Movies : The Warrior Within : Producer Moctesuma Esparza, a veteran Chicano activist, still fights for Latino rights. But as the years have passed, he has learned to soften his approach.

The crowd was growing agitated.

The topic of complaint: “Why are minorities seemingly banished from film and television?”

“It’s racism,” yelled out one man in the audience. “They always say, ‘Latin doesn’t sell overseas,’ ” added another frustrated actor. “We need a battering ram to get in the door,” lamented yet another.

Then veteran television and film producer Moctesuma Esparza spoke.

A compact man whose soft voice and plump, delicate hands belie a warrior-like intensity, Esparza has a long history on the civil rights battle lines; as one of the student leaders in the 1970s Chicano rights movement, Esparza is intimately familiar with institutional racism. He has been jailed, intimidated by police, charged with felonies, forced to go underground--then eventually acquitted on all charges. As perhaps the only Latino producer (the 1997 feature film “Selena,” HBO’s recent “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge”) with enough juice to get projects approved at studios, Esparza had a few things to say to the audience.

“The days of the battering ram are over,” he said simply, to the bewilderment of the crowd. “To get ahead you need a good education and the willingness to work hard.”

His words surprised some in the audience who had always considered Esparza a role model of Chicano activism and protest.

But Esparza’s statement in front of hundreds at the Screen Actors Guild meeting in March was not blurted out in a fit of emotion. A deeply introspective man, he had carefully analyzed and slowly pieced together his beliefs after 25 years of working inside the entertainment industry.

“It is now vital that everyone in our community understand we can create our own lives,” Esparza explained in a recent interview, drinking green tea in his office overlooking the Hollywood Hills. “Even though there is still institutional racism and external barriers, we now have the power to overcome them and achieve our goals.”

But the old fire isn’t completely gone. He remains a mercurial personality known on occasion to publicly rip into colleagues over disagreements. And despite his track record of working within the studio system, he is seen by some as a “street fighter” whose methods are too confrontational for today’s Hollywood system.

“He doesn’t really invite or embrace the studio world,” said one colleague who asked to remain anonymous. “We need to be able to wear different hats. I think this next generation of producers and talent understands that you can get more with sugar than you can with salt.”

Throughout his career Esparza has been doing this delicate dance, attempting to work within the confines of a basically white Hollywood system while still maintaining his sense of identity as a Chicano activist.

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This tricky balance also affects his movie-making, as Esparza has tried to make Latin-themed commercial films with a crossover appeal to non-Latinos. He has been careful not to pigeonhole himself by making only Latin pictures. With his partner Robert Katz of Esparza/Katz Productions, his company has produced several war epics such as “Gettysburg” and “Rough Riders” in addition to more Latino-themed fare like “Selena” and “The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca.”

They also produced the recent HBO movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” and they have a standing deal at Warner Bros. to produce a movie biography about farm labor leader Cesar Chavez.

But even Esparza acknowledges it has neither been easy nor a complete success story.

“I have been grappling with how to frame the movies . . . so they are seen as part of the mainstream and not something that the country feels is alien or foreign,” he said.

Indeed, that was the challenge their film “Selena” faced--and couldn’t quite overcome at the box office. Though Jennifer Lopez’s performance launched her career and the film grossed more than $35 million domestically, the movie did not have crossover appeal in theaters. However, Esparza contends that non-Latinos have seen “Selena” at home either on video or HBO and it has now achieved a significant amount of crossover.

His next box-office marketing challenge will be “The Price of Glory,” a boxing picture starring Jimmy Smits set in East Los Angeles. The film, which has been described as a cross between “West Side Story” and “Rocky,” will be released early next year by New Line Cinema.

The movie, by first-time director Carlos Avila, is budgeted at less than $15 million, low by today’s studio standards. It is one of the few--if not the only--movies this year backed by a major studio whose cast is entirely Latino and whose subject matter is Latin-themed. However, Esparza stresses that the story is universal--about love, loyalty and perseverance.

Perseverance is perhaps the defining characteristic of Esparza, whose stocky physique and modest clothing make him look more like a college professor than a Hollywood producer. Born to Mexican immigrant parents in East Los Angeles, Esparza and his younger brother Jesus grew up in poverty. Esparza’s mother, Esther, died giving birth to his brother, who is mentally retarded.

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As a youth, Esparza also danced between two worlds. While he was a straight-A student, he was also in a gang. While his teachers and counselors showed contempt for Mexicans, his father instilled a sense of patriotic pride in his son. While he thought of himself as American as apple pie, he felt society viewed him as a foreigner.

Esparza excelled in school, scoring in the top percentile of SAT despite the low expectations of counselors and teachers at school. Perhaps, his counselors told him, he should think of community college before dreaming of UCLA. They advised him to consider working as a janitor or perhaps a mechanic.

“When I was a kid in the ‘50s, ‘dirty Mexican’ and ‘spic’ were things that you still heard,” he recalled. “Being called a Mexican was like being slapped in the face.”

A seed of discontent was growing inside him. Due to his outstanding grades and high test scores, he did enter UCLA in the fall of 1967. At UCLA he met others like him, bitter that they had been given a third-rate education and determined to change things for future generations.

“He was a sharp-talking 17-year-old,” said Esparza’s best friend Juan Gomez Quinonez, recalling their first encounter at UCLA. “He was very energetic. Very straightforward.”

Along with his group of activist friends, Esparza co-founded Young Chicanos for Community Action, which morphed into the paramilitary group the Brown Berets and the community outreach organization United Mexican American Students.

Within a year, in 1968, they had orchestrated the Chicano Blowouts--which resulted in 20,000 Los Angeles high school students walking out of their schools in protest of inferior education.

As one of the leaders, Esparza was immediately targeted by law enforcement. Soon after the Blowouts, he was charged with 15 counts of conspiracy to disrupt public schools--a felony that carries three years for each count. After a two-year battle, the charges were dismissed on appeal.

Soon after that acquittal, Esparza and several others were again charged, this time with arson, burglary and tampering with electrical wires during then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s speech at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

The most serious charge--arson--stemmed from a plot hatched by a police infiltrator of the Brown Berets to light flares in the laundry closets of the hotel.

Even though Esparza was no longer a Brown Beret and had no knowledge of the flare idea, he was again targeted. The case became known as the Biltmore Seven.

“At that point we were fearing for our lives,” he said. “So I went underground for a while.”

But at 22, he could not face life as a fugitive, so he turned himself in. After a two-year court battle, all charges were again dropped.

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Those years, however, turned out to be a seminal chapter of his life. He emerged a more determined, focused man. He became a Zen macrobiotic--an offshoot of the Buddhist faith--a practice he continues today. Most important, he battled against cynicism and bitterness. “The American Dream and the principles which this country was founded on are truly powerful. They are values that are worth fighting for,” he said, reflecting on those days he spent meditating, contemplating his fate. “I never lost faith.”

He is now compiling interviews for a documentary with the former prosecutors, FBI agents and police operatives who chased him down 25 years ago. Some have admitted that the charges against him were used as fear tactics to break the protest movement.

“He is a courageous man,” said director Jesus Trevino, who met Esparza 25 years ago as a student at UCLA. “He underwent an attack that the best of the authorities could throw at him, and he was able to come out of it not a destroyed person but a stronger, committed person.”

Having graduated with a theater arts degree, he decided to enroll in UCLA’s film school.

Instead of acting, he would focus on producing. Esparza says he saw filmmaking as a vehicle for social change, making it his goal to create films that would present Latinos in non-stereotypical ways. By producing, effectively being in charge of organizing the money, he could control the content.

His senior thesis, a documentary titled “Cinco Vidas/Five Lives,” aired on NBC and won a local Emmy in 1973.

He then became an independent producer working at first on documentaries about Mexican Americans, such as the 1982 PBS special “Borderlands.” Esparza was one of the first Latino producers to find clever ways of financing pictures. His 1982 film “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” was funded through the PBS’ “American Playhouse” and by pre-selling the television rights to Europe with a theatrical release window.

Over the past 20 years, he has worked his way from publicly financed documentarian to independent producer with some studio backing.

He has seen his share of ups and downs. In 1987, after taking a public pounding for allegedly depicting cultural inaccuracies and stereotypes in “The Milagro Beanfield War,” Esparza was ready to throw in the towel on Latino-themed projects. He was under fire by Latino activists for producing a film some considered patronizing, and that they said made Mexican Americans look stupid. His partner Katz convinced him to return.

“He always did want to [continue with Latino films] but he had been beaten up so badly that he thought it was just too hard a struggle,” Katz said.

After the “Milagro” controversy, Esparza/Katz went on to produce films like “The Cisco Kid” and “Caliente y Picante” in 1990, one of the first all-star Latin music television specials.

Esparza has no pretenses about producing “artsy” films. His movies are commercial through and through, said Noriega.

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Despite his resume, Esparza cannot shake the perception--perhaps something that all trailblazers experience--of being an outsider.

Some younger Latinos now entering the industry cringe at Esparza’s negotiating methods. Though acknowledging he has opened the door, some say Esparza is unpolished and unable to navigate comfortably in the smooth-talking world of Hollywood executives. This lack of finesse has hurt his career, some say.

Indeed, his abrupt style was witnessed at the first annual Latino producers conference in San Francisco in June. Esparza was one of the organizers of the conference, hoping to reestablish funding for the Corp. for Public Broadcasting’s Latino projects and to introduce a younger generation of Latino producers into the industry.

But the conference was a disappointment to many who attended. It became a very public showdown of sorts between Esparza and actor Edward James Olmos over who would control funding allocation. A funding decision has been postponed until September.

But those who have known Esparza say he has mellowed out significantly. Esparza and Olmos were photographed in a strong embrace in August at a rally. And nobody questions his credentials.

The old intensity and anger--dramatically captured in Trevino’s documentary “Chicano!” when Esparza is seen pointing his finger into the chest of a school administrator--have been softened by age and a fulfilling life. He has been married to the same woman, Esperanza, for 22 years, and they have four children--all either on their way to college or already there.

“When I went to film school with him, he was a very angry man and into violent action,” said Gregory Nava, who directed “Selena.” “I think it is incredible how he evolved, how he took that negative energy and channeled it into something positive. That is something I really admire about him.”

And his activism continues.

In the 1980s, Esparza founded a cable television company in East Los Angeles, Buenavision Telecommunications, bringing cable to that sector of town.

He recently underwent a weeklong fast in support of striking workers at USC. This year, he played a key role in uniting several fractious Latino activist groups to create one cohesive agenda for implementing changes in television and film.

He and Katz also envision building a chain of movie theaters in Latino communities they feel are underserved. Unveiling plans last week for the Maya Cinema circuit, Esparza announced he had secured a site in San Pablo in Northern California and hoped to reach an an agreement for a site in downtown San Fernando. He declined to answer questions about financing what will be an expensive and risky proposition.

Esparza remains eternally optimistic. Already Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, Oscar de la Hoya and others are accepted as American pop culture icons. The flood gates, he says, have been opened.

“This extraordinary wave of [Latino] celebrity and acceptance that is occurring now is not only our present, it represents a wonderful future,” he said in his office. “The hissue here is not how to make every single movie a crossover success. The fact is that we are now arriving at a time and place where all of the possibilities to succeed are real and no longer pipe dreams.” *