Rethinking Kahlo as ‘Two Fridas’ : Movies: After dropping plans for his first project on the Mexican artist, Luis Valdez returns with a new approach. This film is based on her painting depicting the dual personalities she saw in herself.

Eight months ago, a disillusioned Luis Valdez abruptly dropped plans to make a movie about Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The playwright-director’s decision came after New Line Cinema backed out of financing the project and as some fellow Latinos criticized Valdez for casting a non-Latina actress--Laura San Giacomo--as Kahlo.

Valdez, saying he was “fed up” with Hollywood filmmaking and feeling “betrayed” by his own people, announced he would have to rethink the movie.

Valdez and his wife, Lupe Trujillo Valdez, have, indeed, rethought their approach to the movie about Kahlo and Rivera, the muralist she twice married. The project is now called “The Two Fridas,” and is based on a Kahlo painting that depicts the dual personalities she saw in herself--the German-Jewish background of her father and the Mexican heritage of her mother. Valdez, creator of “Zoot Suit” and director of the feature film “La Bamba,” said this is a return to his original screenplay concept, which New Line rejected.

“You can’t capture Frida using a traditional linear story,” Valdez said. “Like Diego, she had a tremendous imagination and was able to reinvent herself. . . . You might say that this story will be a triangle--of Frida, Diego and Frida.”

Production on “The Two Fridas,” which will have two actresses playing the two Fridas, is expected to begin in September. The $7-million project will be financed by American and Italian production firms, as well as the Mexican government’s film office, Imcine, which also supported the original production.

Valdez said one of the two actresses he would like for Frida is still San Giacomo (“sex, lies and videotape” and “Pretty Woman”). He hopes the second Frida will be Ofelia Medina, a renowned Mexican actress who portrayed Kahlo in the 1987 film “Frida,” by director Paul Leduc, which had only a limited art-house distribution in the United States.

Valdez’s executive producers, Donald Zuckerman and Kevin Benson, said both actresses have had meetings with the director. “Now we’re at the point of beginning negotiations with them,” Zuckerman said.

Valdez’s choice to play Rivera remains Raul Julia (“The Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “The Addams Family”). “We have a realistic hope, but he has problems with scheduling,” Zuckerman said.

Valdez’s plans to make “Frida and Diego” assumed a high profile last year due to mounting interest among the international art community about Kahlo, who died at age 47 after a tempestuous relationship with Rivera. The script by the two Valdezes is based on the 1990 biography of Kahlo by Martha Zamora.

A separate film on Kahlo is in development at HBO, titled “The Two of Me,” based on her romance with Diego.

The Valdez project instantly became a rallying point for some Latino actors, who said they have found little opportunity in the Hollywood film industry for roles other than gang and barrio stereotypes.

Valdez agreed, but said he had to balance the rarity of a Latino film, not widely believed to be highly commercial, with box-office considerations. At the time, Valdez said New Line would not approve his idea to audition an unknown Latina for the role.

In the wake of the announcement to drop the original film, Zuckerman said Valdez received “validation from the Latino community. People called him and sent letters of support. ‘You’ve always been one of us,’ they told him. ‘We endorse your decision, whatever it may be.’ ”

Zuckerman asserted that it was the criticism by “a vocal minority” in the Latino acting community “that sank us in the first place.”

Because of that criticism, there has been the suggestion that the conceit of two Fridas is a compromise. “This concept is in the first draft,” said Zuckerman, disputing the contention. “New Line didn’t like it. So Luis abandoned it and rewrote it. But it was his first artistic approach and it works for us politically as well. I don’t think he thought of it as a compromise.”

Now, with the new financing from Los Angeles-based First Look Pictures and Italy’s Produzioni Cinematografiche C.E.P., Valdez said he is free to cast Medina. The Italian firm is known here for its production of “A Fine Romance,” which starred Marcello Mastroianni and Julie Andrews.

“Frida gives me an opportunity as an American filmmaker to view the effects of the Mexican Revolution on the rest of the world,” Valdez said.