Hollywood, Mexico : Striking Gold on the Silver Screens of Los Angeles

Larger than life, the images flicker on the screen. A suburban bedroom, a silver cross tacked above the double bed, on the headboard an inlay of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Lying in the bed is an attractive woman, a brunette in an appealing but proper nightgown. A man--her husband?--a successful mariachi singer, has shed his silver- and sequin-festooned cowboy suit for monogrammed satin pajamas. He walks slowly to the bed, draws the covers back and reaches . . . not for the woman but for a large pillow. He tries to settle down to sleep, on the floor, wrestling with his pillow and finally blurting out, “I can’t stand it anymore!”

Segue to a quick and clumsy exposition: Pablo and Maria are in love with each other, they have lived together for years, but-- they aren’t really married.

So begins “Sinverguenza . . . pero Honrado” (“A Schmuck . . . but Honest”), the latest in a series of musical comedies starring Vicente Fernandez, Mexico’s favorite singing cowboy. But the moviegoers laughing and crying along with Pablo and Maria weren’t snacking on churros and elotes at the Cine Insurgentes in Mexico City. They were spending their Thanksgiving weekend munching butter corn and Milk Duds at the Roxie, at 5th and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, one of 21 local screens to premiere the film--nearly half of the Spanish-language movie houses in Southern California.

Like “Sinverguenza,” some 30 Mexican films a year, or half the national production, will be shown in Los Angeles. With the rare exception of art films and documentaries, most of them are hopelessly romantic dime novels or shoot-’em-up comic strips translated into quick-and-dirty celluloid, at a budget of $100,000, tops. From conception to completion they take no more than two months to produce. With bankable stars, they rarely flop.

Indeed, as Mexico’s economic crisis sharpens, more and more films are being made expressly for the Southern California market, which has become the most lucrative showcase for the Mexican cinema. As many as 5 million Spanish-speaking residents here are paying $4 apiece rather than 200 greatly devalued pesos (about 40 cents), to account for roughly 50% of the Mexican film industry’s gross receipts.

“If it weren’t for Los Angeles, Mexican cinema would disappear,” says 51-year-old Rogelio Agrasanchez L. A prolific producer whose six films this year all were made specifically to exploit the Los Angeles audience, he admits that he’s after sure-fire instant hits, formula--not art--films. “Wetbacks, frontera (‘folklore’), violencia , mucha violencia ,” Agrasanchez emphasizes.

Throughout greater Los Angeles, more than 40 screens and nine drive-ins, all owned by the Metropolitan and Pacific chains, now book only Mexican films. On Broadway, the majestic film houses--the Orpheum, the Broadway, the Olympic, the Globe--have been brought back to life after two decades of decline. On one typical weekend, entire families spent their Sunday outing watching the Almada brothers, Mario and Fernando, in “Al Filo de la Ley” (“On the Edge of the Law”), playing at the Arcade. Two blocks north, the Million Dollar Theater was filled with fans of Mexico’s favorite servant, “La India Maria,” played by Maria Elena Velasco, who stepped from behind the screen for a live appearance. At the Roxie, the audience hooted with approval when Vicente Fernandez lectured his teen-age son: “Why do you want to go to California? Don’t you know Mexicans pay for their stay in the United States with more than dollars? They pay with their dignity.”

The point is not “what movie did you see?”--although that is part of the experience--but “did you see this week’s movie?” This is reflected in the quick turnover of films on the circuit and the steady stream of new installments that speed across the border . “There is little other family entertainment for Mexicans in L.A.,” says Jose Luis Macias, president of Azteca Films, one of seven Mexican film distributors based in Los Angeles. “They like to go on Sundays with the whole family, listen to their own language and expose their Americanized kids to real Mexican idols. And we Mexicans don’t like to see the same movie twice.”

For the older generation, nostalgic for the Mexico left behind, each week offers a new choice of charro films, mariachi musicals in which superstar Fernandez sings away at life’s lesser troubles or Antonio Aguilar coaxes his horse through tap-dance routines. For the younger generation there are spicier, trashier films, which come in spates depending upon what new trends the Mexican producers pick up on. They’ve already exhausted Westerns, cops and robbers, and ficheras (hooker films), and are now onto mojados (“wetback” movies) such as “El Puente” (“The Bridge,” as in the border, one of last year’s top box-office hits) and drug trafficking. Topping this last category was “Lola la Trailera” (“Lola the Truckdriver”), the 1985 smash that reaped $3.5 million in profits--$2.5 million in the United States, $1 million in Mexico--on a $150,000 investment by producer Raul Fernandez. His success was to strip the fiery Rosa Gloria Chagoyan down to her machine gun and little else and to turn her loose a la Rambo against a gang of ruthless dope dealers. Not satisfied with a mere 25-fold return, Fernandez is out to make another killing with “Lola la Trailera II.”

Once a row of imposing hotels and government offices, the splendid corridor of the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City is now a twisted facade, a monument to the force of last September’s earthquake. One of those buildings hit hard by the temblor is the Condominios Cinemategraficos, an unimposing 10 stories of pink tile and glass with one functioning elevator, loose telephone cables hanging from the ceilings and the continual clamor of jackhammers reverberating through the hallways. Yet it remains the nerve center of film making in Mexico. Whether on the ground floor, where the computers of Peliculas Nacionales track every foot of Mexican celluloid, or on the sixth floor, where Fernando Perez Gavilan, head of the Mexican Producers’ Assn., has his telephone answered by his sister Beatriz, the atmosphere is that of a Philadelphia fight promoter’s office circa 1963.

On the fifth floor are the offices of Rogelio Agrasanchez L. But for the lobby cards and posters featuring bikini-clad women with machine guns, gangsters with machine guns, federales with machine guns, and heavily armed mariachis singing to their horses, one would never guess that this waiting room, furnished with plain, wooden teachers’ desks and a two-line telephone, is the antechamber of a film empire. Nevertheless, Agrasanchez is a cinema magnate, an impresario specializing in cross-border raids on the Latino movie audience in the United States. “A good film can bring in $300,000 in one month, showing in 20 cinemas just in Los Angeles,” he says. “Forty percent is for us, about $120,000. . . . Our advertising costs and promotion run about $15,000. No more than $40,000 goes to the distributor. So we make back our initial investment of about $60,000 in a month or less. And then the film usually produces revenue for about another three years.”

Without ever leaving his desk, Agrasanchez oversees a lean assembly line that has put out 82 films since 1970, when he bought out a bankrupt producer--an average of one major feature film every two months for the last 15 years. “A film is born with one of my ideas. I write an eight-page treatment, give it to one of my writers, he makes a synopsis, I rewrite it and return it to him. He writes the script. I put up my own money. I do the bulk of my production at Estudios Americas because they’re the cheapest. And I do the post-production where the facilities are better, at Churubusco.”

Barely two months after Agrasanchez has come up with his idea, the movie opens in Los Angeles. “Who doesn’t want to double their money?” he laughs. “Seventy percent of my films are commercial successes. The other 30% break even. That’s what I consider a loss. Of course, there’s the time in 1982 I spent $400,000 to make a serious film about middle-class attitudes--’La Pachanga’ (‘The Party’). It wasn’t for the L.A. market, but it did win awards in Russia. I didn’t make a nickel. In fact, I lost my shirt.”

If a Hollywood regular were to arrive at Agrasanchez’s office, or that of the other 12 major Mexican producers bunkered at the Condominios, he would find no common lingo, even if he spoke Spanish. No coterie of production secretaries, script readers, story editors, development executives, directors of creative affairs. No writers waiting to pitch stories, no projects in development, no agents ringing the telephones off the hook. No discussion of “high concepts” with “top spin,” or of “home runs.” No story conferences, no deal-making, no meetings to be taken, no “power lunches.”

“This isn’t Hollywood,” Ramon Garcia Gonzalez, former general director of Peliculas Mexicanas, says with pride. “Here there isn’t so much loose talk, so many half-baked projects without financing. There isn’t so much deception. It’s much more direct and businesslike.”

A five-minute drive from the Condominios Cinemategraficos are the twin state-owned studios where the business of shooting, editing, dubbing and printing is carried out. At Churubusco and Estudios Americas the equipment, although aging, looks like what you’d find at Paramount or Universal. The sound stages--one still set up from the filming of “Dune”--are like those in Burbank or Studio City. The labs, like Technicolor in Hollywood, efficiently push millions of feet of 35-millimeter film through their processing tanks. There are no whiz kids, however, no hot shots on the lot divining next year’s hit movie. These are rent-a-studios that are offered by the hour or by the day to whoever can pay the going rate, run by government bureaucrats whose only concern is to keep the sound stages occupied and the money rolling in. “Don’t come to us complaining if the script is a bad one,” says Arcadio Chavez Chavez, Churubusco’s No. 2 executive. “It’s not our fault. And we don’t care.”

While the Mexican film industry has been preoccupied with turning out cheap, commercial pap, the Mexican state, with degrees of commitment that have sharply zigzagged from zeal to neglect, has tried to fill the artistic gap. Ironically, within the gates of Churubusco the Mexican government has a different set of employees whose job it is to take seriously the content of films. At Conacine, the state film company, four or five “quality” films are produced each year. Staffed by film school graduates, its offices cluttered with reels of unedited and incomplete films, Bunuel posters papering the walls, Conacine is the artistic refuge.

Hector Lopez Lechuga, the general director and executive producer of Conacine, has won nine of the last 11 Arieles, the Mexican Oscars, in the best-picture category. His office is a trophy room, testimony to the division in the Mexican cinema. The producers at the Condominios may make all the money, but Lechuga gets all the awards. He has the support of the state, which allows him generous budgets without the onus of turning a profit. “We are spending a lot of money ($300,000) on our current production, ‘Imperio de la Fortuna’ (‘The Empire of Luck’),” he says, “but we are sure it’s going to be the picture of the year.”

Eighty miles northwest of the studios, at a 150-year-old hacienda on the outskirts of Tlaxcala, Arturo Ripstein Jr. is in the final week of shooting on “Imperio de la Fortuna.” Tlaxcala is rural Mexico--as far from the seething metropolis of Mexico City as the Condominios are from 20th Century Fox. Within the high, dirty walls of the hacienda yard are the shops and quarters that still house resident peons. Beyond stretch rows of agave, the century plant cultivated for its fermented yield, pulque.

Ripstein has come to Tlaxcala to complete his film about a middle-class peasant woman trapped by the tyranny of her husband, based on a story of the same title by one of Mexico’s best-loved writers, Juan Rulfo. It could not be at a further remove from the boilerplate productions of Perez Gavilan or Agrasanchez. “Imperio” is drama, not melodrama; these are characters faced with real choices in a confining world. For Ripstein, 42, it is also his 15th film in 21 years for Conacine. A former assistant to the Surrealist master Luis Bunuel, he is considered challenging enough a director to have been blacklisted under the former administration, revived under the present one.

Inside the hacienda house, upstairs in a vaulted room as large as a country schoolhouse--which it is meant to be in the movie--co-stars Blanca Guerra and Ernesto Gomez Cruz are walking through a scene. Guerra is slumped in an overstuffed parlor chair, her legs slung over its right arm, her attention barely held by a tattered issue of Life magazine. Gomez Cruz ambles in, already drunk, to sit down for a game of cards, ignoring the sultry woman who is slowly being bored to death by the rhythms of country life.

The late afternoon air in Tlaxcala is getting cold, and by nightfall it will bite. Ripstein wants to get through the scene so that everyone can go to the cockfights at the Municipal Fair that evening. But things move slowly. The filming is cautiously hand-crafted, like the charcoal smudge pots that produce the smoky effects that color the air inside the set. Ripstein--a cigar plugged into his mouth with one hand, his free hand buried in his fleece-lined jacket pocket--paces about the stage, fussing, cogitating, adjusting the map on the wall, moving the chairs at the poker table, peering through the camera to check new angles.

It is a one-man show. Silence dominates the set, and not because the cameras are rolling. Ripstein needs to think, in quiet. Until he issues his next order, everyone waits. When he speaks, the four men at his command promptly reply, “Si, senor ,” and the skeleton crew snaps to work. Elsewhere at the hacienda, actors, production assistants and family wait for the filming to end. They mill around, no trailers to retreat to, no catered spreads. Seven o’clock becomes 8. Eight o’clock becomes 9.

Ripstein may be plying the artistic cutting edge, but the realities of Mexico’s cinema have a way of insinuating themselves onto the set, even on location in Tlaxcala. Everyone is working on something else. The truth is, no one can make one film a year--even the “film of the year”--and then sit back and coast. Ripstein gets to make the films he wants, at state expense, yet he’s hard at work on the sidelines, producing industrial films and government public-information television spots, directing TV dramas and hawking commercial products.

Even three “bad” films a year are not enough. Screenwriters are paid no more than $2,000 per script. Well-paid actors and actresses rarely earn more than $5,000 per film. Only major stars such as Mario Moreno (Cantinflas), Vicente Fernandez and Mario Almada have the power to demand more money, and even their shares rarely amount to more than $30,000 per film. Studio cars in Mexico are Volkswagens and Ramblers. Grips, propmen and electricians earn as little as $150 a month. Bare survival requires that the artists performing in, directing and writing movies such as “Imperio de la Fortuna” regularly work on others whose titles they would rather forget.

Blanca Guerra, 32, comes out of the rigorous training of the theater and is considered one of Mexico’s best actresses. In her nine-year career she has made 36 films, a few of them “serious” state-financed projects. But most are quick-hit, fast-buck productions. Guerra is la muy taquillera , “big box office.” In six of her recent films she starred opposite Vicente Fernandez, as she admits, “to make money. I make these concessions because this is my living. Sometimes I have to get my satisfaction from seeing how much I am worth to a producer. It’s depressing. You disperse your energy in so many directions.”

The one exception among those present at Tlaxcala is Ernesto Gomez Cruz, universally regarded as Mexico’s greatest working actor. For his performances he has been awarded five Arieles. He has appeared in more than 50 films and refuses to work for any but serious directors. “The films that go to the United States are garbage, rubbish,” he says angrily. “Those aren’t actors, they are just faces and bodies.” That night, as cast and crew unwound over tequila and cockfights, Gomez Cruz took a cab to a separate hotel to concentrate on his lines for the next day. He pays the price for dedication to the purity of his craft. “I live very humbly. I have seven kids and rent a house. One day I would like to buy a house on a small piece of land. Right now, I’m 55 and I still live day by day.”

Wolf Ruvinskis, 61, whose name appears on half the posters in Agrasanchez’s office, has done more than 160 films. In the past two months alone he completed roles in six films, the names of which he cannot recall. His “trailer” at the hacienda is his 1985 Mercury Cougar. In the back seat of the car, with the heater on full blast, he explains what it means to be one of the best-recognized Mexican actors. “When I leave tonight, I will drive back to Mexico City to perform at my restaurant. I do telepathy, card tricks, and perform stand-up comedy. Without the restaurant, I wouldn’t make a living as an actor.”

These are not the complaints of a failed talent. Ruvinskis is employed full time in Mexico’s film industry. As he points out, “In the United States you feel you have a chance to win recognition. You do the right picture, and you’re set. Here, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. You’re always struggling.” When Ruvinskis finished his nightclub act that Friday, he woke up early the next morning to drive to Oaxaca, where he would play the police chief in “Lola la Trailera II.”

Such is the schizophrenia of the Mexican film industry. At one extreme, independent producers reap vast and easy profits from B movies. “They don’t try to make anything better,” says Paco Ignacio Taibo, one of Mexico’s top film historians and critics. “None of the profits are reinvested in improved and more ambitious projects. They are used to buy houses and cars for the producers.”

At the other extreme is a handful of private producers who specialize in hard-hitting, politically controversial films. They complain not only of a lack of resources but also of a lack of cooperation from the state, which owns most of the country’s movie houses. This year film maker Salvador Diaz won, but refused to accept, an Ariel in the best documentary category. His movie, “Juchitan,” tells the story of a village that elected a radical municipal government and, for its boldness, wound up occupied by government troops, its leaders under arrest and many of its citizens murdered. In turning down his award, Diaz asked bitterly: “Why was I given this prize? For the film’s style, or for its content? It is really an empty form of recognition. If independent political cinema is going to be rewarded, then let that be manifested in some tangible form. Like allowing those films to be shown to audiences in large theaters.”

As for the state-owned cinema, everyone knows that yesterday’s blacklisted director is today’s prima donna. The sexenio , the six-year period of successive federal government rule, means that with each new administration the state film apparatus must start again from scratch or retreat and await an upturn in fortune. That is the Mexican style. Each administration comes in with a different film agenda, which, as critics complain, is usually based on fiat. The current administration of President Miguel de la Madrid has a relatively liberal view toward its own cinema. The directors at Conacine have been given considerable political latitude. But no one is betting on the future. “Conacine really likes my work, and it would be nice to get a regular contract with them,” says 36-year-old Paz Alicia Garcia, who penned the screen version of “Imperio.” “But even if I got that kind of a deal, I could only count on it for three more years--then the sexenio is up.”

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, President Luis Echeverria, a major figure in the Third World’s nonaligned movement, dreamed of creating a Latin American Hollywood in Mexico City. Money and resources were poured into rejuvenating state film production, which had been all but ignored since the golden era of Mexican cinema, that brief period beginning during World War II. As Hollywood had ground out Department of War booster films, and as the rival Argentine studios had gone pro-Axis, Mexico’s Emilio ( El Indio ) Fernandez had been free to invent a national cinema. Unfortunately, the neglect of the previous 15 years meant that Echeverria’s mandate could never be fulfilled. No one really knew how to make films. Not a single great Mexican director emerged from that period.

“President Jose Lopez Portillo was a disaster for our film industry!” Taibo laughs, recalling Echeverria’s successor. “He saw cinema as a family problem. He appointed his sister, Marguerita, to oversee production. Her only previous experience was that of a government film censor.” Under Lopez Portillo the quantity and quality of state film production nose-dived. Socially significant themes were taboo. Artistically inclined directors were without work. And the private sector, taking its cue from the state, indulged in a spate of peliculas ficheras-- whore films.

It is in this unpredictable environment that the state cinema erratically shifts, aping popular commercial cinema during one administration, then straying into ethereal flights of fancy during the next. “It is often the cinema of the ego,” says one young critic. “Some of the directors working today for Conacine don’t care if anyone sees their work, as long as the director himself enjoys it.”

So a debate arises: It is argued that the Mexican audience will not pay to see anything better than what the Condominios issue. This is a law, claims Agrasanchez, born from the hard ground of experience. Films like his “La Pachanga” or state-productions such as “Imperio de la Fortuna” don’t make money. They don’t even find an audience, he argues.

It is the films that mold the audience, not the contrary, Taibo insists. “Go to any Mexican marketplace and you have a sophisticated aesthetic experience. Not only are the stands immaculate, but also colorful, imaginative and thoughtfully arranged with a careful coordination of colors and patterns. Mexican good taste is being poisoned by those producers who impose horrific, crude films on the viewing audience.”

Forced to straddle the extremes of Mexican cinema, Blanca Guerra protests: “I get very angry when I arrive in Los Angeles. I see the movie posters at the Spanish-language theaters, and I realize that there is literally zero respect for the Mexican audience. I think they would go see better films if better films were offered. This is my longstanding complaint with the producers. The least we can expect is that the films have quality, which they usually don’t.”

The Mexican film industry, Taibo says, has a responsibility that it refuses to fulfill. “Go to any small Mexican town late at night,” he says, “and you will see only two lights shining. One will be for a cantina--a pulque bar. The other will be a cinema marquee showing something like ‘Wetbacks and Gunmen Part 9.’ The Mexican people deserve better choices.”