It’s the Year of the Latino . . . or Is It?

In our scaled-down American dream, the small cottage is now a condo and the picket fence a security gate. But the new American dream flourishes, the one about making a killing in Hollywood with a seven-figure price tag for your script.

For some, though, it’s not always the same equal-opportunity dream.

Berkeley writer Floyd Salas saw his Hollywood dream stir 22 years ago when his novel “What Now My Love” was optioned for $15,000 by an independent producer who paid it out in $500 monthly hunks before the company folded.

A few years later the film rights for an earlier novel about Chicano gangs, “Tattoo, the Wicked Cross,” was optioned for $5,000 but somewhere between option and shooting script, Salas’ name fell off. Several lawyer meetings later his name went back on, just about the time the project sank.

So here it is almost the end of 1992 and Salas seems to be a hot item again. His autobiographical “Buffalo Nickel,” which came out last October, received strong reviews and he’s hitting the public appearance circuit and the phones are ringing, Hollywood’s script hunters come calling.

From “Zoot Suit” to “American Me,” it’s almost an annual Hollywood ritual for studio bosses and producers to make public utterances about “the year of the Latino movie” and about “tapping into the Latino market.”

It’s the search for another “La Bamba” but without the music.

Hollywood’s production charts tell a different story, with nothing before the cameras in either films or TV. But earlier this month a TV movie deal involving Edward James Olmos, Sonia Braga, Maria Conchita Alonso and writer Milcha Sanchez-Scott was announced for next year along with an HBO project for comedian Paul Rodriguez and a 2-year Columbia Pictures deal for 24-year-old writer-director Robert Rodriguez and his $7,000 feature, “El Mariachi.”

There are other significant stirrings, too.

Salas’ publisher, Nicolas Kanellos of the Arte Publico Press in Houston, said he’s had dealings with Hollywood producers before but nothing has matched the calls that came in when reviews of Salas’ “Buffalo Nickel” came out.

Disney’s Touchstone asked for a copy of the book the Monday following a review in The Times. Then calls came from the big CAA agency, NBC, producer Lawrence Turman and several other independent producers.

An associate producer with At Work America, the independent that co-produced the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes,” tracked Salas down to a reading in Brentwood, talking movie rights.

Some agents, Kanellos says, have tried to skirt his exclusive contractual arrangements with his writers, approaching some with promises of quick fame and fortune.

Gary Keller’s Bilingual Review Press in Arizona has become another target of some Hollywood development people. Keller recently signed a deal with the At Work America company for the book “The Road to Tamazunchale” by People magazine senior writer Ron Arias. The 20-year-old book, reissued by Keller’s press, will be retitled as “Fausto’s Road,” with a script by UCLA adjunct film professor Al Gonzalez, who also will direct the film.

“I first read Arias’ book in 1975,” Gonzalez says, “and used it in my classes then because it reflects the Latino and Chicano experiences in Los Angeles. It tells what we are as a people. It’s not the gang baloney that the majority culture thinks we are about.”

Keller also reports increased interest by Hollywood people in Latino writers. Two books that he wrote, “Hidalgo, Venture Capitalist” and “Zapata Rose in 1992,” are in Hollywood studio hands now. “We’ve seen options before, and nothing came of them. Now with Arias’ book we have a deal.”

Kanellos believes it’s strongly in Hollywood’s interest to develop Latino connections. “The demographics favor going after the Latino market,” he says. “It’s a world market, too. But what should be offered are films that don’t stress the gang banging, drug-related stuff. But it seems when it comes to stories of nonviolence, it’s always harder to raise the money.”

Another of Kanellos’ writers, Victor Villasenor of Oceanside, parlayed the success of his book about his family, “Rain of Gold,” into an assignment developing a so-far unproduced TV series about a Latino community. He’s had similar brushes with Hollywood producers looking for books to convert into movies. “I made a lot of money over the years just selling options to my earlier book, ‘Macho,’ ” he says.

Jose Luis Ruiz has a different take about Hollywood’s periodic interest in Latino writers/Latino themes.

He’s looking for a new “Sounder,” an honest story reflecting human lives, something without the “American Me” gang violence or the hidden ethnicity of an “Old Man and the Sea.”

Ruiz, executive director of the National Latino Communications Group, a stand-alone production company with links to PBS, says Hollywood filmmakers too often take a Latino story and then lose the Latinos. Who knew, he says, that Spencer Tracy’s role as Hemingway’s old man was Cuban?

“The bigger issue is that as the studios start to option the novels of Latino writers, will they maintain the flavor of the original? The real question will be: Who will do the writing, who are the writers who can catch the essence of this culture? Hollywood so far has not been ready for our language and our writers,” Ruiz says.

He sees other ethnic and racial groups with established beachheads in Hollywood and only recently have the studios become “used to African-American language in their films.”

His foundation-supported production group, he says, has more projects about Latinos than all of Hollywood’s studios. The American Playhouse movie “La Carpa” has been accepted for the Sundance Festival. “Tierra,” based on Tomas Rivera’s “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him,” is being budgeted as a major PBS event and possible theatrical movie.

To get more of Hollywood’s attention, Kanellos is beginning to look for a “closer,” that unique person among literary agencies who has the right connections and the right approach and the ability to close a deal.

“I’ve closed deals by myself in the past,” he says, “but now the stakes are much higher because our writers have gotten onto best-seller lists and become major factors.”

Yet he knows that while Houston isn’t yet Hollywood, neither has 1992 become the promised year of the Latino writer.