$panish Blood: The True Story of Narcos, Music & Money

He came to Los Angeles to make movies. Instead, he found himself directing the soundtrack to a world of fame, fortune, narcos-and spectacularly bad decisions.In the explosive Latin music scene of the 1990s, an ambitious young filmmaker with almost no experience and even less Spanish talks his way into directing music videos for major record labels and some of the biggest names in regional Mexican music. Before long, he is known as "El Gringo del Norte," creating groundbreaking videos while navigating powerful executives, dangerous associates, counterfeit cash, kidnappings, border crossings, wild animals, and budgets funded by people who do not accept failure.His relentless willingness to say yes takes him from Tijuana bars and Hollywood boardrooms to a medieval Spanish castle, where an impossibly ambitious production involving a lion, a celebrated actress, and a running of the bulls brings everything crashing down.Darkly funny, brutally candid, and almost impossible to believe, $panish Blood is a roman à clef inspired by the author's experiences inside the Latin entertainment industry. It is a story of youthful ambition, artistic obsession, cultural transformation, and the intoxicating feeling that anything is possible-right up until it isn't.Sometimes success has a price. Sometimes it takes everything.