The Parade Came Second
On Saturday 1.6 million people watched Mexico City's Day of the Dead parade. Eleven years ago there wasn't one. James Bond walked through it first.
In March 2015 a film crew closed the Zócalo, Mexico City's main square, and parked giant papier-mâché skeletons along Calle Tacuba behind police barriers. It was the opening of Spectre, the 24th Bond film: Daniel Craig in a skull mask, walking through a Day of the Dead parade toward the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México. The production hired 1,500 extras, built ten giant skeletons and made 250,000 paper flowers, then copied the crowd in post until it looked like about ten thousand people.
There was one problem with the parade. Mexico City didn't have one. The Day of the Dead was altars at home, marigolds, families keeping their dead company in the cemetery on the night of November 1. A procession of floats down the middle of the capital existed only in the script.
And the script had other contributors. Emails stolen from Sony in the 2014 hack, first reported by Tax Analysts in March 2015, showed Mexico offering incentives worth up to $20 million, with notes attached: the villain shouldn't be Mexican, the Bond girl should be played by a known Mexican actress (Stephanie Sigman got the part), a Mexican governor marked for assassination should become an international leader, and the film should show "modern Mexico City buildings." Sony's chief Amy Pascal wrote, "We should insist they add whatever travelogue footage we need in Mexico to get the extra money" (CBS News). Producer Michael G. Wilson denied that anything was changed for the money. They'd come to Mexico, he said, for the Day of the Dead.
The film opened in Mexico that November with more than double Skyfall's takings. Eleven months later, on October 29, 2016, the federal and city governments staged the real thing, floats down Paseo de la Reforma to the Zócalo, and 250,000 people came (Wikipedia). Anthropologists have a name for this, the pizza effect: something leaves home, gets reinvented abroad and comes back as the original.
Saturday was the tenth. It ran from the Diana fountain on Reforma to the Zócalo with tributes to Juan Gabriel and Juan Rulfo, and a 33-metre cardboard Catrina in the square that Guinness certified as the tallest ever made. The city counted 1.6 million people (La Jornada). Bond's crowd needed a computer to reach ten thousand. This one didn't.