'A Day Without a Mexican' Resonates 20 Years Later

Turns out life doesn’t just imitate art — sometimes it borrows the script, reboots it with National Guard checkpoints and streams it live from Los Angeles. Case in point: A Day Without a Mexican, the cheeky 2004 sci-fi satire from Mexican filmmakers Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi, in which California wakes up to find every person of Latino descent has vanished into a mysterious haze, leaving Angelenos panicking over who’s going to mow the lawns and run the kitchens. Two decades later, with ICE patrols chasing down undocumented workers at Home Depots and a real fog of fear spreading through the city, the movie suddenly seems less like farce and more like dark prophecy.

“Forget about what happens to the Latinos in the film,” Arizmendi, who starred in and co-wrote it with husband Arau, tells Rambling Reporter. “The point is what happens to you without them.”

Shot on a shoestring budget — $1.8 million, about a hundredth of what it cost to make Brad Pitt‘s swords-and-sandals tentpole Troy, which opened the same day — Mexican performed well enough at the box office, grossing about $10 million worldwide. But it made noise in other ways. As part of its guerilla marketing, the filmmakers erected a billboard in a Sav-on drug store parking lot in Hollywood that proclaimed, “On May 14th there will be no Mexicans in California.” Unsurprisingly, it got a lot of attention. “People called in to radio stations, to TV news,” says Arizmendi. “They thought it was from the KKK.” Sav-on took the sign down within a day, but by then it had put the movie on the map. “I was like, ‘Bravo,’ ” Arizmendi says.

Twenty years later, A Day Without a Mexican is having a second life — streaming on Amazon Prime and being referenced all over social media for its eerie prescience. “We love it,” says its star. “It’s like payback … in a good way.”

‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ — But the Lederhosen Are Up for Grabs

“There was no more room in the closet,” says Joel Grey — jokingly, we think. At 92, the Broadway icon (who came out as gay at 82) is preparing to auction off a lifetime of keepsakes. But more than 50 years after he first sang “Willkommen” onstage, Grey is parting with more than just memorabilia — he’s finally revealing the backstory he privately invented for Cabaret’s Emcee, the sly, seedy master of ceremonies who defined his career.

Sale of the century: *Come to the Cabaret* … and leave with Joel Grey’s top hat.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Until now, Grey has said little about who he thought the character really was. “I believed he lived alone in a two-room flat and that he made all of the Kit Kat Club girls come to his room and made love to them,” he says. “He used them. He was a real lowlife.” He also suspects the character didn’t survive the Nazis. “Because he was Jewish,” says Grey. “He was passing [as gentile], and he was living every second of his life as if he were OK.”

The Emcee’s distinctive look also has a backstory. Grey says it started with a rummage through his then-wife Jo Wilder’s makeup kit, where he found a foundation stick labeled “Juvenile Pink” — and a clump of fake lashes in the trash. “I pasted them on at 4 in the morning thinking, ‘Nobody will ever want to see this.’ ”

They did. And now, so many decades later, they can buy some of it — including the top hat, lederhosen, a cane and a tasteful colleciton of male nudes — at “Master of Ceremonies: The Joel Grey Collection,” which goes on the block June 20 at Freeman’s Hindman online and in person in Philadelphia. — Seth Abramovitch

Khaby Lame Has No Comment — Unless You’ve Got $1.2 Million

Want to ask Khaby Lame about getting deported? That’ll be $1.2 million.

According to his reps at the Dubai-based Sharks Celebrities Management, that’s the going rate for an interview with the 25-year-old Senegalese-Italian TikTok star, whose silent comedy shtick has racked up more than 162 million followers. Rambling Reporter reached out for comment after Lame was swept up in a June 6 ICE raid at the Las Vegas airport. According to immigration officials, the comic, who just a month earlier was partying at the Met Gala, “has since departed the U.S.”

“Would be more than happy to facilitate an interview with fees,” came Sharks’ prompt reply. “Khaby’s fees for media interviews is $1.2M.”

Rambling thought they were kidding. Alas, they were not. A follow-up email made that abundantly clear: “We are not interested in you or your agency and you are not permitted to mention our talent name in your fake news website,” we were instructed.

Too late! — S.A.

Where in the World Is Chet Hanks? Scheduled to Read, Texted Instead

A dog pissed on a flower installation. The bathroom line never dipped below five deep. And the vibes were somewhere between downtown book launch and conceptual prank, as On the Rag — L.A.’s buzzy new literary tabloid — celebrated its arrival at Night Gallery with a cigarette-clouded bash full of poetry, prose and potting soil.

The only thing missing? Chet Hanks.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s son had been billed as the event’s headliner, slated to read from a forthcoming memoir. But when it came time to perform, writer Kennedy Wright took the mic and explained that Chet had texted her instead: “I wanted to read a chapter from the new novel I’m writing, The Baptism of Abraxas. Can’t wait for the next one. Hope to see you there.”

There was a pause. A few chuckles. Then Wright launched into her own material, and the show went on.

Still, for a paper whose back page includes rants like “Paris sucks cock” and that counts downtown art world fixture Chris Kraus and highbrow troublemaker Rachel Kushner among its editors, a disappearing Hanks almost felt … on brand. — Oren Peleg

This story appeared in the June 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.