Latin America Looks to Miami, Not Hollywood, for Music, Film

As a child actress in Mexico City, and later as a radio deejay in Texas and television news anchor in Los Angeles, Ana Maria Canseco figured she had seen just about everything the Spanish-language entertainment industry had to offer.

Then she saw Miami.

“You won’t believe it!” she squealed months after moving there. “It feels like all of Latin America is here.”

That’s a slight exaggeration, of course. Not every Latin American lives in Miami--just those who can sing and act. In the last five years, south Florida’s entertainment industry has enjoyed unprecedented growth, an expansion sparked almost entirely by music and cable-television companies hoping to tap into Latin America’s new economic prosperity.

While Los Angeles can boast of its long history in the entertainment field, an unrivaled television, motion picture and recording infrastructure and the largest Spanish-speaking population in the country, Miami has the edge in Latin programming.

Although Los Angeles is just a two-hour drive from the border, it is more than 1,500 miles from Mexico City, the nerve center of the Mexican entertainment industry.

Miami is actually 300 miles closer to the Mexican capital by air, but it’s the city’s proximity to the rest of Latin America that really gives it an advantage. Indeed, you can reach Latin America’s three major entertainment centers--Mexico City, Caracas and Buenos Aires--much quicker from Miami than from Los Angeles; in the case of the Venezuelan and Argentine capitals, five hours faster.

“If you want to go to Venezuela, to Colombia, to South America or to Latin America in general, it’s easier [from Miami],” said Puerto Rican singer Chayanne, owner of 28 gold and 19 platinum records in Spanish.

As a result, virtually every major Spanish-speaking entertainer has a house, agent or studio here, making the area the country’s dominant source for Latin music and television as well as a leading player in the international entertainment business.

The Hollywood of Latin America

Along Miami’s South Beach--recently dubbed the “Music Row” of Spanish-language recording--are offices for the Latin divisions of Sony, EMI, Universal/MCA, MTV, Warner Chappell, Island Music and Gloria Estefan’s Estefan Enterprises. Across Biscayne Bay on the mainland are BMG, WEA, PolyGram and Fonovisa--all powers in Latin music--plus the East Coast headquarters of the Telemundo and Univision television networks. Radio Unica, the nation’s only full-service Spanish-language radio network, is also there, along with a burgeoning number of cable outlets that beam their signals throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Even the mammoth Spanish publishing house Santillana recently moved its U.S. headquarters from Compton to Miami, convinced that Florida, not California, is the gateway to Latin American.

“It’s one-stop shopping,” said Dennis Leyva, Miami Beach’s liaison to the entertainment industry. “Just go down the list of all the major cable networks, and they all have their Latin American divisions here.”

Miami Beach, with a population of just 90,000, is home to more than 195 entertainment-related companies. Along with smaller entertainment companies spread throughout south Florida, they provide an estimated 14,000 jobs and in 1996, the last year for which figures are available, brought nearly $1.4 billion into Dade County, nearly double the previous year’s total.

That’s provoked little concern in Los Angeles, where business is booming as well. Spending for television and movie production grew more than 60% in Los Angeles County in a recent four-year period, topping $25 billion in 1996, also the last year for which figures are available. And the entertainment industry provides work for an estimated 412,000 people here.

“Of course we’d love to have everybody, but our community has had such an influx of production. . . . All our [15,000-foot] sound stages are booked through 1998,” said Stephanie Hershey-Liner, executive vice president of the Entertainment Industry Development Corp., a nonprofit organization that works closely with local governments to bring film production to Southern California. “We realize that Miami has certain advantages. . . . There’s enough work for everybody.”

Miami is hardly a stranger to the entertainment industry--prime-time television programs such as “The Jackie Gleason Show” and “Flipper” were filmed there in the 1960s. But its emergence as a major player dates only to the mid-’80s, when European fashion photographers discovered the area. Next came NBC-TV’s “Miami Vice,” which made the city look glamorous to a national audience.

But few network programs followed in Don Johnson’s wake. So when Latin American economies stabilized following the “Lost Decade” of the ‘80s, the Spanish-language entertainment industry--drawn in large part by U.S. money and easy access to all of Latin America--took over south Florida.

Cable television and music companies were the first ones in, and they still dominate local production. But when the trickle of Latin American talent became a flood five years ago, it threatened to overwhelm Miami’s nascent support system.

“There had been the impression that the infrastructure would be there because the Univision and Telemundo affiliate stations had been there and had been producing for some time,” said Maria Romeu of Miami-based public relations firm Luna Media Inc. “But the infrastructure was actually just growing as these people were coming.”

While much of the existing physical resources, such as studios, were suitable, the producers, writers and auxiliary talent who had primarily aimed their work at older Latinos in the U.S. had difficulty adapting their skills to a much younger Latin American audience.

“In the beginning it turned out to be much more costly and much more time-consuming than we thought,” said Romeu. “But now there’s a tremendous base of infrastructure. The industry motivated the growth.”

That growth lured even more talent from a variety of entertainment and fashion-related genres. It’s been an immigration explosion that community leaders have encouraged.

“As a location to film in, it’s really a pretty spot. But in terms of actually owning a niche in the business, it’s the Latin American market,” said Jeff Peel, director of the Miami-Dade office of film entertainment. “This is really the Hollywood, if you will, of Latin America. The trends that take place in Latin America are really the trends that we live or die with.”

Bicoastal Synergy

One trend worth watching is the one that already draws some of Latin America’s biggest stars to Southern California. Spurred by Telemundo’s aggressive new programming strategy, the growth of roles for Latinos in the movie business and the big-screen crossover dreams of Latin stars such as Chayanne, Venezuelan soap opera heartthrob Luis Fernandez and Mexican singer Paty Manterola, Hollywood is taking on a new importance for Latin talent.

Sony and Liberty Media, which earlier this month consummated their purchase of financially troubled Telemundo for $539 million, have already set up national variety show “Al Dia con Maria Conchita” in Hollywood and have plans to shift more of the network’s production from Miami to Southern California in the coming months.

“We are in the entertainment business and the entertainment business is in Hollywood,” said outgoing Telemundo Chief Executive Roland Hernandez, who, like his Univision counterpart, Henry Cisneros, was based in Southern California. “Those individuals, particularly on the creative side, are sitting right here in Hollywood, in Los Angeles. And the amount of contact that we enjoy being in Los Angeles and Hollywood, we would not enjoy . . . being in Miami.

“Los Angeles is going to grow in influence as a major production center in Spanish TV. And it will share that type of influence with Miami. But I don’t think that you will continue to see Miami viewed as the exclusive center for Spanish-language production.”

While Hernandez, chairman of Telemundo’s station group under the new Sony management, believes that Los Angeles’ role as a production center will grow as a result of the Sony purchase, Sony officials are saying Miami will become even more important. Both may be right.

Because Sony’s major motion picture and television divisions are in Los Angeles and its Latin music headquarters is in Miami, Telemundo is likely to benefit from the synergy of those relationships on both coasts. In fact, the network has plans to expand not only in Miami and Los Angeles, but in the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan and Mexico City as well. Moreover, division heads are being encouraged to share their talent with other Sony properties.

Chayanne, for example, one of the major recording stars under contract to Sony Latin, has appeared on three separate Telemundo shows in recent weeks and made his Hollywood acting debut this month in “Dance With Me,” a Sony release.

L.A. Latinos’ Power Gap

Los Angeles’ efforts to lure Latino entertainers to the city may be hindered to some extent by a lack of political and economic power among Latinos here. While they comprise the largest segment of the community, they remain underrepresented in government, finance and the boardrooms of the city’s major entertainment companies.

“In Miami, our mayor is Hispanic, our supervisors are Hispanic, the bank presidents are Hispanic,” said Leyva, a Cuban American. “L.A. is not a multicultural community for the Latin population.”

Indeed, Miami’s Latin population is actually far denser. Although L.A. County’s Latin population of 3.3 million is nearly twice as big as the total population of Dade County, nearly two-thirds of Miami’s residents are Latino. For Los Angeles, their proportion is less than half.

And in the spring, a Miami television station--Univision affiliate WLTV--became the nation’s first non-English station to win the prime-time ratings sweep in a major market.

Southern California’s size, its proximity to Mexico and the influence of Mexican culture here actually work against Los Angeles in building a broad presence in the Latin entertainment world, say Dade County’s Peel and others.

“Los Angeles is so big and there’s so much going on, Latin [entertainment] sort of gets lost,” he said. “Also, if Los Angeles is oriented at all toward Latin America . . . it’s oriented toward Mexico. But Latin America is really much more diverse than that.”

Peel chuckles at the situation. “We don’t have any fantasies of surpassing Los Angeles as the film and entertainment capital of the world. We are just going to be a production center with our particular niche. And that’s going to continue to grow.”