The biggest role Francisco Esparza played at Warner Bros. was as a cook in the studio’s cafeteria during World War II.
An industrious immigrant from Mexico, Esparza quickly followed up by becoming the chef at La Scala — the Hollywood in-place of the 1950s and ’60s. He would come home and regale his young son, Moctesuma, with stories about what Marilyn Monroe wore at lunch or how Liz Taylor had ordered his lima bean soup delivered to the set of “Cleopatra.”
“I never thought that world would be open to me,” said Moctesuma Esparza.
Today, however, the younger Esparza’s services are just as hotly sought after as his father’s were.
The difference is that when Moctesuma Esparza whips up a creation for Warner Bros., it’s on the order of the new hit movie “Selena,” which he produced. The movie grossed more than $21.7 million in its first ten 10 days — more than double what it was anticipated to pull in. As of April 7th it was eighth at the box office and had taken in $27.1 million.
The film — the story of slain Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla Perez is a breakthrough epic, not only for the story of a Latina’s triumph and tragedy it has brought to the U.S. public, but also for the opportunities the movie’s success is projected is expected to make available for Latino actors, directors, producers and writers in Hollywood.
” `Selena’ has shown that there is an audience for Latino films,” said Esparza’s co-producer and partner, Robert Katz. “People at other studios are asking, `What have we got that’s Latino that would work?’ “
Warner Bros. doesn’t have to ask that question. The studio has already commissioned Katz and Esparza to do a film on the life of Cesar Chavez, the founder of the first union for migrant farm workers.
For 15 years, the filmmakers wanted to make that movie. They even had a script, written by Luis Valdez. But every time they approached Chavez, he would say no.
“He didn’t want to be treated as a hero, as an icon,” Esparza said. “He always maintained that the (United Farm Workers) was the issue.”
Then three months before his death in 1993, he agreed to do the film.
“Perhaps he had a premonition that his life was coming to an end,” Esparza said.
The movie has great personal meaning for Esparza, who, in 1966 as a junior at Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, marched from Delano, Calif., to Sacramento with Chavez.
“He is the American Gandhi,” Esparza said. “He represents the commitment to non-violence. He is not just a Latino hero, he is one of the giants of the 20th Century.”
Esparza and Katz have had their frustrations. In 1988, working with another Valdez script, they tried to bring Rudolfo Anaya’s classic Chicano novel, “Bless Me, Ultima,” to the screen.
“We desperately wanted to make that movie,” Esparza said.
But the studios argued there were no “Latino stars” big enough to carry it.
This was despite the 1987 release of “La Bamba,” which grossed $54 million for Columbia.
Studios wise up
Now with “Selena,” the major studios’ questions have shifted to an issue traditionally facing any producer: `Do we have an exciting script?’ ” Esparza said.
Gregory Nava, director of “Selena,” is less sanguine.
“You have institutions that have been based on a certain way of thinking — that the audience is Anglo,” Nava said. ” `Selena’ showed that the audience is changing. The problem is that the financiers and promoters are changing slower than the viewing audience. They still don’t get it, but they are starting to.”
Now there are many Hispanic stars to point to, said Nava, including Jennifer Lopez, the Puerto Rican actress who starred in “Selena” and Nava’s prior film, “Mi Familia.”
But, said Nava, “we still aren’t there yet.”
“We are only a tiny percentage of all actors, writers, directors, producers and agents in Hollywood,” he said.
“We are only 2 percent of the characters on TV. We had more of a presence in the ’50s, when we had Desi Arnaz, the Cisco Kid and Zorro.”
That’s why Nava is so insistent that Hispanic actors fill the Hispanic parts in his films.
“Now everybody wants Jennifer Lopez,” Nava said with obvious delight in his star-making abilities.
Said Esparza: “It’s clear we won’t have Anglo actors performing in brownface.”
This fall, when Sony releases Esparza and Katz’s latest movie, “Lorca,” Hispanics again will be showcased. The film is an investigation of the death of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The film stars Andy Garcia, Esai Morales and Edward James Olmos.
The pair’s TV productions include “Gettysburg” and “The Cisco Kid,” and “Avenging Angels” for the cable channel TNT.
Before joining forces with Katz, Esparza produced such feature films as “The Milagro Beanfield War,” and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.”
Combining history and film
Esparza and Katz tend to the historical and biographical in their works. The interest stems in part from Esparza, a high school valedictorian who had always contemplated a career in public service and community organizing.
In 1968, as a freshman on a scholarship at UCLA, Esparza helped organize a demonstration of 20,000 Hispanic high school students. The students protested against, among other things, high Hispanic dropout rates, the failure to include Hispanic contributions to American history in the curriculum and the degree to which Hispanics were channeled into trade and technical courses.
Esparza was arrested and charged for his role in organizing the demonstration. He faced 45 years in prison, but the charges — filed under a secret grand jury indictment — were dropped when his attorneys successfully argued that the students were within their free speech rights.
The next year, Esparza again was arrested, this time for disrupting a speech by former California Gov. Ronald Reagan at the Biltmore Hotel condemning bilingual education.
Under a second secret grand jury indictment, Esparza faced life in prison. But he was acquitted after a six-month trial.
At the urging of a UCLA professor, Esparza switched his major from history to film.
Esparza recalls protesting to the professor that he was an organizer. “But the professor convinced me that that’s what producers do,” he said.
Esparza won an Emmy Award while at UCLA grad school for his master’s thesis, a portrait of five Hispanics in East L.A. He then went on to produce a PBS children’s show, “Villa Alegre.”
He was only 23.
A team is formed
In 1984, Esparza met Katz while working on a documentary in South Africa. Esparza was trying to find financial backing for a film about a white doctor who had been arrested under the apartheid regime for opening up a clinic in a black township.
A cousin of Katz’s connected the two filmmakers. Katz, 54, a former Marine who had done a lot of work in South Africa, couldn’t nail down the money either.
But since then, the two have plowed ahead with their joint projects, many of which — like the Chavez project — provoke social questions.
Their goal is to not be preachy. Like Nava, they say they just want to tell “good stories about people.”
Esparza said he is not out for revenge.
“This is a wonderful country,” Esparza said. “Yes, it falls short of its ideals at times.”
But he has considered what happened to his counterparts in Mexico City who demonstrated on campus there in 1968.
“Had I grown up there,” he said, “I would have been massacred right along with them.”
