It was a shootout straight from Hollywood in the former playground of its biggest stars: Outlaws holed up in a hillside mansion in Acapulco fought heavily armed Mexican soldiers with a rain of gunfire and grenades that had tourists cowering in hotels nearby.

Roughly 3,000 shots and 50 explosions marked the four-hour battle late Saturday that left 16 gunmen and two soldiers dead. Nine other people were wounded, including three bystanders.

More than a dozen Mexican tourists were evacuated from a neighboring hotel strip frozen in the 1950s, when Elizabeth Taylor held one of her many weddings in Acapulco and John Wayne and “Tarzan” star Johnny Weissmuller threw lavish parties at Los Flamingos Hotel less than 100 yards from where gunfire broke out.