A new doc explores the “rags to riches” rise of one St. Louis mayor
By Kristyn Schiavone
A.J. Cervantes likes to talk about the days when his father—then a hardscrabble 19-year-old kid “from the wrong side of the tracks”—would host rumba contests at clubs in Old Hollywood. His father, of course, was Alfonso Cervantes, the man who would be mayor of St. Louis from 1965 to 1973, a fact that gives what would otherwise be a so-so family anecdote a sense of ... political intrigue, to use the term loosely. In fact, A.J. likes to tell those stories of the young promoter Cervantes so much that he put them—and a couple decades’ worth of other tales from his father’s St. Louis City Hall days—into his new documentary, Mr. Mayor.
It’s a project A.J. has been working on for years, almost since his father died in 1983. He didn’t get serious about it until two or so years ago, when he put to work the skills he picked up in his movie-producing days and started splicing together old footage, photos and audio relics of his father’s life, including some he never knew he had. “I wrote campaign commercials and shot them for my dad in ’72, so a lot of this stuff I’ve had in my archives for years,” he says. “Then I found some interviews that were not designed for broadcast where he was talking to someone who was going to write his biography. There were hours of recollections.”
As A.J. got deeper into sorting through raw material for the doc, his memories of the man he’d watched command the room at civic functions grew richer. “You start to connect the dots,” he says. “You really start to appreciate what he accomplished in his life.”
That work will pay off this month when Mr. Mayor opens the St. Louis International Film Festival at the Moolah Theatre—and makes its world premiere—on November 9. Given the subject matter—political stories that don’t involve corruption aren’t standard movie fare—the event’s organizers are expecting a diverse mix of attendees to the opening. So is A.J. “There’s a whole new generation of St. Louisans, many of whom are avid filmgoers, who will have a bona fide interest in him,” he says. “I think what you’re going to see is a very cross-cultural, trans-generational audience.”
