An acquaintance related this tale to me over lunch at Canter’s recently, and my first question was “can I share this?” He agreed to let me tell the tale, provided no names are named. He also generously shared the images below from his personal collection of bootleg knockoff foreign movie memorabilia. 

In the early 80s, an A list Hollywood director with a taste for lavish cocaine fueled soirees (let’s call him Alan Smithee) ran up some serious debt with his Bolivian connection. So serious that he was given two options to clear the books: pay it off in cash, with 30% and a finger as the weekly vig, or go to Bolivia and direct a “passion project” film for an infamous drug lord. The director, being short on funds from a nasty divorce, decided a couple of months filming in Bolivia sounded pretty good. And he’d steered big studio projects before in spite of narrow minded studio execs looking for the lowest common denominator films to fund their ab implants. The script, “Robot Asesina Del Futuro,” was awful. But he’d turned dreck into dreck-aide before, and he was confident he could do it again….

“Robot Asesina Del Futuro” was written by (or ghost written for) the drug lord, who we’ll call El Jefe Gordo, and it combined two of his cinematic passions: The Terminator, and Yoda. El Jefe Gordo believed in his black little heart that Arnold had been the only thing wrong with the original Terminator film. The movie was great, sure, but El Jefe Gordo recognized something no one else had: using Yoda as the Terminator would have added an element of incongruity that would have just pushed the film into Oscar territory. Having a big name director at his beck and call was an opportunity he didn’t intend to waste. He secured a production facility outside Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and had Smithee make travel arrangements.

El Jefe Gordo had a SFX budget, but for many scenes Yoda was played by Mexican thespian and little person Javier Borracho, wearing a paper mache head covered in green latex. As the stills below testify, the effect was uncanny. A kidnapped American missionary, Wendell Wray, was also pressed into service. Wray’s ministry centered on performing Christian puppet shows in broken Spanish, and he was as close to Frank Oz as El Jefe Gordo was going to get.

As you might imagine, the movie set off a huge kerfuffle once Hollywood found out about it. Even El Jefe Gordo was not foolhardy enough to contemplate a US release, but in those pre-internet days he figured he could stay off the radar. Alan Smithee and all the other US folks working on the movie  had nothing to gain by Hollywood finding out. After considering their options, the studios decided the publicity from legal action would be far worse than any brand damage in the South American, Asia-Pacific, or African markets from the film. 

Sadly, the fire at El Jefe Gordo’s compound in 1993 that took his life also destroyed his film vault, including the negative for Robot Assesina Del Futuro. Although a complete print is believed to exist in the hands of a private collector, so fair said collector has not chosen to share the Bolivian Terminator with the world. For now, we’ll have to make due with the production ephemera below.