Actress Switches Roles for Colorblind Projects

It’s a good thing Salma Hayek is an insomniac.

Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to juggle her career both as a busy actress and a neophyte producer who wants to make Latinos more visible behind and in front of the cameras in colorblind projects.

“I had no idea how stressful and time-consuming this would be, but I’m on a total high,” says Hayek, on a lunch break from the improvisational movie she’s starring in for director Mike Figgis, referring to all the production chores at her less-than-year-old company Ventanarosa Productions.

Interviewed at the sparse Sunset Boulevard offices that she’s been too busy to decorate, the 31-year-old star of such films as “Wild Wild West” and the upcoming “Dogma” says she works 18-hour days and weekends to fit everything in and often finds herself awake in the wee hours of the morning swimming with ideas.

Earlier this year, she pitched to Sony-run network Telemundo seven of her own ideas, which subsequently evolved into expanded first-look deals with Sony International for Spanish-language programming and with Columbia TriStar TV for English-language domestic network and cable shows.

Hayek’s two top executives, company President Ricka Fisher and Director of Development Jose Tamez, each says Hayek is going in so many directions at once they often have to ride the elevator with her or drive her to the airport just to have a conversation.

Hayek says that while her impetus for being a producer was largely to change cultural preconceptions, she’s not interested in creating and developing Latino-themed programming that promotes separatism.

“What we’re doing are not Latino shows; they’re shows with universal themes in which Latinos are part of the landscape. I don’t believe in separation, I believe in integration,” says the actress, who launched her company when she signed on to co-produce with Miramax Films a movie based on artist Frida Kahlo in which she will also star.

While Hollywood stars often have “vanity” production deals that never amount to much, those who have worked with Hayek say she takes the job seriously.

“She’s a producer not just in name, but in action as well,” says Mark Gill, president of the Los Angeles office of Miramax, which is financing and will distribute the under $10-million feature.

“The two things that really impressed me about Salma is that she knows a lot of writers and knows who’s good and who’s not. And, she’s incredibly effective in getting things done.”

Hayek, known for her persistence, persuaded Miramax Chief Harvey Weinstein to acquire the project from Trimark Pictures after some creative differences and budget problems. Since then, Hayek helped land a screenwriter for the project, which she had been developing years before Miramax’s involvement, and traveled to Mexico to secure government approval, some outstanding underlying rights and shooting locations for next year’s planned production.

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Hayek unofficially got her feet wet as a producer by wrangling the lion’s share of the budget for last year’s small independent feature “The Velocity of Gary,” in which she also starred. She says that after Columbia TriStar Home Video “had already rejected it, I convinced them to put money into it and went back and got more when we ran out in post-production.” The film had a limited, unsuccessful run.

Ventanarosa also has a production credit on the Spanish-language feature “No One Writes to the Colonel,” which Mexico has just selected as its official Oscar entry.

For now, producing films isn’t the company’s priority. Creating and developing television projects both in English and Spanish is.

“Of course I want to do movies,” says Hayek, whose big-screen Hollywood career began in 1993 as a one-line extra in “Mi Vida Loca” (My Crazy Life), followed by roles in “Desperado,” “From Dusk Till Dawn,” “The Faculty,” “54” and “Fools Rush In.”

“But I believe the fastest and best way to start changing the preconceptions is through television. It is immediate. It is massive, and it is the core of America.”

It is also where Hayek, who had an upper-class upbringing in a small Mexican town, got her start as an overnight TV soap opera star. The daughter of a successful businessman and a mother who was an opera singer and talent scout, Hayek left Mexico in 1991 at the height of her popularity to move to Los Angeles, where she had to start over but finally broke into TV with roles on “Dream On” and “The Sinbad Show.”

Over the next two weeks, Hayek and Fisher will pitch a half-hour sitcom to the networks that they’ve been developing for Columbia TriStar TV.

They say the show was conceived by Hayek. One of the lead characters is a Mexican busboy who proves to be much more than just a hired hand when he becomes a major asset to the restaurant’s American owner.

“He’s smart and educated and [the owner] changes her mind about who she thinks this man is supposed to be,” Hayek says. “We hope the audience changes its mind about some of the preconceptions it has about Latins and discover a whole new gamut of characteristics it didn’t know about.”

Ventanarosa is also developing a half-hour sitcom in English for Sony International that was originally intended exclusively for Telemundo but will now be shopped all over the world.

Tentatively titled “Who’s Wearing the Pants?” the sitcom is set in the near future of Los Angeles when the established majority is Latino and the mayor is a Mexican American woman.

“It’s a character-driven sitcom with six principals, and it’s what the world would be like if we took over,” explains Hayek. “The whites are the minority, pushing the strollers on the streets and working as busboys and parking attendants,” she adds noting it was her former boyfriend British actor Edward Atterton, who originated the show’s premise.

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Hayek and her team say the sitcom is indicative of the kind of programming they believe can change the way people view Latinos.

“There is a total absence of minority presence in network television,” says Fisher, a TV veteran who previously worked as an executive at Disney, NBC and Avnet/Kerner Productions.

“Americans are so guilty of dismissing minorities as this invisible work force,” says Fisher, who hopes that a show like theirs “where everything is flipped” can help audiences reconsider their biases.

Hayek says she’s not simply interested in developing programming that will “break the stereotypes,” but rather “will bring humanity into it and show different characteristics that people never take time to notice.”

Ventanarosa is also in active development on a series for Sony International called “The Enlightened Ones,” half-hour docudramas about saints and others driven by faith from around the world who have lived throughout the centuries.

Hayek says the episodes will be shot in Mexico by top-drawer directors “because it’s a lot cheaper.”

Hayek acknowledges that her popularity as a Hollywood actress helps give her credibility as a producer. But she says of her behind-the-camera endeavors, “I’m not just doing this to make the characters cross over. I really want to create great, quality television programming, whether there is a Latin character in there or not. Because if it’s successful and a Mexican did it, I’m already sending the right message. It’s already changing the perception of who we are.”