Mexico’s Cinema Heyday Gone. Ahora Que?

As the lights dimmed inside the Fox theater in the Northern California town of Salinas, Kit Parker thought he was in for some good Mexican cinema. Movies that showcased exotic, sultry women and macho men in romantic settings.

Instead, on that day five years ago, Parker, a classic film buff, was shocked to see a wreck of a movie filled with slapstick: dumb “gringos” tripping over furniture and pseudo-action heroes stiffly reading poorly written lines.

It was a painful reminder that the era of classic Mexican film had come and gone.

“It was so sad because I remember those Jorge Negrete and Pedro Armendariz films which were wonderful,” said Parker, whose company Kit Parker Films is a distributor of classic movies for studios. “And now it had sunk to this stuff.”

So Parker and his friend, Lawrence Martin, whose family exhibited Spanish-language films for four decades, began their quest to revive the popular Latin cinema they fondly remember from their youth.

Unable to rely on Mexico for film distribution, Parker and Martin have founded a fledgling production company, New Latin Pictures, to produce Spanish-language movies made in the United States. Despite a lack of film products, they remain convinced that the market for Spanish-language films in the U.S. is not only still there, but bigger than ever.

As the Spanish-speaking population in the States continues to grow, so has the Latin entertainment industry. In radio and television, the Latin divisions rake in millions of dollars annually. Parker and Martin have set out to prove that commercial Spanish-language films can be just as popular and profitable.

“This is the piece that is missing from the Spanish entertainment scene,” said Martin, whose father and uncle owned a chain of theaters throughout California from 1940 to the late 1980s. “We want to bring Spanish-language films to a new era.”

It appears they have found support from one national theater chain. AMC, which showed the pair’s first film “Nueba Yol” in 1996, is on board to exhibit their releases this fall: “Las Delicias del Poder” (The Delights of Power) starring classic Mexican comedienne La India Mari’ and “Anjelito Mio” (My Little Angel), a musical-fantasy starring soap opera child star Daniela Lujan.

“In this industry, grosses have a tendency to speak louder than just about anything else,” said Richard Fay, president of AMC theaters film marketing. “As we watched [‘Nueba Yol’] we were pleasantly surprised to see the grosses. It turned out to be very successful for all of us.”

New Latin Pictures’ target audience are Latinos living in the United States. The movies they want to produce are not highbrow art films; rather they’re light, entertaining movies they hope will have a broad appeal.

So far, however, no major studio has shown an interest in backing the pair’s production company. Without studio support, they can only afford to produce about one film every three years, even though their films are extremely low-budget--usually under $500,000--by Hollywood standards.

Production Affects Audience Loyalty

A slow pace of production makes it difficult to establish a loyal audience--something that was a key to success for Latin cinema years ago, according to Michael Donnelly, who, in the early 1980s, worked as a distribution consultant for Azteca Films, the major distributor of Mexican films in the United States.

“You need a consistency in the flow of production otherwise you have just the opportunistic film that does well when it comes out,” said Donnelly. “With this audience, you need to win them over.”

For more than 30 years, Spanish-speaking audiences could count on seeing one of their favorite stars at a local movie house in the U.S. From 1940 through the early 1980s, commercial Spanish language films--made mainly in Mexico--spurred a multimillion-dollar industry in the States.

At its peak, Mexican films were churned out for distribution on a weekly basis with at least a half-dozen companies distributing the films to more than 300 theaters nationwide, Donnelly said. Part of the allure was the star power of actors and actresses like Armendariz, Negrete, Dolores del Rio, Pedro Infante, Cantinflas and Maria Felix who spawned the Golden Age of cinema in Mexico from 1936 to 1957.

In the early 1970s, the Mexican government tried to prop up the dying industry by subsidizing quality pictures that targeted a more sophisticated audience. But by the late 1980s, the industry had collapsed entirely, relegating Mexican movies to a few breakout independent films or cheaply made, low-quality movies laced with sex and violence.

“It went from a booming family entertainment industry--where you would fill the Million Dollar Theater [in downtown Los Angeles]--to now where you are lucky to see an occasional Mexican picture every few years,” said Donnelly.

This has left a large void for bilingual and Spanish-speaking audiences here, said David Maciel chair of the Chicano Studies department at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and author of several books on Mexican and Chicano cinema.

“You still have an enormously large Latino population and it includes many people who grew up on Golden Age cinema,” said Maciel. “Every survey shows that Spanish-language media markets are growing. That tells you that there is a terrific hunger for Spanish-language entertainment.”

Growing Market for Latino Films

That hunger is what Martin and Parker are counting on.

Bringing back a form of popular Latin cinema has become an obsession--particularly for Martin, a third-generation Spanish-American.

Martin, 40, caught the tail end of the Spanish-language film era. His father, Ralph Martin and great uncle Antonine Blanco, lived and prospered during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Their chain of California theaters such as the Fox in Salinas, the Tower in San Francisco and the Mooney Drive-In in Visalia showcased those classic Spanish-language films.

The family’s theaters--mainly one-screen structures--were majestic, Art Deco buildings that Martin would decorate with film posters as a youngster. Movies like “Ustedes los Ricos” (You, the Rich Ones) and “Nosotros los Pobres” (Us, the Poor Ones) with Pedro Infante were billed alongside English language films like Disney’s “The Castaways” or “The Wizard of Oz.”

Ralph Martin, whose license plate reads CINES (movie theaters), wanted his son to continue the family legacy. But the popularity of video, lack of quality films coming in from Mexico and the total breakdown of production and distribution put the family out of business by the late 1980s--shortly before Ralph Martin passed away.

“My dad died a motion picture guy,” said Martin, who now manages the family’s properties. “If there was a heritage he wanted to hand down to me, it was for me to be a film guy.”

The Martin family has retained only five of the 20 theaters they once owned. Only one of their theaters shows movies anymore. ‘I saw [the industry] collapse before my eyes,” said Martin. “It was the most frustrating thing because it didn’t have to happen.”

So Parker and Martin set out to prove their idea would sell with “Nueba Yol.” That movie--a romantic comedy that cost $350,000 to make--brought in $3.3 million domestically. In New York, the movie outgrossed all the other English-language films showing at the same theater. “Nueba Yol’s” sequel--”Nueba Yol 3,” made for $550,000, brought in $2.1 million domestically.

For “Nueba Yol” (which is a play on the Dominican pronunciation of Nueva York), Parker himself sought out the film buyers for theater chains in heavily Latin areas of Manhattan.

Initially, the theater representatives sent him to “art house” theaters in rundown sections of the city.

“At first they told us, ‘Nobody is going to go to a foreign-language film,”’ recalled Parker, 51. “I said, Well, Spanish isn’t a foreign language in your theater.’ Once we showed those theaters that our movie would deliver, all of the previous prejudices were gone.”

Both Parker and Martin, who are based in Northern California, are adamant about showing their films in mainstream modern theaters.

Megaplexes in L.A. Targeted

In Los Angeles, Parker has selected megaplexes in several cities with large and economically diverse Latino populations--Hollywood, city of Commerce, Alhambra, Montebello and Anaheim--that he hopes will show their next films.

Though they have not found a studio backer, Martin and Parker have found a mentor who struggled through the same studio nay-saying 50 years ago--Samuel Z. Arkoff.

Arkoff is co-founder of American International Pictures, a company that made more than 500 films specializing in teen pictures and B movies from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s. Arkoff capitalized on the lack of studio films targeting teen audiences and hit the jackpot with movies such as “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”

“The studios will always resist doing something different until somebody hits them with it in their pocketbook or their breadbasket. The same thing happened to me,” said Arkoff. “I think the boys have something good here. It’s a real opportunity and, frankly, if I was 40 and not 80 years old I would do it myself.”

Parker hopes that eventually the money will talk and Hollywood will listen.

“This was a $250 million business 20 years ago,” Parker said. “People went to the movies and the only reason they stopped going was because the movies were no good. The challenge now is the audience. We have to warm them up like they used to be.”