THE BUSINESS OF ENTERTAINMENT : Latino Films, TV, Music Make It Big in Hollywood

The emerging Latino majority in Southern California, with its rich musical heritage, historical dramas and vibrant images, has been, until recently, relegated to the fringes of the entertainment world. To a large extent, this has more to do with the incestuous nature of the entertainment business than with racism. Top entertainment executives not only live in a virtually all-white world, they also come from places in the country whose enduring ethnic archetypes are Jewish, Italian or African American.

Yet, Latinos are slowly beginning to breach Hollywood’s walls of inattention. Although still rare, several high-profile Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute of Public Policy and at the Pacific Research Institute. He is also business-trends analyst for Fox TV.

Latin-themed or directed movies will probably leave an unprecedented imprint on audiences this year, including a biography of the late Tejano singer Selena, the new movie “Lorca” and a remake of the “Zorro” TV series.

Even television, usually slower at incorporating social trends in its programming, is weighing in with at least two Latino-oriented dramas, two sitcoms and an English-language novela currently in development. Also in development is a TV movie on the life of baseball great Roberto Clemente. And Hollywood’s Klasky-Csupo, creator of the popular “Rugrats,” has added the Latin-themed Santo Bugito cartoon series.

Hollywood might also consider tapping the resources of Los Angeles’ thriving Spanish-language media. In the richest radio market in the nation, Latino programming and personalities dominate the top-rated local FM-radio stations, with No. 1-ranked KLVE’s morning show clobbering Howard Stern during drive-time. In the last ratings period, KMEX was first among adults age 18-34, and second among the 18-49 group.

Significantly, some Spanish-language outlets are shifting their production from Cuban-dominated Miami, the traditional center of U.S. Latino mass culture, to greater Los Angeles. During the past year, for example, the new ownership of the Telemundo Spanish-language network has produced variety and talk shows at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. Other programs in development, like sitcoms, aim at markets throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

“The Hispanic market has to be producing programming for its audience in the same place as it’s being produced for the rest of the world--and Hollywood is that place,” says Harry Abraham-Castillo, executive vice president for production at Telemundo. “It’s easy to produce here because there are a lot of support industries, but . . . there is also the pride and the prestige of programming produced in the Hollywood area because it has the Hollywood stamp.”

Since Hollywood is helping to develop Latino entertainment, it stands to benefit mightily from the growth of a Latino media presence here. For one thing, many of the industry’s freshest faces are from Latino communities across the country and from Central or South America. These include actors Robert Beltran, Jimmy Smits and Hector Elizondo, writer Rene Echeverria and directors Gregory Nava, Robert Rodriguez, Luis Mandoki and Alfonso Arau.

At the same time, Latino music, from the Tejano ballads of Emilio Navaira and the late Selena to Banda and salsa, is gaining increasing air time on mainstream radio. Sales of Tejano music, a Texas-based blend of Latin pop, polka music and country sung in either Spanish or English, have quadrupled, to more than $120 million annually, in the past four years.

In many ways, should Hollywood ride the Latin wave, it would continue its longstanding habit of feeding off the creative energies of America’s ethnic communities. For example, the original moguls drew heavily on their predominately East European Jewish culture with its roots in Purim plays and the Yiddish theater.

Perhaps more than anything, what immigrants and outsiders brought to Hollywood were new possibilities for mass culture. In seeking to attract a mass audience, notes historian Irving Howe, the mostly immigrant moguls exuded a sense of optimism and a sense of possibility that have long been at the core of American culture.

But in the conformist-minded 1950s, this robust sense of American culture began to shrink. The new bosses at the studios were hard-headed, mainstream-oriented corporate executives who wanted to “blend in.” Minorities such as Asians, African Americans and Latinos were mostly hired to play stereotypes.

Latinas, remembers actress Carmen Zapata, could choose between a maid, a prostitute or the mother of a troubled boy. It wasn’t much better for males. Actor Ricardo Montalban recalls three kinds of roles being offered--”the indolent peon,” “the Latin lover” and, most often, the Mexican bandit.

It was in the late 1980s, with the explosion of black filmmakers, that the doors for minorities in Hollywood swung open. With the rise of directors like Hughes Brothers, John Singleton and Spike Lee, as well black music producers, African American cultural influences began to reach mainstream audiences. Today, African Americans actors have a higher percentage of speaking roles--17%--on network television than their share of the general population.

The current upsurge of interest in Latino artists owes much to these African Americans. The proven ability of blacks to appeal to mainstream America, as well as to foreign markets, shattered forever the mythology that only white-bread “mainstream” culture could sell.

But the Latinization of Hollywood offers distinctly different assets for Hollywood. As Nely Galan, one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising Latin producers, puts it, Latinos should not be dismissed as “black imitators,” but represent a highly diverse cultural universe that draws upon everything from Chicano history to the various Afro-Carribean and Latin American experiences.

Galan believes that Latin themes, stars, musicians and directors could help open up huge new markets for U.S. media companies in the 300-million-strong Spanish-language market abroad. With Hollywood looking outside the United States for upward of half its future revenues, this market should appeal even to the most shortsighted of entertainment executives.

At the same time, Latino-oriented programming could equip hard-pressed producers to gain access to one of the fastest-growing markets in the United States. Since 1970, the nation’s Latino population has grown from under 10 million to nearly 30 million, four-fifths of whom are either bilingual or primarily English-speaking. By the year 2000, Latinos will be the largest minority not only in Los Angeles, San Diego and Houston but also in New York, the nation’s largest television market.

“With the networks losing viewership, people are saying, ‘Oh, my God, it’s time to pursue this market whether its features or television,’ ” says Galan. “After all, this is a business and people are looking for more eyeballs.”

Equally important, Latinos could bring to Hollywood a new perspective on the quintessential American experience of immigration, with its contrary impulses of integration, assimilation and alienation. Like the turn-of-the-century Jews who gave birth to Hollywood, today’s Latinos come to this country dazzled and confused but fundamentally energized by its new opportunities.

In this sense, the Latino struggle in America--as told in such movies as “American Me,” “Mi Familia,” “Mi Vida Loca,” “El Norte” and “La Bamba”--reflects not only a barrio sensibility, but the essence of the immigrant American experience. By tapping this experience and the creative visions that it inspires, Hollywood may yet find a way to replenish the creative stock crucial to remaining the most powerful cultural influence on Earth.*