Mexico Scouts for TV Projects : Can Co-Production Deal With Canada Revive Its Film Industry?

Normally, when Canadian producer Andras Hamori needs to shoot in a lush, tropical paradise, his thoughts turn to the French Caribbean.

The scenery is perfect, the costs are moderate and a long-established Franco-Canadian co-production agreement guarantees that his crews will be welcome on the islands and his shows will be welcome by broadcasters in two countries.

But for his latest venture into paradise--”Sweating Bullets,” the late-night CBS adventure series that premiers Monday--Hamori chose the beaches, coconut trees and dirt roads of this Mexican fishing village near Puerto Vallarta.

Hamori ended up shooting here in anticipation of the signing of the first Canada-Mexico co-production agreement next week, when Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari visits Ottawa. That will give Canadian producers the same advantages in Mexico they now enjoy in French possessions.

Mexican and Canadian officials hope that “Sweating Bullets,” shot this winter, will be a model for the way businesses in their countries can work together to conquer the U.S. market. The three countries have agreed to negotiate a North American free-trade agreement.

Co-productions also represent Mexico’s latest hope for a return to the Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s, when the Mexican film industry had international status comparable to that of Italy or France.

“This gives us an opportunity to undertake productions in another language, for another culture,” said Ignacio Duran Loera, general manager of the Mexican Cinematography Institute, the government agency on the Mexican side of the co-production negotiations.

In co-production, producers from two different countries jointly invest in a project, employing actors and technicians from both nations.

For example, “Sweating Bullets” is a joint production of Toronto-based Accent Entertainment Corp. and Flores-Roffiel-Senyal y Asociados, a Mexico City independent producer. Regulars on the show are Canadians Rob Stewart, Carolyn Dunn and John David Bland, as well as Mexican actors Tony Banana and Pedro Armendariz Jr., who most recently played Pancho Villa in the film “Old Gringo.”

“Everyone thought I was out of my mind to do a weekly television series that has to be delivered every week to the network from Mexico,” Hamori said.

But from a financing perspective, the idea looked perfectly sane.

The fee CBS pays for late-night programming--$200,000 an hour, compared to $850,000 to $1 million for prime time--is not enough to cover production costs for an original series shot in the United States, Hamori said.

To balance the books, Accent needed a guaranteed second market and a way to cut production costs. The answer was co-production, an arrangement that assures the show will be considered domestically made in both Canada and Mexico.

That means that Global Television Network, Canada’s third-largest network, will pay the producers $100,000 for an hourlong episode, twice what the network pays for imported programming.

Hamori figures that shooting on location in Mexico costs 20% to 25% less than working in Canada. Costs are expected to drop further once the agreement is signed and the production falls under the less-stringent union rules for domestic productions.

Recognizing that producers could not afford to make many high-quality films and television shows for an audience of only 20 million, Canada’s population, the Canadian government began encouraging co-productions 30 years ago. Co-productions allow producers to share costs and have access to a larger audience while employing Canadian themes.

In “Sweating Bullets,” the Canadian theme is supplied by Stewart’s character, an ex-Mountie turned private investigator.

Mexico has been involved in co-productions ever since its musicals of the 1940s and 1950s set the standard in Latin America, turning the nation’s singing cowboys into international stars and spreading the image of a rural, macho country that still influences the way much of the world pictures Mexico.

But increasingly, the way international audiences view Mexico has been determined by foreign film companies shooting here. That vision often has little to do with the way Mexicans see themselves.

Since the 1970s, Mexican authorities have responded with censorship. To work in Mexico, a producer must submit two copies of the script for review by the Interior Ministry.

“We reject films that denigrate Mexico or other countries in Latin America,” said Gerardo Saucedo, head of the supervision department at the Ministry’s Radio, Television and Cinematography Section. “Also, if films are supposed to portray real life, they must be true.”

For example, last year, the government refused to allow producers of “A Man From Panama,” a television movie about Manuel Noriega, to shoot in Mexico. The script contained unproven allegations as well as excessive violence, Saucedo said.

Films that are accepted must have a government censor on the set to assure the approved script is followed.

Foreign films have an additional burden, union displacement fees: For every foreign actor or technician brought to Mexico to work on a production, the producers must pay the appropriate union the salary of the Mexican worker he displaced.

Producers blamed the combination of government regulation and union rules for the drop in the number of foreign films made in Mexico, to 15 last year from 50 a year in the 1960s, including documentaries and movies made for television.

As a result, there has not been enough work to allow younger technicians to develop. “Look at the age of our crew,” said Lance Hool, producer at Santa Monica-based Silver Lion Films, in an interview during the shooting of “Pure Luck,” a comedy feature shot this winter in Acapulco.

Indeed, people behind the equipment on the “Pure Luck” set were nearly all gray-haired, in a country where the average age is 15.

“Movie admission prices here are $1,” Roffiel said. “At that price, you cannot recover much, so you cannot invest much.”

As a result, “the pay is a joke,” said Fernando Camara, sound mixer for “Pure Luck,” and budgets are too tight to permit the kind of quality control needed for international-caliber films. A stout man with a long, gray beard wearing a “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” T-shirt, Camara crews foreign films for money and produces Mexican films as an avocation, so he clearly sees the differences.

“Like now,” he said. “We’re waiting for the sunset, for the light to be just right. Then, if the scene does not go well, we will come back tomorrow. It may take two or three days. A Mexican production would not have the time or resources--which are really the same thing--to wait.”

To provide people in the Mexican film industry with a way to be creatively involved in productions with international budgets, the Mexican Cinematography Institute has attempted co-productions with U.S. companies.

“The problem was that even the lowest budget films by U.S. standards were very expensive by Mexican standards,” Duran Loera said. Canadian budgets are more comparable, he said, making it feasible for Mexican producers to provide the 20% minimum investment needed to qualify a show as a co-production.

In addition, the government has streamlined and speeded the script approval process--scripts are accepted or rejected within three days of submission.

And next week’s co-production agreement will even tackle the union question. Duran Loera said co-productions will be treated as domestic productions--they will not have to pay displacement.

Concessions on displacement could be crucial for “Sweating Bullets.”

Roffiel currently is talking with the actors union, trying to obtain concessions. The agreement could strengthen his position.

“The world is changing rapidly,” he said. “We cannot keep operating with rules from the 1950s.”