Where did we go?
That seems to be a question much on the minds of members of the Hispanic creative community these days. That Latinos-roughly 9 percent of the nation’s population-are virtually invisible in the entertainment media is indisputable; how to deal with the problem is an issue very much open to debate.
Two weeks ago, in a protest led by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a group of 200 picketed the offices of ABC-TV here and in other cities to demand more representation on the network’s prime-time lineup. Among other things, they argued that ABC president Robert Iger had reneged on a promise to add a Latino-themed show to last fall’s schedule.
The network denied that any such deadline was in effect, citing, instead, an agreement it had worked out with the Writers Guild of America to develop more Latino script writers. An ABC spokesman did acknowledge the obvious, however-that it was necessary to increase the presence of Latino talent in front of and behind the camera.
Last Wednesday, Gregory Nava’s multigenerational story “My Family/Mi Familia” opened in theaters around the country. It is a film that could provide some answers to questions about how willing the rapidly growing Hispanic audience is to support works created specifically for its consumption-movies whose stories aren’t dominated by gangs or drug smuggling.
“I think the audience is definitely there, and Hollywood has yet to figure out how to unlock it, to come up with the kinds of films they want to see,” said Nava, who directed the film and shares a writer’s credit with his wife, Anna Thomas. “I think that `My Family’ will be a real test case for all this. We’re sort of pioneering.
“We clearly have a film that the Latino audience adores and responds to, so it’s a question of how to market it and start to get the whole thing going.”
To that end, distributor New Line Cinema reportedly has spent more than $1 million on advertising in Spanish-language media, including the Telemundo and Univision TV networks and local radio stations and newspapers. It is an unprecedented sum.
The studio arranged screenings in select Hispanic communities and brought Spanish-language media and community group representatives to Los Angeles to see the film and meet its stars. Also enlisted were the Arenas Group, a marketing firm that specializes in the Latino market, and the National Latino Communications Center.
“I’ve been working with New Line mostly on the grass-roots level, with screenings and groups around the country,” said Nava, the day after his movie was given a benefit premiere in Los Angeles. “It gets good word-of-mouth. We bring people in-the Southwest Voters Registration Education Project and others-and get them talking to their friends, and we’re getting on Latino television shows and Hispanic media.
“We also want the regular avenues, because the Latino audience is assimilated. We’re trying to get on Oprah and Letterman, too.”
To this end, it helps that such popular figures as Jimmy Smits, Edward James Olmos and Esai Morales are involved in “My Family,” in addition to less-familiar actors like Elpidia Carrillo (“Salvador”), Jenny Gago (“Old Gringo”) and Enrique Castillo (“Bound by Honor”). The rest of the cast is made up of dozens of Hispanic actors, young and old, whose faces will be entirely unfamiliar to mainstream audiences.
It hardly seems possible that there are only a handful of prominent Hispanic stars in a country of 25 million Latinos (Los Angeles is about 40 percent Hispanic; Chicago about 20 percent), but the numbers speak for themselves.
In the 1993-94 TV season, for example, a Newsweek study showed that only 11 of the 800 prime-time network television parts were played by Hispanics, and then largely in supporting and so-called ineffectual roles. The Center for Media and Public Affairs reported that of more than 7,000 TV characters on 620 prime-time shows between 1955 and 1987, 2 percent were Hispanic and 6 percent were black.
This might be explained by another study, by the Writers Guild, which found that 96.1 percent of all TV shows created between 1987 and 1991 were done by non-minority writers.
Last week, CBS scrapped its Latino Writers Program, launched in December 1993 to promote the hiring of Latino writers on network TV shows. It had been criticized for bringing in trainee writers at less than Guild minimum.
And yet a Motion Picture Association of America study showed that, in 1994, the Hispanic audience for theatrical films represented 16 million moviegoers above 12 years of age-or 10 percent of the audience-with 134 million tickets purchased. Whites represented 73 percent of the total audience; blacks, 13 percent; and others, mostly Asian-Americans, 5 percent.
The MPAA pointed out, however, that while the number of admissions per person increased for whites from 1993 to 1994, it decreased for blacks and Hispanics.
Perhaps that’s because neither group recognizes much of itself in the movies, and what they do see is getting repetitive and ugly. Films aimed at broader audiences, with largely Hispanic casts-such as “La Bamba” and “Stand and Deliver”-while successful, are few and far between.
If Hollywood is going to do something to woo the expanding Latino community and tap into an estimated $200 billion marketplace, it had better move quickly. U.S. Census studies show that in the next 10 years, the Hispanic population in the country will increase by 25 percent.
Like Nava’s 1983 debut film, “El Norte,” “My Family” is about the immigrant experience and the difficulties of realizing the American Dream. Both films are drawn on a large emotional canvas and share a documentary feel and a common regard for the importance of family.
“My Family” opens in the 1920s. After Jose Sanchez leaves Mexico and arrives in Los Angeles, he settles in with a relative named El Californio, who is descended from the original California settlers. Sanchez meets his wife while working at the same Beverly Hills mansion, and they settle into a modest life in East L.A.
Mirroring the current controversy brought upon by the state’s Proposition 187 legislation, Maria Sanchez-an American citizen pregnant with her third child-is rounded up in an immigration sweep and deported to Mexico. Her tortured return home to East L.A. with her infant son provides some of the film’s finest moments.
Nava skips ahead to the ’50s to document how this diverse family has grown and adapted to a rapidly changing L.A. and the unique pressures faced by the Hispanic community. Troubles with police and gangs add to the drama of everyday familial concerns.
Then it’s on to the ’80s, when the Sanchez clan virtually is turned inside out by external societal forces and a grandchild who won’t be denied his voice.
A common visual theme in the film is Nava’s use of bridges-especially over the concrete rivers of L.A.-and how they can both bring together and separate people. Symbolic bridges also span generations.
The large Sanchez family is made of archetypes, as opposed to stereotypes, and the children include a writer, a lawyer, a gang leader, a loner ex-con, a restaurateur and a nun. Their sprawling story is told in narration by one of the sons, a contemplative observer played by Olmos.
“All the kids are completely different,” said Nava, a Chicano who hopes that the life-affirming message of “My Family” will translate to other ethnic groups. “I wanted to show that it’s just as common to have a family member who’s a nun as it is to have one that’s a gang member. We can’t be defined by one image, but by contrasting images.
“That’s the way it is in families, and Latino families are no different. Ultimately I see this film as being very universal. It’s not like that in Hollywood families and I wanted to show families the way they really are.”
Although “My Family” is a more consciously uplifting tale, there are echoes of the multigenerational “Godfather” saga in Nava and Thomas’ story. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios helped finance the project, which was pitched around Hollywood for five years.
“A film about a family is not considered commercial, and I wanted Latino actors,” said Nava. “The combination of the two things, even though (studios) liked the script, made them feel that it wasn’t worth the commercial risk. When Francis talked to New Line, they agreed to take the risk.
“It cost $5.5 million to produce; the actors deferred a lot of their money. If it makes $30 million-even $20 million-no one will believe it. It’s possible, though.”
And $30 million isn’t considered a lot of money in Hollywood, where the average film now costs $50 million to make and market and the standard of success is set closer to $100 million in gross receipts.
If the Latino audience turns out for “My Family” and if it receives some Anglo support, Nava’s target shouldn’t be difficult to hit.
If the movie does succeed commercially, who among Hispanic creators could be tapped immediately for more productions? Nava suggested Luis Valdez, Carlos Avila, Alfonso Arau, Robert Rodriguez.
“Like Water for Chocolate,” Arau’s surprise art-house success of 1993, “should have been marketed more to the Hispanic community,” Nava said. “They could have taken it out to the barrio and made $10 million more.”
Arau’s upcoming movie, “A Walk in the Clouds,” is a romantic drama that stars Keanu Reeves and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, a newcomer from Spain. Other actors include Mexican stars Angelica Aragon and Evangelina Elizondo.
Jeff Valdez is another artist who thinks the time is right for the Hispanic audience to stand up and be counted.
Last month, the writer-producer signed a seven-figure deal with David Hoberman’s Disney-based Mandeville Films for his screenplay “Play Ball.” It is the “Cinderella story of a team of Cuban players who, after defecting, are granted a major league franchise.”
He also is busy on “Valdez,” a sitcom pilot for NBC, and last year created a popular local show, “Comedy Comprades.”
” `Mi Familia’ is taking a bold chance because it actually is using Latinos in a film (about Latinos),” said Valdez, the sarcasm dripping from his voice. “In a perfect world that shouldn’t be an issue at all, but it is. . . . We’re not perceived as being from America, and I’m fourth or fifth generation.”
The lack of representation on TV has created unique problems in the development of his sitcom.
“An irony of this pilot we’re casting is that it was hard to find (Hispanic) actors who did comedy, because we’ve never been given a chance to do comedy,” he said during a break in an all-day script conference. “It’s always been drug lords, gang guys . . . and the same with the women who always have been maids, hookers, just horrible roles.
“It comes from writing. There are so very few Latino sitcom writers. There are more in films and in theater; where we’ve had a lot of access, there are tremendous writers.”
The question of monitoring the Hispanic TV audience by the A.C. Nielsen service has been a constant irritant to producers.
“There’s a lot of faults with the ratings system,” Valdez said. “(Latino entertainment) is a cottage industry. You can’t treat it as if it’s a mainstream industry. You have to nurture it and watch it grow.”
Certainly that’s been true in the Los Angeles radio market, where Spanish-language formats have dominated recent ratings books, surprising many Anglo observers.
Valdez described the negotiations for his “Play Ball” script as if it were a scene from Robert Altman’s “The Player.” Once the story was in play, studios were tripping over one another to acquire a film that might attract a vast, unserved audience-one that’s a mystery to most industry hands.
“It was terrific, such a Hollywood thing,” he said. “Very few people know how to tap the Hispanic audience, how to execute it.
“It’s like, `How do they think?’ `What do they do?’ `How do you write for Latinos?’
“I said, `I’ll tell you a secret: Pretend they’re like everybody else.’
“We were working on a scene at a dinner table and somebody said, `What do they eat?’ I said, `Probably something similar to what you had.’ It’s like we’re savages or something.”
Valdez’ pilot (it’s a “Latino `Cosby,’ ” he says) is about a mixed-race family in Pueblo, Colo. The father is Hispanic, a history professor, and the mother is Jewish.
There are three kids who are “just trying to grow up in America,” and the grandfathers, who live with the family, are played by Bill Macy and Cheech Marin.
“The ironic thing is that the mother is being played by Ada Maris,” he says. “She used to be in `Nurses,’ and she’s a Latina playing a Jewish character. It’s historic. We’re very excited about it.”
About the possibility of more organized protests of the networks by Hispanic groups, Valdez says, “If they really press on with these boycott (threats), it will be interesting to see the economic impact.
“The whole thing with Howard Stern and pulling sponsors (after the radio shock jock made disparaging remarks about the murder of singer Selena). . . . It’s one thing when a community’s held down; it’s another thing when you kick them. When you’re backed into a corner, what choice do you have? We’ve had it.”
