The Race for Rights to a Martyr’s Life : Producers Compete to Film Story of Slain Brazilian Environmentalist

In a village deep in the South American rain forest, where trees tower over wooden houses and shabby storefronts to form a leafy canopy, a group of Brazilian labor organizers and environmentalists will meet soon to decide the fate of one of the most coveted film projects in recent Hollywood history.

The Brazilians who gather in Xapuri, a village near the western edge of Brazil, hold the rights to the story of Chico Mendes, a peasant who captured the world’s attention with his attempts to save Brazil’s rain forests from being destroyed. In the six months since Mendes was gunned down in his back yard--allegedly by local ranching interests--his story has been pursued by such entertainment heavyweights as Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, David Puttnam and Ted Turner.

Producers and directors have trekked to Rio Branco, a frontier town that requires a seven-hour flight with three stopovers from Rio de Janeiro, to lobby Mendes’ widow and his followers. They have flown in Portuguese and Spanish versions of their movies. They have offered to pay for worldwide TV commercials to promote preservation of the rain forest. And, one by one, they have dangled hundreds of thousands of dollars in front of Mendes’ family and the foundation that bears his name.

“We’ve all seen bidding wars on scripts,” said Leading Artists agent Robert L. Stein. “But in 21 years in the business I can’t recall the kind of lunacy that has taken place on this one. The players are international players. It’s competition on a global level.”

Two of Stein’s clients are on Puttnam’s team: Chris Menges, a former cinematographer (“The Killing Fields”) who made his directing debut last year with the anti-apartheid film “A World Apart,” and the respected documentary maker Adrian Cowell, who was doing a film on Mendes when he was murdered. Warner Bros., under its production agreement with Puttnam’s Enigma Productions company, is backing this group.

Puttnam’s principal competitors are:

--Robert Redford, who has drafted Brazilian actress Sonia Braga (whom he directed in “The Milagro Beanfield War”) to smooth the way with the local population. Redford has proposed doing two projects: A feature that would be financed by 20th Century Fox and directed by Steven Spielberg, and a second project through his own production company.

--Cable TV mogul Ted Turner, who is already producing a documentary on Mendes’ death to air on his cable superstation TBS in October. Turner is now seeking rights for a made-for-TV movie.

--The British film distributor Goldcrest Co., which has promised that Costa-Gavras (“Missing,” “Betrayed”) would direct its film.

--Jon Peters and Peter Guber, who have produced such films as “Batman,” the box-office hit “Rainman,” and “Gorillas in the Mist” about anthropologist Dian Fossey.

--Cable movie channel HBO, which has joined efforts with Harmony Gold Productions and hopes to produce a four-hour miniseries.

--S.H. Productions. Two of the company’s partners, Elliott Lewitt and Don Guest, produced the 1985 thriller “At Close Range,” and Guest produced the 1984 “Paris, Texas.”

--Cecchi-Gori, a major Italian distributor.

--J.N. Filmes, a Brazilian firm whose principal partner is the son of the late Nelson Rodrigues, one of the country’s most celebrated playwrights. J.N. Filmes has made four feature films since 1982.

The race for the rights to Mendes’ story appeared to end--if only momentarily--June 7 when J.N. Filmes hosted a press conference in Rio de Janeiro to announce that it had acquired the rights to Mendes’ story from his young widow, Ilzamar. But the announcement merely raised the ante in the competition.

“Ilzamar Mendes had signed this agreement with J.N. Filmes without authorization,” argued Alan U. Schwartz, a Los Angeles attorney retained by the Chico Mendes Foundation in April to broker the influx of movie proposals. Schwartz’s view is shared by other leaders of the foundation, which is administering the rights to Mendes’ story and holds the key to cooperation from friends, family and followers.

The film makers pursuing Mendes’ story appear to have stumbled onto a power struggle within the political movement that Mendes left when he died.

“Quite frankly, it’s not simply a matter of these deals,” said Schwartz. “It’s also a matter of where the authority of the movement should lie.”

Mendes’ widow is president of the foundation’s board, but she sits on the board with representatives of six different union, environmental and Indian organizations, each of which has a voice in the direction of the movement. Ilzamar’s agreement with J.N. Filmes took many of these representatives by surprise.

On the same day that she was negotiating with J.N. Filmes in Rio de Janeiro, Schwartz was 2,000 miles away in the Amazon jungle, outlining nine different movie proposals to foundation leaders. Schwartz said many of them “were furious” when they heard about the deal that Ilzamar Mendes had struck, and planned to challenge it.

In a phone interview Monday, Jofre Rodrigues, the main partner in J.N. Films, insisted that his agreement with Mendes’ widow was “binding.” He added, “We made a perfect contract, so perfect that it is irreversible.”

Rodrigues said his company already has already made payments to Ilzamar Mendes, as well as Mendes’ first wife and daughter. And J.N. Filmes has signed up the successful Brazilian novelist Marcio Souza to write a screenplay for the movie.

The foundation’s leaders were scheduled to meet in Xapuri this week to discuss whether to ratify the J.N. Filmes deal, to dismiss it in favor of another proposal, or--in the most likely scenario--to appoint a major Hollywood film maker as a partner with J.N.

Rodrigues said he wants to bring a major foreign production company into the project to assure access to top American stars and worldwide distribution. He declined to comment on speculation published by the Brazilian newspaper O Globo that Fox and Redford were negotiating to join his company on the project. (A Redford representative also declined comment.)

It’s not just Mendes’ life that has generated so much interest in Hollywood, it’s also his stature as a hero, and now martyr, of the environmental movement.

“The environment has become a very hot issue here,” Schwartz said. “You’ve got this very fashionable issue and (Mendes’ story) is a direct focal point for it. In a very visual way, you can make a story about it.”

Mendes started organizing local peasants in the 1970s because he wanted to preserve a way of life for the thousands of rubber tappers who, like himself, earned a meager living by extracting latex from the forest’s rubber trees.

As his work gained international recognition, environmentalists concerned about the destruction of the rain forest by settlers and ranchers lent support to his efforts. Environmental experts point to widespread burning of the rain forests as a key ingredient in the “greenhouse” effect, or global warming that results from excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But some of the film makers pursuing rights to the Mendes story have an interest in the rain forest that predates Hollywood’s new-found interest in the Earth’s health. Redford, for example, has been involved with environmental issues for years. Turner’s Better World Society, which produces TV programming about pressing world problems, gave its 1987 environmental award to Mendes.

Puttnam’s partner Cowell has filmed in the Brazilian rain forest for nearly 10 years, as well as following Mendes’ life since 1986. Cowell filmed Mendes just months before the activist was shot down when--in the midst of a victory celebration--he expressed worry that he would soon become the target of assassins. (A local rancher, whose plans to clear 15,000 acres of forest were thwarted by Mendes, is now on trial for the murder, together with his son.)

The Puttnam group claims to be the first to actively pursue film rights to Mendes’ story--a fact confirmed by Steve Schwartzman, a Washington, D.C., environmentalist and anthropologist who serves as an honorary member of the Mendes foundation. Schwartzman is attending the upcoming meeting in Xapuri.

Stein, the agent to Chris Menges and Cowell, traced the seeds of their proposal to a dinner party at his house in November. There, Menges’ wife, Judy Freeman Menges, a sound technician, “started telling us about the research she had done on the burning down of the rain forests,” Stein recalled.

Shortly after Mendes’ death, the Mengeses hooked up with two long-time colleagues, Cowell and Puttnam. In February, the Mengeses and Cowell flew to Brazil. To bolster his case with the locals, Menges had a print of his film “A World Apart” subtitled in Portuguese and shipped into Xapuri. Later, Redford and Guber/Peters would follow suit, treating the Amazon locals to private screenings of their movies.

By the time the Puttnam group arrived back in the United States, a lengthy Vanity Fair magazine piece on Mendes by writer Alex Shoumatoff was about to hit the newsstands, heating up Hollywood’s interest in the story. Fox and Redford immediately snapped up the film rights from Shoumatoff for an undisclosed sum.

It’s unclear whether Redford also traveled to Brazil. Bonnie Lee, president of Redford’s film company, Wildwood Enterprises, declined to comment on the actor’s role in the race. However, other sources say Redford did meet with Ilzamar Mendes when she was in the United States last March. During that trip, Mendes’ widow also met with Puttnam in Washington, D.C., according to Stein.

When she returned to Brazil, Ilzamar Mendes was accompanied by Thomas Belford, executive director of Ted Turner’s Better World Society and an executive from Turner Broadcasting.

Turner Broadcasting already had a documentary underway on Mendes’ life, and had been airing commercials on his four cable station networks soliciting funds to preserve the rain forest. But Turner wanted to secure the film rights to Mendes’ story for a TV movie. So Belford was dispatched to Rio Branco, where the local rubber tappers union was holding its annual meeting.

In Rio Branco, where gravel roads give way to dirt outside the city limits, Belford made his presentation to union leaders and family members, promising a $5- million TV movie that would be delivered within 18 months.

Belford said the locals seemed unimpressed by the attention that Hollywood was lavishing upon them.

“A lot of fancy names were being thrown around,” he said. “But it’s not like they sit around reading the Hollywood Reporter . . . While they were certainly interested in our credentials, it appeared that one of their greater concerns was whether the message (of the film) would be faithful to his goals and his life.”

So besieged was the Mendes foundation by film makers that in April Schwartz was asked--through American environmentalists--to gather all the film proposals and make a recommendation. Schwartz, who in the past has worked for such human-rights dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn agreed to take the case on a pro bono basis. By June, he had collected nine offers, and he made his trip to the Brazilian rain forest.

“These people have no money,” Schwartz said. “They meet in shacks with no windows. They have no money to travel to promote the cause, even inside Brazil. They need to be able to build their operation, to mount political campaigns. And they need to be able to reach out to the rest of the world.”

The actual monetary value of the J.N. Filmes contract is unclear because the money promised in dollars would be delivered later in cruzados, the value of which diminishes each day with Brazil’s spiraling inflation.

Still, J.N. Filmes’ bid of $1.2 million to $1.7 million--depending on how the deal is calculated--was higher than amounts American competitors were offering, according to several sources. As a result, it raised the cost of the project and may force some of the other competitors to unite in order to match that figure, sources say.

Even if the foundation ratifies the J.N. Filmes agreement, it may not be the end of the story.

“Our feeling is that if the decision is left as is, a quick demonstration should be made that this fellow is viable,” said Belford. If J.N. Filmes can’t deliver on its agreement, Belford added, “we’ll be waiting in the wings.”

Rodrigues dismisses American contentions that his operation cannot fulfill its agreement. “We are small, but that does not mean we are not competent,” he said.

It is likely, moreover, that if the J.N. Filmes deal is ratified, a major Hollywood film maker will attempt to produce a film without obtaining legal rights to Mendes’ story, relying instead on information already in the public domain, sources say. That, insisted agent Stein, would deceive the cause that the film makers say they are trying to promote.

“It’s a question of integrity,” he said. “If you don’t get the film rights, don’t make the movie.”

Times Staff Writer William Long contributed to this story from Rio de Janeiro.