The Hollywood Route

IN CHEECH MARIN’S den stands an ebony trophy, awarded his movie “Born in East L.A.” for Best Picture at the New Latin America Cinema Festival in Cuba. Marin, its star and director, is stunned with gratitude by this honor, a first for a Chicano film. Universal Studios had made him pay his own way to Havana, and now his film is beating “Fatal Attraction” around Latin America.

About a Chicano who gets swept up in an INS raid and dumped in Tijuana, “Born in East L.A.” is a comic vehicle for a serious subject. “You only need a couple scenes to say everything you want to say,” Marin says. “The rest is a hot-air pillow to support the payload.”

The release of his film and “La Bamba” in a single season was, Marin says, “the longest streak in Chicano history. Now the ground is prepared for more Chicano films, but it’s up to the film makers. If they fall into the ‘blaxploitation’ bag--like doing a lot of films about gangs--we’ll crash. But if there’s a couple of these, a couple of those, we’ll make it.”

WRITER-DIRECTOR Luis Valdez, who began doing street theater for the United Farm Workers and made it to Broadway and Hollywood with his searing “Zoot Suit,” now finds himself having to justify his successful movie “La Bamba,” based on the life of rock star Ritchie Valens.

“People are asking why isn’t Luis Valdez angry anymore? Who the hell is as angry at 47 as they were at 25? If you are, you’ve got ulcer problems. If I were still doing plays on a flatbed truck on street corners, it might be tremendously romantic to some people, but the majority would call it a pathetic lack of progress.

“I have to exist as an individual. I never asked anyone’s permission to begin Teatro Campesino or to call myself Chicano. I have not asked anyone’s permission to make Hollywood films. Trying to find the most effective way to reach the largest possible audience, one that includes but goes beyond Chicanos, has nothing to do with a compromise of values.”

Valdez is working on a pilot for a TV series that would portray multiple Los Angeles ethnic groups. “We used to worry that the white majority would swallow us and we’d disappear. But you are what you eat, and if the dominant majority eats us, they’ll become us. But we won’t be so easily swallowed. If we assimiliate toward standards providing for cultural diversity, then we’ll be what it really means to be American. It’s a brave new world, and everybody’s got to get used to it.”

FOR TWO YEARS, Edward James Olmos stumped the country to persuade theater owners to show “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” in which he portrayed a historical Mexican-American hero. But when his latest film, “Stand and Deliver,” set in East Los Angeles’ Garfield High School, screened at last fall’s Mill Valley Film Festival, nearly every major company bid for distribution rights, which went to Warner Bros.

To Olmos, an East L.A. native who also starred in “Zoot Suit” and who plays Lt. Castillo on “Miami Vice,” this was supreme satisfaction, because the film addresses both the barrio’s and the United States’ biggest challenge: education. Based on a true story, “Stand and Deliver” tells how so many of teacher Jaime Escalante’s students at gang-ridden Garfield High passed the college advanced-placement calculus exam that the Educational Testing Service accused them of cheating. Today, Escalante’s students have the highest advanced-placement-test passing percentage in the country. Teachers’ organizations who previewed the movie gave it sustained ovations.

It received another when Olmos, who plays Escalante, screened it last month for 1,000 cheering United Farm Workers. At Cesar Chavez’s request, the lights stayed down for the credits so the teen-agers present could see the number of Chicanos in the cast and crew, and they applauded still harder.

“This film about our people,” Olmos told them, “will touch the nation. It shows we can achieve anything we want. Being able to do a film like this is the finest moment of my life.”