Walker, Screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer

In the five years before the Civil War, he was the most famous man in America. Today, he is still famous throughout Latin America — as the most notorious of the gringos malos. A doctor, lawyer and newspaper publisher, Walker religiously fought slavery in New Orleans, attacked corrupt city officials in San Francisco, and was a great advocate of women’s liberation and the Monroe Doctrine. Filled with dreams of a mighty America stretching from sea to shining sea, he led fifty-eight ragtag freebooters to Nicaragua, exploited haphazard politics, waged war, and became president of the country. Two years later, the mood of the United States (and the business interests of Cornelius Vanderbilt) had reversed; William Walker was captured and eventually executed by a Honduran firing squad.

The Universal motion picture was shot on location with the full cooperation of the Nicaraguan government. Walker is the shocking story of a turbulent American dream gone off the wire. The book includes notes from Ed Harris’s production journals, excerpts from Walker’s autobiography, an interview with director Alex Cox (whose other films include Repo Man and Sid & Nancy), the outstanding biography by historian Albert Z. Carr and spectacular photographs of the film, the country, the people and the wars of Nicaragua by Lynn Davis, Tom Collins and Susan Meiseles. Walker is an exploration of the entire astonishing history of America’s Nicaragua — then and now.

95 min., Color

VHS Edition — 1988