Adventures in the Cultural Divide

Under normal circumstances they never would have met. Yet a group of screenwriters--10 veterans and 10 novices--gathered here, talking about their movies in an unlikely setting--a pre-colonial city deep in southern Mexico.

Some came from Mexico City, others from the U.S. Some work in Hollywood studios, others in their native Spanish-speaking countries. Gen-Xers mixed with baby boomers. Some wrote dramas, others comedies.

What brought them together in Oaxaca, a city that is arguably the cultural heart of Mexico, was the sixth annual Sundance Institute’s Latin American Screenwriter Workshop. The international programs were born of Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford’s travels to Cuba for the Havana Film Festival. In Cuba, Redford would hear a common refrain from Latin American filmmakers--the need to develop the crafts of screenwriting and producing. And so Sundance has tried to do for Latin American film what it did for American independent film--nurture and support it.

Mexico seemed the logical first choice to establish the workshops, which are run in conjunction with a nonprofit Mexican organization called the Toscano Foundation. Many of Mexico’s recent critically acclaimed hits such as “Sex, Shame and Tears,” “Santitos” and “Under a Spell” have come out of these workshops. Modeled after the Utah screenwriter labs for American writers, the Latin American workshops evolved into much more than just writing seminars. They became cross-cultural exchanges, where screenwriting is seen as a vehicle to learning how culture affects the nuances of storytelling.

Earlier this year, The Times was invited to attend and observe the workshops. The following is a rare inside look at how the process worked for the aspiring screenwriters, who were chosen after submitting scripts to Sundance, and their mentors. We chose to write about three of the 10 students who came to the workshops with completed scripts and possible production deals. Each had specific script problems that were detected at the workshops and worked on by the writers and their advisors.

* First-time writer Hector Hernandez, 32, would need to make his script relate more to U.S. audiences if he wanted to sell his border-town black comedy, “Los Pajarracos de Tijuana” (The Scavengers of Tijuana) to Hollywood.

* Marcela Fuentes Berain, 42, needed to decide how much historical context to provide in her script, “The Thunder of August,” about a power-hungry general climbing his way up the political ladder in post-revolutionary Mexico. Otherwise, many non-Mexicans--and most Mexicans not intimately familiar with their history--would have a difficult time understanding it.

* Juan Carlos Valdivia, 38, needed to determine if the protagonist of his story, “American Visa,” should be more heroic, as his American advisors suggested, or more ambiguous, as his Mexican mentors advised.

Oaxaca’s intense indigenous heartbeat alongside the heavy Spanish colonial influence created a uniquely inspirational environment. The advisors from the U.S. and Mexico and the students from Mexico and other Latin American countries would meet in restaurants, cathedrals and convents. They gathered in 19th century textile mills, in the city’s vibrant parks or in contemporary art galleries and their cafes, soaking in Oaxaca’s art scene.

It was not until the second day of their three-day workshop that the work began. In the morning, veteran screenwriters such as Zach Sklar (“JFK”), L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”), Laura Esquivel (“Like Water for Chocolate”) and seven others began dissecting the scripts written by the novices.

In these private sessions among the advisors--away from their students’ ears--the veteran writers could talk about their impressions. Sometimes, the discussions would reveal the script’s gaps in narration or lack of character development. Other times, they would reveal cultural misunderstandings created by nationality, particularly between the American advisors and their Latin American students.

One of the key goals of Sundance’s international programs--expanded now to Japan, Europe and South America--is to have writers tell stories that are authentic to their countries. The idea behind the Latin American writers’ workshops is not to impose a Hollywood view of movie-making, noted Sundance’s international programs director, Patricia Boero. Rather, they are workshops where the novices sit one-on-one with a veteran and learn the techniques of writing for the screen. The young writers are encouraged to retain their voices and culture in their scripts, Boero said.

The art of screenwriting has its own format, style and set of rules that make it different from writing a novel or a short story. As Carson explained: “Screenplays are like a telegram and a poem. It’s highly selective and each page has a rhythm to it. What we are doing here is not business. It’s more like organic growth. [In the end] the movie should be about that release of emotion.”

I: ‘The Difference Is Miramax’

Carson, a no-nonsense Texan who is hard to impress, couldn’t conceal his enthusiasm for “Los Pajarracos de Tijuana.”

“This is like ‘American Graffiti’ with magical realism,” he said to Hernandez as they sat around a table on a pleasant patio. The warm morning sunlight streamed in around them, gently highlighting the curving smoke rising from Carson’s cigarette.

“The characters are familiar yet foreign,” Carson continued. “I mean, this story is completely approachable--even for a studio.”

Hernandez, a native of Mexico City, was shocked; he never thought his story, featuring a motley crew of nasty grifters on the Tijuana-U.S. border, could be marketable to Hollywood. But now as he thought about it, it seemed they were characters everyone could relate to. There is the morally bankrupt former DEA agent-turned-criminal; his pathetic Mexican counterpart; their ruthless drug-dealing boss, a curvaceous, fast-talking Cuban. There is the cocaine-addicted Miss Lonelyhearts of Mexican radio and her lover, a two-bit thief.

But Carson, 50, had more to say. Hernandez’s characters needed to be more bicultural. His script needed less Spanish, more English.

“This guy, the mochadedos [one who cuts off fingers], is so much assimilated into the [Mexican] culture that we don’t know he is a gringo. What is his back story? Why is he a wreck?” asked Carson.

Hernandez attempted to answer but was cut off as Carson continued his line of rapid-fire questioning. “Do you think it would be helpful just to call him . . . Gus?”

Hernandez’s fingers played with his black goatee and his thick black hair. He scribbled all the notes in his spiral pad. He looked up from his notebook, his brown eyes quizzically inspecting Carson, and sheepishly asked: “What is the difference for you if we shoot it in Spanish or English?”

“The difference?” Carson asked and dragged a long hit off his Dunhill, peering at Hernandez with his greenish-yellow droopy eyes. “The difference is Miramax.”

Not only would Hernandez need to inject more English into the screenplay if he wanted to pitch it to an American studio, but he also needed to develop the characters a bit more. “The border itself is a very important character in this movie,” said Carson. “It clarifies the thrust of everybody’s character in a very simple way. You have to think about telling this story to as many people as possible.”

Just as the border needed development, so did most of the main characters. One in particular--an awkward kid named Benigno Bueno, who is searching for salvation but is conflicted by his sexual desires--was ripe for reworking.

“A saint has to have terrible things happen to him,” said Carson. “It’s all about character display. You have to show a little more of his desire for her. He’s like a little horny St. Augustine whose big problem is fighting the sins of the flesh.”

Luckily for Hernandez, the story line was essentially solid. After the session, Hernandez was pumped. Now he needed to decide if his story would become a little more Americanized. Would it work? Would he be selling out if he injected a little more English--a few more pocho (an Americanized Mexican) characters into the mix?

Hernandez said later: “We came away knowing that we don’t have to throw away the script.”

II: ‘It Was a Revelation Talking to Her’

Sklar was eager to get down to business when he met his colleagues early one morning to discuss scripts. Never one to beat around the bush, he told them exactly what he thought of one of the screenplays.

“The Thunder of August” was one of the lousiest screenplays he had ever read. A preposterous melodrama with pathetic, bumbling characters.

The advisors from Mexico looked at him in disbelief as they sat around a room, with scripts on their laps. This was not a melodrama! It was a satire. And a very good satire at that, on the political shenanigans of post-revolutionary Mexico.

Sklar was confused. A satire? How could he have missed so much? It wasn’t as if he were an ignorant gringo. He had picked coffee beans with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He was intimately familiar with conspiracy theories and political intrigue--after all, he worked with the King of Conspiracies, Oliver Stone, on “JFK.”

Sklar was caught in a culture gap. After meeting with his colleagues, Sklar met with Fuentes Berain.

“For me, it was a revelation talking to her,” said Sklar, a tall, fast-talking man whose bluntness belies his sweet nature. “I read it twice. Some of [the misunderstanding] was a problem in translation. Some of it was in her writing about things that she knew much about but could not transcend national boundaries. Other problems were really character problems.”

Sklar didn’t really miss the story. The screenplay, based on the novel by Mexican writer Jorge Ibarguengoitia, had really been written for people intimately familiar with Mexican history.

Indeed, it was Sklar’s reading of the screenplay that forced Fuentes Berain, a petite woman from Mexico City with a sharp wit and a thick mane of curly brown hair, to approach her story in a new way. Rather than coming at it as an expert in Mexican history and culture, she decided she needed to explain many little details she left unsaid.

For instance, she had made references to the albazo--which literally means an early-morning surprise attack. She did not explain that in Mexican political culture, it is used to describe a common occurrence in which a high-ranking political official suddenly finds himself out of favor with the boss and out of a job.

But some of the misunderstanding was also a result of differences in culture.

“My story has so much to do with Mexican humor and Mexican politics,” she said later as she analyzed the weekend. “Americans tend to think that if it’s a historic picture, then it’s a drama. But this is absolutely a tragi-comedy.”

Fuentes Berain, who wrote the opera “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which was inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and performed by Los Angeles Opera, hopes her film will be seen outside Mexico. So she decided to flesh out the story a little more.

“I need to work on how to make a very local story understandable in the U.S.,” she said. “Our politics are very different from the U.S. I need to develop some of the things that I took for granted.”

She also needed to make her main character--a corrupt, philandering, gun-toting general--more sympathetic. Why would a viewer care about him? Sklar pointedly asked her.

But Sklar, whose graying hair and spectacles betray his years, learned something too.

“It’s not like a Hollywood movie in which you have to make it very tight and weave everything together and make sense rationally and motivations are all clear,” he said. “When we wander from place to place [in Oaxaca], you get into this rhythm where you feel things happen in a different way. It isn’t all in straight lines. That is liberating, and that creates much greater possibilities.”

III: ‘I’m Not Going to Make American Movies’

As Valdivia stood under the shade of an ancient laurel tree overlooking the Oaxacan valley, he relished an exchange he had minutes earlier. Esquivel had just lifted his spirits. She told him he was on the right path, that he didn’t need to turn his story into a Hollywood-style good guy versus bad guy.

His protagonist is a Mexican continually seeking a way to immigrate to the U.S. without really knowing what he wants there. The story, Esquivel told him, was about his character’s voyage through the confusion.

Valdivia, a native of Bolivia who lives in Mexico, was relieved to hear this. A few hours before, a knot had formed in his stomach when one of his American advisors told him to make the character more forceful, more of a hero. The character needed to see the U.S. as the promised land, where opportunity abounds, the advisor told him. But Valdivia didn’t agree.

“What I want my story to show is that love-hate relationship that we Latin Americans have with the United States,” said Valdivia, who studied film at Columbia College in Chicago. “Laura understood that. For me, the story is about a man and the borderline that he draws for himself in his head. He realizes that to fulfill his dreams, he does not have to leave.”

Not having a happy ending and including some vagueness in the character’s motivations are not unusual for Latin American storytelling.

“Latinos have a very different worldview,” he said. “I don’t want to change my script so that Americans will understand it. I want my story to be universal, but I’m not going to make American movies.

“We have a lot to learn from Americans, like their ability to synthesize stories,” added Valdivia, whose curly hair, goatee and blue eyes behind round-rimmed glasses make him look like a Latino Leon Trotsky. “Also, their way of structuring the information.”

The directness of people like Carson also helped him loosen up his writing. Carson dared him to delve into some of the darker aspects of his characters. At one point during a previous exchange, Carson had pushed Valdivia so hard that it seemed the novice writer was going to cry. Seeing this, Carson embraced him.

“He was always observing me and wanting to see what I was made of,” said Valdivia.

Carson explained his method after the meeting: “I was talking about the two guys that Juan Carlos is: one is this sort of tight-ass loser, and the other is this emotional adventurer. After insulting him and breaking through, I had to get up and hug him.”

Now Valdivia would go home, put some finishing touches on the script. He hoped the movie would begin filming in August in Mexico.

“I know I have to inject more passion into the script,” Valdivia said. “I have to let go and let those things come out of me.”

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A Post-Workshop Progress Report

Here’s an update on what’s happened to scripts by screenwriters Hector Hernandez, Marcela Fuentes Berain and Juan Carlos Valdivia since the Latin American Screenwriter Workshop in Oaxaca in February. All three writers spoke by phone from Mexico City.

* Fuentes Berain’s script is on hold until financing can be found. So she has begun writing a new script about the drug trafficking culture in Mexico. “Film is really a luxury for us Mexicans,” Fuentes Berain said. “We could not survive economically by working in film, so we work in television. I need to have that attitude in order to survive, otherwise I’d live off of Prozac.”

* Hernandez and his writing partner, Horacio Rivera, finished the script, deciding to leave out most of the English and bicultural elements. They are now negotiating financing for the picture with two production companies, one German and one Mexican. “We came into this without a producer attached, and now it’s like we are waiting in line to get into the theater,” Hernandez said. “That is fine. I’m willing to wait.”

* Valdivia polished his script with the help of a writing partner. They decided to return to Valdivia’s original script, discarding most of the advice from the workshop. Two of Mexico’s top producers, Matthias Ehrenberg (“Sex, Shame and Tears”) and Alejandro Springall (“Santitos”), are now attached to the project. “I was taken off track by [the workshop advisors’] suggestions. When I realized that happened, then I went back to my original script,” Valdivia said. “I came at it again with more security and trusting my instincts.”