Testing the Waters (Again) : Latinos have been TV’s invisible people. Now, Cheech Marin has sold Fox (sort of) on a sitcom starring Culture Clash.

Resist Much, Obey Little. -- Walt Whitman

Yeah, but Walt Whitman never had to do a sitcom in Hollywood .

--Richard Montoya, of Culture Clash

The plan sounded simple: Put three, hip Latino guys in a prime-time sitcom. Latinos who spoke fluent English without an accent and didn’t conform to the stereotypes that many whites have of Latinos as being lazy, or drug dealers, or murderous gangbangers. Latinos who had listened to their parents speaking Spanish at home while simultaneously immersing themselves in the Anglo language and culture of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Brunch.” Three brown-skinned men who revered their Latino background but were nonetheless as American as Ted Danson and Candice Bergen.

Yet the obstacles were imposing. While African-Americans have managed to become television fixtures--from “The Jeffersons” to “Good Times” to “What’s Happening!!” to “The Cosby Show” to “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”--Latinos, like other minority groups, have been largely invisible in prime time.

The man with the plan was Cheech Marin, formerly of Cheech and Chong. Fishing around for a television series to produce, he had discovered a comedy trio called Culture Clash last year when he went to see its high-energy, savagely satirical “The Mission” at the Los Angeles Theater Center. He signed the group and persuaded Fox Broadcasting to finance a half-hour pilot based on the stage characters.

“I’m going to take this show where no other Latino series has ever gone before,” Marin boasted. “Seven episodes!”

Looking at the bright side, the plan worked. “That’s the most brown faces you’ll ever see on TV at one time,” Richard Montoya said after taping was completed on the pilot, in which he stars with partners Ricardo Salinas and Herbert Siguenza. And Fox did order more episodes.

On the down side, however, Fox didn’t schedule “Culture Clash” for fall. And it only commissioned six additional episodes beyond the pilot. So if he is patient, Marin might eventually make it to his magic number of seven episodes. But even that is far from imminent and far from guaranteed.

Ever since Cuba-born Desi Arnaz stopped muttering Spanish exclamations at his harebrained wife on “I Love Lucy” in 1961, the only series featuring so prominent a Latino character that could even remotely be considered a hit was “Chico and the Man,” starring the late Freddie Prinze, which aired four seasons on ABC in the 1970s. While the Latino population of the United States and especially Los Angeles has risen steadily, its representation on prime-time network television in recent years has remained at one--Jimmy Smits on “L.A. Law.” And now he has left to pursue a film career.

On the rare occasions that network programmers have taken a stab at a Latino-based series, it has disappeared about as fast as you can say, “Gracias, pero no gracias.” “Popi” and “Viva Valdez” lasted but a few months each in 1976. Most conspicuous as the butt of Marin’s joke about lasting seven episodes, “A.K.A. Pablo” survived just one month on ABC in 1984 while “Trial and Error” aired only twice on CBS in 1988. Both starred Paul Rodriguez.

Such is the Latino legacy--and the Latino void--that Marin and Culture Clash are up against. But they are convinced that the time is ripe for an uncompromising breakthrough.

“I don’t think it’s a question anymore of whether we can be American enough for the TV audience,” Montoya said. “It’s more a question of being unapologetic and aggressive and claiming a piece of the American experience and the American pie. Now you have a lot of black shows like ‘In Living Color,’ and even ‘Roseanne.’ If America is ready for edgy African-American shows and white trash, then Chicanos can fit in there somewhere.”

“We are no less American than anybody else,” Siguenza said. “Hollywood has just never seen us as part of the American picture. We have always been the aliens, outcasts, something to be feared. The American picture on TV is black and white and that’s it. We’re simply trying to say that we are part of that picture too.”

Culture Clash centers around Montoya, Siguenza and Salinas, three guys of about 30 who play themselves--three guys struggling to break into Hollywood. They live in the garage under a Santa Monica restaurant and nightclub owned by Mrs. Chow, their Chinese landlady. Marin plays their shyster agent, and the pilot is sprinkled with some of the same caustic satire of stereotypes that has made Culture Clash’s stage productions a success in cities all over the country. (The group will open a new stage show, titled “Bowl of Beings,” at LATC Thursday.) Siguenza, for example, performs a dead-on and hilarious imitation of Jaime Escalante, the high school math teacher whose life was immortalized in the film “Stand and Deliver.” Salinas makes fun of the way Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and whites all dance salsa. Montoya, the Valley Boy Chicano, keeps a poster of Che Guevara above his bed and says things like “ Gracias, dude” and “I’ve been a Chicano since 1985.”

These bits are interwoven around a rather typical sitcom plot about the trio’s battle to get on stage in Mrs. Chow’s nightclub and to remain true to their dreams in the face of conflicting parental expectations. The pilot also features several ethnic humiliation jokes about Mexican lettuce pickers and Chinese laundrymen. About her restaurant’s chef, Mrs. Chow says, “He’s the first Cambodian chef I’ve had who doesn’t make the pot stickers from poodles.”

After viewing the pilot, Fox executives ordered an additional six episodes and put the show on a list with a handful of other programs under the nebulous category of “mid-season replacements.”

Paul Stupin, Fox’s executive vice president for series programming, said that Fox chose not to go with a bigger order because it wanted to see how the first few scripts and the first few tapings turn out. He speculated that “Culture Clash,” which will begin production in early fall, will be ready to go on the air by November, but he could not say when it would actually premiere.

“We have been looking for a program that involves (the Latino) voice for a long time because it certainly is one that hasn’t been heard on television before,” Stupin said. “This show has elements of humor that are different and fresh and also universal. We do think that this material can represent a very funny show for us and reach a broad audience, and it certainly is something that will get on the air at a time when it can receive the full focus of our marketing and promotional efforts.

“But we do want to take the time and effort to really develop their characters, to really develop a world for them here in Los Angeles. We want to give them the time to develop their stories and personalities, what will happen to them in their personal and their professional lives so that the audience will really care about these three guys and look forward to seeing what will happen to them next.”

Why the kid gloves? What’s the problem here?

Basically, say the Latinos who are knocking on the networks’ doors, the problem is “the gringos.” White people run the networks and decide what shows get made. Not that these white executives are overtly prejudiced; they just believe that the big, broad, predominantly white television audience will be turned off by Latino characters and Latino jokes.

“Obviously with this kind of show you have to try to attract the Latino audience with some authentic flavoring, but I have run across executives who get nervous that you will turn off the white audience simply by using one Spanish word,” Marin said. “They say, ‘Oh, what was that? He said ‘no’ in Spanish. Forget it.’ I guess in Wisconsin or Minnesota they are not all that familiar with Chicanos, but in big chunks of this country, in Texas and Louisiana and Florida and, of course, here, the Spanish influence is all over the place. But for some reason TV has always been aimed for that audience in Iowa. I just don’t think Iowa is indicative of this country any more.”

Members of Latins Anonymous, a four-person theater group that is currently developing a sitcom for ABC, said that even when the studios seek out Latinos to create new shows, the white executives impose these old biases on them.

The first show that Latins Anonymous pitched to a major studio was set in a small Southwestern town in which everyone was Latino and middle class. As they were describing the characters, who had names like Becky Gomez and Helena Molina, one of the white executives whispered incredulously, “All of their names are in Spanish,” recalled Luisa Leschin, one member of the group.

“They tell you, ‘Do what you want. Give us a show,’ ” added Rick Najera, one of her partners. “And you give it to them and then they slap you for it.”

“Another thing we heard all the time was ‘Where is your point of entry?’ ” said Armando Molina, the third member of Latins Anonymous. (Diane Rodriguez is the fourth.) “Which basically means, where is the white guy? How are Americans going to get into this world unless you give them Joe Smith from Iowa?”

“And that’s ridiculous,” Najera said. “I don’t watch ‘Cosby’ or ‘The Fresh Prince’ and say, ‘Darn, I really miss seeing white people.’ ”

With a new concept that they were unwilling to reveal, Latins Anonymous is scheduled to meet with ABC this month for story approval for their pilot. If the network approves, they will write at least the first draft of the script.

Their two producers, however, are white, and Latino writers contend that that has been another problem on the few occasions that television has tried bringing Latino characters into the mainstream. White producers have always been the driving forces behind the camera, they say, watering down the material and stereotyping the characters. Nothing is ever done, they complain, about the Latino middle class. Instead, most of the stories are about people coming over the border or about drugs or some heart-wrenching melodrama about a maid in Beverly Hills and her family back home.

“Most of the stories have been bound at the border,” Marin said. “The first ones here, the first ones to get a car, or being deported. We have always been ghetto-ized into that border region.”

“Where is the mom in Sherman Oaks, the engineer, the doctor?” Leschin said. “All you ever see is the newest immigrant. Nothing about all of us who have been here our whole lives.”

“Hollywood’s idea of the Latin middle class tends to be a low-ranking drug dealer,” quipped Najera, who along with his fellow actors in Latins Anonymous became sick and tired of auditioning to play bit parts as hoodlums, prostitutes or maids. “I was doing all the drug dealers, killing people, speaking with a thick Cuban accent. And it was actually hard to get those jobs because I’m sort of light-skinned and I was losing those jobs to Filipinos. Hollywood is so stupid, they look at him and say, ‘Oh, he’s dark, he can be a Mexican.’ They look at me, a Mexican-American, and say, ‘No way.’ ”

“And you pick up the script to play the maid and the English is so badly written, like we don’t know how to speak the language,” Rodriguez said. “Or the few words of Spanish are wrong, too. I keep hoping it will improve, but it doesn’t.”

Ironically, “Culture Clash” could stir similar complaints from Asian-Americans, another group significantly under-represented on network television. Its portrayal of Mrs. Chow, the landlady and nightclub owner, is anything but sympathetic. She proclaims that she “never sleeps with a man who doesn’t own commercial real estate” and speaks with an accent heavier than Charlie Chan’s.

Salinas, Montoya and Siguenza refered to Mrs. Chow as their landlord in their stage show, but she never actually appeared. They confess to being a bit apprehensive about her accent and how Asians might react to it, but they have no power to make alterations. In “Culture Clash,” the TV show, they are only actors.

Marin is the boss and co-wrote the pilot with Eric Cohen. And he makes no apologies for Mrs. Chow’s accent, as spoken by Lauren Tom, an Asian-American actress who speaks in real life without an accent.

“As Mark Twain said, ‘No criticism can withstand the wall of laughter,’ ” Marin said. “Lauren Tom is amazingly funny and she makes that character come to life. Politically correct people have to have a sense of humor too. With Cheech and Chong we faced that politically correct audience before, and either we won them over with humor or we drove them away. But I think the dynamic between Mrs. Chow and the guys is gold.”

Culture Clash, the group and not the show, was born in an art gallery in the Mission district of San Francisco in 1984. Montoya, Siguenza and Salinas had worked individually as actors and comedians for several years, performing in nonprofit Latino theater productions and trying to crack the comedy circuit. After meeting, they decided to team to create and perform monologues and sketches from their own Latino bent.

Both Montoya and Siguenza were born in California. Montoya is third-generation American--his great-grandparents came from Mexico. He grew up in San Diego and Oakland, and his father, a poet and teacher, was involved in the inception of the United Farm Workers movement. Siguenza’s parents immigrated from El Salvador to San Francisco in the 1940s. Salinas was born in El Salvador, but moved to East Los Angeles and then San Francisco when he was 5 and was raised in the latter’s mostly Chicano Mission district.

Their sketches, first tested in the art gallery, eventually turned into a play and, finding it tough to break into the mainstream white comedy and theater clubs, they have been performing and touring ever since--mostly on what they call the “college and Viva La Raza circuit.”

“The white comedy club scene just mirrored what was happening in film and television, where we have always been invisible, and that is what really has kept our passions inflamed all these years,” Montoya said. “We were told by some comedy club owners that they’d like to hire Culture Clash, ‘but Mexicans just don’t tip well and it wouldn’t be good for our waitresses.’ ”

The group calls itself an “equal opportunity satirist,” lampooning everyone from low riders to Julio Iglesias to Frida Kahlo to Erik Estrada, Carlos Castaneda, Cesar Chavez and “La Bamba.” They make fun of white people, they make fun of Dostoevski and Brecht, they make fun of the Catholic church, they make fun of Hollywood--especially the humiliating roles Latinos are forced to take.

The lure of television--besides the money, of course--is the opportunity to bring the group’s satire and its efforts to dismantle prejudices to a much larger audience.

But the medium’s promise, Siguenza noted, does not come without compromise.

First, there are the bad jokes, which, as hired hands, the trio was obligated to recite in the pilot. They fought for and won some changes, but a few ethnic jokes--about cockfighting, lettuce picking and another about the “Wheel of Lard”--did survive, and they just had “to grin and bear it,” Salinas said.

And then there is the problem of having to water down the bite and intelligence of their jokes to hit the level of the broad TV audience. Brecht, Dostoevski and Che Guevara are not the stuff of most television shows.

They have achieved some small victories. When Montoya tacked up a poster of Che on the set of his bedroom, the staff person responsible for such things asked him what rock star was on the poster so he could get clearance for it. Montoya told him he could call Fidel Castro. The poster stayed up. But Montoya was not allowed to wear his paper hat emblazoned with the name Chaka, the infamous Los Angeles graffiti artist.

“We are forced to give up some of our more esoteric references,” Siguenza said. “But as people get to know us and we can educate them, maybe in episode 10 or 20 we can do the Frida Kahlo joke. It does us no good to get canceled after six episodes because we were too intelligent or too hip. It does me no good and it does Latinos no good.”

“Yes, we are afraid that the TV show will not have the same urgency and political consciousness of our shows in Berkeley or at LATC,” Montoya added. “But in the overall scheme of the TV picture, when was the last time you saw Latinos who didn’t have accents and were dealing with real, human problems? It’s a give-and-take thing and that in itself is a big take, a big political statement. Yes, it might be silly at times and not as urgent, but that is acceptable to us because slowly we will be able to infiltrate our way into the norm of American culture.”

They are all disappointed that Fox chose not to schedule “Culture Clash” immediately, but grateful too that they still have a chance. Friends who have supported them over the years, they say, have questioned whether the compromise and disappointments are worth it.

“We’ve thought hard about that,” Siguenza admitted. “But if we give up, if we don’t step up and take this opportunity, it will be at least another two or three years before others make their way through this process. We have a responsibility to try to give everyone else that is struggling out there a little lift.”

“The door is only open as long as you can keep it open with brute force,” Marin said. “Latino shows are long overdue, but the bottom line is the bottom line. If we prove to be successful, that’s when everyone will look around and say, ‘Got any more?’ ”