Passing the Screen Test : If Their Stories Are to Be Portrayed in Films and Television, Latinos Need Opportunities Behind the Camera

Enrique Berumen, 30, began a 10-month fellowship in October with the American Film Institute to write and produce a screenplay. The East Los Angeles native was one of four people in the country chosen for the fellowships in writing, directing, cinematography and producing. He was interviewed by Mary Anne Perez.

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When I finished my first year of secondary school I wanted to be a priest and went into a seminary. I saw religion and priesthood as a way of helping people. But that only lasted half a year because I got so disillusioned with everything that I saw, the hypocrisy.

I think shifting from one place to another and going through separations and losses and emotional turmoil, making friends and seeing my family all separated, made me kind of start writing--journal writing. The more I read, the more I wanted to become a writer or a poet. I just didn’t know where to start, and then I started seeing a lot of films in Mexico City and I thought, ‘Wow, films are really powerful.’

It’s cool to transpose what you write onto the screen, but then I didn’t know there was such a thing as a film school. I was 22 at the time, so after I dropped out I just didn’t have anything else to do in Mexico City and I came back. Gradually, I was trying to be more serious with my writing. I met some poets and did some readings and some collections. By the time I went up to UC Santa Cruz to get my B.A., I already had it in mind that I wanted to write. I wanted to be a poet.

When I was 24 or 25 I hooked up with a really good friend, my teacher, my film teacher. I told her I wanted to study film for a graduate degree and she told me about film school. Then she told me about the film school in Cuba, that they were looking for Chicanos to apply. It was a new school, run by the Latin American Film Assn. So I applied and went through a series of tests and the application and I got accepted.

I went to Cuba in ’88. It’s a six-month course . . . and (there are) big names like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robert Redford. . . . Then I came back and got accepted to film school at USC.

The American Film Institute scholarship is a new program, in its second year. It’s an effort to increase the minorities that work in the industry--the writers, producers, directors and cinematographers. In the Writers Guild, fewer than 1% of the screenwriters in this country are Latinos. It’s sad and in the Directors Guild it’s probably even worse than that. The sad thing is there’s only one slot and that’s not a lot, but I guess it’s something.

At the end of the 10 months I’ll have a completed screenplay for a two-hour film, but a lot of the way between the beginning and the end is the process of being able to have special writers as mentors, being able to network in the industry, be it agents, producers, production company heads etc.

There are some failings in the program but I think the good thing is that it serves as an example for maybe other institutions to do the same. The situation is bad. I think that if we’re going to see ourselves represented on the screen and on television, we need to have more opportunities for writers or directors and producers and cinematographers to develop, because it’s not just going to happen.

I’ve been working on three treatments--a whole narrative of the story of about 20 pages each. From there I can go directly to an outline, breaking down into scenes and then go to the actual scriptwriting, a screenplay. Concurrently I’ll be working on the list of people I want to meet, some heavy-hitters in the industry. Ideally, I want to have a script, two other treatments and the film from school when I go in to meet with people. I don’t want to go in empty-handed.

As a Chicano writer, a minority writer, people do judge you harshly. The standards are way up there, you have to have a good presentation, you have to be extra good. They expect a lot from you, plus in some ways even though you don’t want to, you’re representing your people and that’s a pretty big burden.

I think we all have good stories to tell. One of the things as a screenwriter is knowing how to master the technique, the structure that they use in Hollywood. In some ways we’re going back to the dominant culture, but the reality is we do live in this framework. If you want to subvert, if you want to rebel against the institutions, you have to learn the technique and then use it to your advantage.

A lot of times what happens is we have Anglo writers or non-Chicano writers trying to write about our experience and sometimes it doesn’t work because they’re just not feeling what we feel. They really don’t know what it’s like.

I encountered a lot of people at USC who lived a sheltered life and had nothing to say. They probably did master the grammatical structure better than I did because they came from privileged backgrounds, they grew up in a house that had books. But I had a lot to say. I just didn’t know how to start saying it.