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Playing card of actor and director Romain Fielding from an unknown date-2008.

While no known print of "The Life of General Villa" exists the British Film Institute in London has a reel of Mutual Film fragments called "Mexican War Pictures."

And another reel with the same name exists in the BFI of a Lubin Films production shot by director Romaine Fielding in 1913, with lackluster fighting scenes staged for the camera.

"In 1916 Lubin west coast director, Wilbert Melville met Villa, filmed him and signed him to a movie contract. The footage does not survive and since Lubin went bankrupt a few months later, nothing ever came of the contract. It was probably just a publicity stunt anyway."

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...