys Danny was counseling called up to say that he needed help. He was on a job where a lot of his coworkers were using drugs, and he was tempted to use. He wondered whether Danny could come down to support him. "Sure," Danny said. He drove down to the work site and found himself on the set of the movie Runaway Train, with Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. The guy Danny was counseling was a production assistant on the film.
"They had all these guys from like Brentwood and Bel-Aire and Westwood," says Trejo, "and they were all dressed up like convicts, and they had fake tattoos, and they'd come up to me and go 'Hey, does this look hard?' And I'd go 'Yeah, you'd be somebody's wife in prison!'"
Another person on set that night was ex-con Eddie Bunker, who had written the screenplay for the film, and who had previously done time with Trejo. Bunker had seen Trejo win the welterweight boxing championship at San Quentin, so when he learned that the director needed somebody to give boxing lessons to Eric Roberts, he immediately recommended Danny. "I told Eric and the director, Konchalovsky--they had several guys lined up--I said 'take the Mexican with the tattoo.'"
Trejo was immediately hired as Roberts's trainer. What's more, when Konchalovskiy got a look at Trejo's spectacular tattoos--most notably that of a girl wearing a large sombrero emblazoned across his chest--he immediately cast Trejo to play a convict in the film.
"I told him to go get a SAG card with the money," says Eddie Bunker, "because he was eligible. And that's what started him. And I told him his face is going to be his fortune, and it's true."
Machete director Robert Rodriguez concurs. "Actors are usually known for being probably too good-looking. What's good with Danny is that he's got a great-looking face in a different way. And he makes you feel like he's the real deal, which he is. You can't always act that. He just is that."
"He's about as tough a looking guy as you're ever going to run into," says Dennis Hopper with a chuckle. "And those tattoos help."
The Runaway Train gig led to other jobs, and soon Danny was getting calls to play similar parts in other films. Trejo's dangerous appearance made him a popular choice for casting directors whenever they needed someone to play a thug, a convict or a badass.
"I was just inmate #1," Trejo laughs, "or the thug, or gangster #1, or #2. I figured as long as I could stay in the first one, two or three, I had a career going."
And Danny didn't have to pretend. He was the real deal, and he looked it. If anything, Trejo had to work hard to seem less intimidating.
"They want to make sure that you're no problem on a movie set," says Trejo. "Especially me, because I look like a bad guy--so for me, I have to be extra cautious and extra polite, so I don't scare anybody."
"The movies don't want tough guys," Bunker explains. "They want guys who can act tough when they say 'shoot.'"
After his appearance in Runaway Train (1985), Trejo worked steadily in film and TV, appearing in almost 200 movie and television productions over the next 25 years, carving a career for himself as a reliable actor who could take direction and with whom everybody enjoyed working. During that time, Trejo apparently only came close to getting into a fight on one occassion, with a certain movie star whom Trejo won't mention.
"one day he was going to punch a star in the eye," relates old friend Eddie Bunker. "The guy got really sh**ty with him, and he called me up. And I said okay, but first what you do is, you take your SAG card and cut it up, know what I mean? Because if you punch a star out in the middle of a shoot, you're not going to work again. So he uses charm now."
In 1995, Robert Rodriguez cast Trejo in the role of the knife-wielding assassin Navajas in Desperado, Rodriguez's big-budget followup to his small indie actioner, El Mariachi.
"I was casting for that," Rodriguez says, "and he walked into the room with such charisma and presence. I was looking for somebody to be the knife-throwing guy. As soon as I saw him I said, oh this is him, and I handed him the knife."
Desperado would be the first of several Rodriguez films in which Trejo would play a prominent supporting role, including the Desperado sequel Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which Rodriguez brought Trejo back after killing his character off in the first film. (In Desperado, Trejo's character was named Navajas, or "knives"; in Mexico he was Cucuy, or "Boogeyman.")
I had to bring him back," explains Rodriguez, "because I was shooting in high definition for the first time, and I thought, if I'm shooting a Sergio Leone closeup of anybody it should be Danny's face. That's a landscape in itself."
Trejo also appeared in Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) as Mexican vampire bartender named Razor Charlie, and in Rodriguez's three Spy Kids movies as a character called "Machete," though the character is no relation to the title character of Rodriguez's upcoming action film.
In the keenly anticipated Machete, opening on Friday, September 3rd, Trejo plays a rogue Mexican Federale and former CIA asset who is set up to be the fall guy in an assassination plot and ends up battling hit men, border vigilantes, and a ruthless Mexican druglord, played by none other than Steven Seagal. The film features Trejo's first starring role, and was based on a faux movie trailer Rodriguez had created--starring Trejo--as one of several "coming attractions" sandwiched between Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Rodriguez's Planet Terror in their retro double feature, Grindhouse.
As evidenced in Eckardt's documentary, Trejo is philosophical about his success as an actor.
"This film industry is like catching lightning in a bottle. I've watched kids train their whole lives trying to get into this thing, and if you don't have a certain amount of luck with the talent--I mean, you can be the most talented sucker in the world, but you gotta have that little break, that little luck, you've got to run into an Eddie Bunker."
Trejo is also convinced that none of it would have happened were it not for his pivotal decision, long ago, to become a giver rather than a taker.
"When I devoted my life to helping other people," Trejo says, "that's when things started getting better for me. Everything good that has happened in my life has happened as a direct result of helping someone else. Everything."
Great as the movie business has been to Danny, he makes it clear over the course of Eckardt's documentary that his true passion is helping others avoid the mistakes he once made. Trejo views his film success as simply another valuable tool in his mission to keep at-risk kids out of jail. He still works as a drug counselor, and spends much of his free time giving talks at prisons and juvenile detention facilities, hoping to make a difference in the lives of those who've chosen the hard path he once traveled.
"Whenever we go and do a movie," says Rodriguez, "he always goes and finds the worst high school and goes and speaks."
"I go to juvenile hall up in Sylmar," says Trejo, "I'm trying to tell them that they're booking a loser. The train that they're on ends in Folsom and San Quentin and the gas chamber, and unless you change your life around, that's where you're going to end up."
Trejo doesn't spend a lot of time patting himself on the back over the work he does, however the rewards are clearly evident whenever he talks about it.
"God, there's no more blessing than when you're talking, and you see some kid almost in tears because you're telling his story. And afterwards he comes up and says 'Hey, can I call you?', and 'Yeah, call me, man!'"
At one point in Champion, Danny takes the filmmakers on one of his periodic visits to San Quentin, a place he knows a thing or two about.
"Where I became an actor was standing on this yard, scared to death," he tells the camera, "knowing that the Mexicans were going to fight the blacks, and having not to act scared. Keeping a four-inch piece of steel in your pants and trying to act like I'm okay."
Later, Trejo visits his old cell, and sits on his old bunk.
"This is like overwhelming," he says, staring. "I know you can't catch this on camera, but right now I want to hug my wife, and I want to hug my kids. This is about four by nine. I can remember this being my world...I can't really even begin to tell somebody how this feels now, after being out of here for so long, but...I almost think I'm hyperventilating."
Trejo laughs. One of the most surprising revelations in Eckhardt's film is Danny's sense of humor. When Trejo's face, rugged as the Andes, cracks into a jagged sideways smile for one of his rumbling chuckles, one marvels at how a man who has been ground through the rockpile of drugs and violence and prison the way Trejo has is capable of laughing at all, yet laugh he does, and often. Whether born of existential nervousness or the simple joy of being alive, Trejo's buoyant wry humor is itself a kind of inspiration.
At one point in the film, Trejo takes writer/producer Cecily Gambrell on a walking tour of his old neighborhood, pointing out the places he used to hang out, where he used to deal drugs, even a couple of the markets he robbed back in the day. A few people on the street vaguely recognize him, but they aren't sure: he has cleverly shaved off his signature moustache, which would have made him instantly recognizable. This way, he's able to blend into the street.
The lack of facial hair doesn't fool everybody, though. A Hispanic mother with a young daughter asks for his autograph, which he gladly gives. "I've seen you in another movie," she says, flashing a thumbs-up. "Keep moving forward for our people!"
Walking away, Danny smiles at the camera and laughs. "Did you hear what she said?"
Trejo clearly doesn't take himself too seriously, but neither does he take his celebrity for granted. Urban Hispanic youth have never had such a strong and unashamedly Hispanic role model before, and it's a part that he seems humbled and honored to play. In the barrios of LA and New York, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of a guy like Danny Trejo.
Near the end of Champion, Trejo is shown accepting the 2004 Al Jeffries Award for his work with young addicts and alcoholics, after which he addresses the San Fernando Valley chapter of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
"I honestly believe there's just two kinds of people in the world," Trejo tells the rapt audience. "Those that want to make a difference, and those that want to take up space."
It's pretty clear which one Trejo is.
"In order to have a good life," he says in a voiceover, "I honestly believe that you've got to help people. You've just got to. You have to help people. You look at people, and they're struggling and struggling and struggling, and they stay in this rut. It may be success--a rut of success--but they don't find happiness until they start helping other people and start sharing. Until they start going to the high schools and the junior high schools. To the juvenile halls, to the youth authorities, to the penitentiaries. And that's what I want to do, I want to make a difference. I want people to know Danny Trejo as 'Hey, that's that guy that helps.'"
Thinking about Trejo, a certain Bible passage comes to mind - Matthew 25: 34-40:
Then the King will tell those on his right hand, 'Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.'
Then the righteous will answer him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you; or thirsty, and give you a drink? When did we see you as a stranger, and take you in; or naked, and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?'
'The King will answer them, 'Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'
Trejo doesn't spend a lot of time preaching about religion, but it seems to me he's more of a Christian than a lot of people who wave Bibles around and talk about Jesus.
After Machete opens this Friday, a lot more people will know the name Danny Trejo. Rodriguez's blazingly violent actioner is poised to be a smash hit this Labor Day weekend, and will likely lay waste to everything else at the box office. But regardless of whether the movie lands Trejo on Hollywood's A-list, for the people whom Danny has helped, and continues to help--behind the scenes and out of the limelight, on the street, where it counts--Trejo is already a major star.
"He's a champion," says Dennis Hopper. "A champion at whatever he does."
Fans interested in learning more about Danny Trejo and his amazing life and work--and there are bound to be a lot more after Machete opens on Friday--can order a copy of Eckardt's eye-opening documentary through the official Champion website.
Champion was directed by Joe Eckhardt and written and co-produced by Cecily Gambrell. The film won the Copper Wing award for Best Documentary at the 2005 Phoenix Film Festival.
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