Reborn in East L.A.

MOVIE producers don’t show up every day on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Boyle Heights. So it’s surprising how little fuss the locals make when actor-director Edward James Olmos and his production team arrive one recent morning to scout locations for the upcoming HBO film “Walkout,” a dramatization of the seminal 1968 Chicano student protests at high schools on L.A.’s Eastside.

At one point, a dozen filmmakers cram into tiny Jesse’s Barber Shop, which dates to the period and will serve to set a barrio scene during the movie’s opening. They confer about camera angles and set decor as barbers keep clipping and a tropical oldie-but-goodie plays on a small radio.

The director of photography frames a possible shot with his hands, panning down from a JFK portrait high on a wall to the front window advertising regular cuts for six bucks. The set designer scribbles her observations in a notebook while an artist drafts an instant sketch of a sidewalk candy stand Olmos wants built overnight and placed just outside the door. Make sure, says the director, that it has a newspaper rack with headlines from that tumultuous time, the year of the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations.

Customers and passersby just stare as the team bustles back and forth, spilling onto the sidewalk and then into the busy thoroughfare, formerly Brooklyn Avenue. The moviemakers worry about possible 1960s anachronisms. Would a barrio barber shop at the time hire a female stylist like the one working at one of Jesse’s five chairs? Was the word “unisex” already in use? Before the crew breaks for lunch, Olmos is finally approached by a fan, one of the barber’s silent customers sporting a newly shaved head. The young man accompanied by his sister poses for a sidewalk snapshot with the actor and activist.

He later identifies himself as Sergio Arellano, a 1999 graduate of Wilson High School, one of the schools targeted by demonstrators. Like many of his generation, he says he had never heard of the walkouts until a crew member told him what the film was about.

Asked about his own education, Arellano, 24, echoes one of the major complaints of the student protests three decades earlier: A counselor had once told him he’d never be college material.

“There was no guidance,” says Arellano, who holds a community college degree in criminal justice and eventually wants to become a high school teacher. “If you were at the top of your class, they paid attention to you. If you were somewhere in the middle, you were ignored.”

Olmos doesn’t hear the fan’s lament. But the persistent educational problems faced by Latino students is one reason he wanted to make this film -- scheduled to air March 18 -- about events that for most people remain lost in L.A. history.

“The dropout rate is higher than it was when these walkouts took place,” says Olmos, citing recent (and disputed) statistics that have stirred new debates about the quality of education here, especially for ethnic minorities. “That’s why we’re making this movie. We’re hoping that the kids will walk out again.”

The 1968 school protests seemed to explode suddenly within a community commonly referred to in those days as the sleeping giant because of its size and relative political passivity. Until then, the crusade for Mexican American civil rights was largely limited to the rural struggles of farm workers led by Cesar Chavez. The walkouts served as the community’s urban battle cry. For Mexican Americans, historians say, the student protest was the shot heard across the Southwest.

Many date the modern Chicano movement to that first week of March when thousands of teenagers made a dramatic case for better schools. Their mostly peaceful protests prompted parents and neighbors to rally to their support and prodded school officials to take action. They also inspired a generation of Chicano activists who went on to undertake an array of movement causes, from underrepresentation at universities to over-representation on the battlefields of Vietnam.

The walkouts also left a legacy of personal accomplishment among their participants, many of whom went on to successful careers in politics, academia and the arts. They include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who walked out from Cathedral High, and award-winning filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza, who was indicted for his role in organizing the walkouts and is now executive producer of HBO’s film about the protests.

Targeted by police and punished by their principals, student organizers lived through “crucible moments” comparable to combat, says Esparza, now 56. The experience helped forge their remarkable future success.

“Why? Because we lost our fear,” the producer says. “Because we saw that we could get results. Because we saw that we could achieve something and have power in our lives.”

Long in the planning

THE walkouts started Friday, March 1, 1968. That morning, by historic coincidence, the lead story in the Los Angeles Times covered the release of the Kerner Commission report on urban unrest, which famously warned that racism was splitting the U.S. into two societies, “separate and unequal.”

A week later, the protest had spread from predominantly Mexican American campuses -- Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Wilson, Belmont -- to schools as far away as Venice and South Central L.A. More and more students -- estimates range wildly from 4,000 to 22,000 -- had joined in.

Although it seemed spontaneous, organizers had been planning actions for more than a year. The plot was hatched, however, far from L.A.’s barrios in a most unlikely setting, a Jewish summer camp in Malibu.

Since 1963, Camp Hess Kramer had been hosting the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference, a motivational program for the best and the brightest among young Latinos. It was there that outstanding students from Eastside high schools met and started comparing notes, realizing they shared similar educational challenges and complaints.

“The seeds of discontent and revolution were sown there [at the camp] in ’67 and ‘68,” recalled retired teacher Sal Castro, a walkout leader who is the main character in the movie and who still runs the leadership program.

At a raucous school board meeting 10 days into the protests, students presented 39 demands. Some seemed excessive or frivolous: Give only pass/fail grades. Provide student lounges with jukeboxes. Serve more Mexican dishes in the cafeteria and allow mothers to help prepare them.

Others remain relevant goals: Reduce class sizes. Hire more counselors who speak Spanish. Improve testing to distinguish language problems from lack of intelligence.

Three months later, Esparza and 12 others were arrested and charged with conspiracy to disturb the peace, elevating a misdemeanor to a felony that could have landed them in prison for 66 years. It took two years for a state appeals court to exonerate the East L.A. 13, and throw out the charges based on the 1st Amendment right of free speech, according to UC Berkeley professor emeritus Carlos Munoz Jr., an indicted organizer.

“They mistook who we were,” says Esparza. “They thought we were trying to overthrow the country. All we wanted was a decent education.”

Esparza first envisioned making a movie about the walkouts 20 years ago. But he had to build a career and credibility -- producing films such as “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988), “Gettysburg” (1993) and “Selena” (1997) -- before any studio would take a chance with him on a project as ostensibly noncommercial as a period political drama about Chicano protests.

When he was ready, he knew which studio to turn to. “I went straight to HBO,” he says, “because they are not afraid of taking on socially challenging material. I understood the appetite and interest of the [industry] and that this was probably the only place that would do it.”

Esparza was drawn to the arts since his days at Lincoln, where he joined the jazz band and the drama club. “The arts are what kept me in school,” he says at the downtown headquarters for Maya Pictures, his film company, and Maya Cinemas, his new theater chain. “Otherwise, I probably would have dropped out too, because I found the experience at school extremely demoralizing. Very few of the teachers challenged anyone to do well. They generally pushed everybody toward industrial arts.”

Although a counselor had recommended community college for the son of Mexican laborers, Esparza eventually earned his master’s in fine arts from UCLA, winning awards for his 1973 thesis film, the NBC documentary “Cinco Vidas” (Five Lives).

There were but a handful of drama students in his day, says Esparza. Today, there’s a new generation of young actors emerging in L.A. with training and experience in film and on television. Esparza and Olmos tapped that growing pool of talent -- including their own children -- for the cast of “Walkout.”

Castro, the firebrand teacher, is played by Michael Pena (“Million Dollar Baby,” “Crash”), who also appears in Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Alexa Vega (“Spy Kids,” “Twister”) plays Castro’s star student and protegee, Paula Crisostomo, who helped lead the protests against the wishes of her father, played by Yancey Arias, who starred as a violent drug lord in the NBC television series “Kingpin.”

The role of Esparza as student leader is played by the director’s son, Bodie Olmos, a UCLA graduate in drama. And Esparza’s real-life daughter, Tonantzin Esparza, plays Vickie Castro, a protester who went on to become a principal and a school board member.

The movie, with its Hollywood embellishments, has the ring of a classic underdog story, a sort of Latino “Rocky” of the classroom. But it’s based on plenty of real-life drama, says Esparza.

Many of the walkout leaders were teenagers taking adult risks. They were good students overall. Some were athletes and student body officers who gambled their future for change. After the walkouts, some were threatened with expulsion or denied college recommendations.

The students didn’t just play hooky. The idea was to show up to school and make a public point of leaving. “If we just stayed out of school, well, no big deal,” says Esparza. “But it wasn’t a boycott; it was a strike. See, that’s where the courage came in for these high school kids.... The psychological pressure on them was immense. They’re in class looking straight at the teacher and saying, ‘I’m leaving,’ and the teacher’s saying, ‘Sit down!’

“We’re trained to obey. We’re trained to respect authority. And these kids had the courage to overcome that and walk out. It’s a heroic action.”

To dance or not to dance

HUNDREDS of movie extras are having a hard time finding their motivation during shooting of a key scene on location at City Hall this year. Even during a break from the long Sunday shoot, they mostly ignore the music and the stand-up comic provided by the agency that recruited them as unpaid volunteers, Be in a Movie.com.

“Come on, people, dance!” the comedian exhorts the impassive audience of actors. “How often do you get to dance at City Hall? Are we at City Hall? Yes? Well, I think we should band together and create a Hispanic army and take over City Hall! Whaddya say? No? OK.”

This is Day 16 of a tight 26-day shooting schedule. The scene is the climactic release from custody of the walkout leaders after posting bail, paid partly at the time by rival presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. In the movie, Castro and the others emerge triumphant from the landmark L.A. building, its array of stalwart columns and fluttering flags as their backdrop. They are cheered by a crowd of supporters amassed below them on the wide steps spilling down to Spring Street, which has been closed to traffic for the scene.

In real life, the 13 indicted protesters were released from less glamorous city lockups with almost no fanfare, says the real-life Sal Castro, who is watching the filming anonymously from the wings. “The script got a little fanciful,” says Castro of the screenplay by several writers. “When we really got out of jail, there was nobody there. Ni las moscas (not even the flies).”

Esparza defends the historical accuracy of the film, which relied heavily on a 1995 documentary titled “Taking Back the Schools,” produced by Susan Racho, yet another walkout leader. That program aired as part of the PBS series “Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement,” produced by Texas-based documentary filmmaker Hector Galan.

Racho and Galan have worked as consultants on the new movie, making available rare footage taken by news crews and amateur photographers. Some of that old footage shows police violence against students that was not widely publicized at the time, according to the filmmakers

The City Hall rally is one of the few times the film takes dramatic liberties by consolidating characters and events for the sake of storytelling and because, says Esparza, “visually it worked better.” There were in fact large demonstrations in support of the East L.A. 13, but they took place behind City Hall while some protesters were still in custody at Parker Center. (Castro and others were in custody at County Jail.)

Cinematic techniques aside, few dispute the historic importance of the protests. “The walkouts completely changed the atmosphere within the district and among the board members,” says retired district spokesman Bill Rivera. “It forced us to look at things in a much more comprehensive way than we had before and to try and change conditions in the district.”

Learning revolutionary fervor

OLMOS, an Eastside native, was 21 at the time. Though not a participant, his career has reflected his social concerns. On the day of the City Hall shoot, he is dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt, with a United Farm Workers emblem on his cap.

He is struggling to inspire the revolutionary fervor in his army of extras. The thespian masses are getting hot in the afternoon sun. A few wearing the leather uniforms of the radical Black Panthers start a playful chant: “Water to the People!”

With patience and persuasion, the director of “American Me,” the 1992 prison gang movie, speaks through a microphone from the top of the steps to explain the scene. The yellow slips being passed out to the actors represent college applications. They were to be held up and waved on cue, a colorful sign of the walkout’s success.

When Castro (Pena) appears at the top of the steps, his student Crisostomo (Vega) will dramatically stop at the head of the cheering crowd and look up and say earnestly, “Sal, thank you!”

That’s the cue, says Olmos. “Then every student will rummage around and slowly take out their [college] slip and lift it. Let me see ‘em. If you have a slip, lift them. I need more slips out there. Start passing them out. When you lift them up, you will also say, ‘Sal, thank you!’ So let’s practice.”

The response is less than exuberant. Olmos offers an impromptu history lesson to rally the thespian throng. “Listen, this is the single most important moment,” he explains. “In 1968, there were 40 Latino students going to UCLA, not including the gardeners. After this walkout, the following year, the admissions of college students went from 40 to 1,250.”

The actors finally feel they have something to cheer about.

Cut to a close-up of Vega in the crowd. She’s approached by a young man who had befriended her at the leadership camp but turned out to be an undercover police officer.

“What did you accomplish with the walkouts?” the cop asks. “The schools didn’t change. The dropout rates aren’t going to change. Nothing’s changed.”

The character’s rhetorical point is a real issue for Villaraigosa, who has vowed as mayor to improve city schools. At one point during the shooting, he emerges from City Hall to briefly address and encourage the cheering actors.

“You know, a lot of us have made it, but a lot of us haven’t,” says the mayor. “So this isn’t just about history. It isn’t just about back then. It’s about now, and all of us realizing that we have a lot of work to do to bring people through that door of opportunity.”

After retreating to his office, he continues to reflect on the film. “In many ways,” the mayor says, “this is an opportunity to take a snapshot of history and maybe ask the same question that young people were asking back then: ‘Why?’ ”

Contact Agustin Gurza at calendar.letters@ latimes.com.

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A generation of leaders

The 1968 student walkouts in East L.A. produced a wide group of leaders who went on to success in academia, the media, politics and the arts. Here are a few examples:

Victoria “Vickie” Castro

THEN: Undergraduate at Cal State L.A. and walkout leader at her alma mater, Roosevelt High School, where she helped students leave campus by using her car to pull open a locked fence.

NOW: Principal at Hollenbeck Middle School in Boyle Heights. Has master’s degree in urban education from Pepperdine University, where she also earned her administrative credential. Served on L.A. Unified school board from 1993 to 2001.

Paula Crisostomo

THEN: A walkout initiator and organizer who is the lead female character in the HBO movie “Walkout.” Was senior class vice president at Lincoln High School.

NOW: Director of government and community relations at Occidental College, where she also manages scholarships for incoming Latino students. Earned bachelor’s degree in Chicano studies from Cal State Sonoma.

Harry Gamboa Jr.

THEN: Walkout leader as junior at Garfield High School.

NOW: Artist, writer and lecturer in Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge. Cofounder of ASCO, the pioneering East L.A. arts collective, in 1972. His multimedia work as photographer, filmmaker and performance artist has been nationally exhibited, including at the 1995 biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Luis Torres

THEN: Known as Benny Torres, was walkout supporter at Lincoln High School, where he covered the protests as editor-reporter for the campus newspaper, the Railsplitter.

NOW: Award-winning reporter for KNX News Radio. Earned bachelor’s in political science from UC Santa Barbara and master’s in journalism from Columbia University. Produced the first Los Lobos album, “Just Another Band From East L.A.,” and developed the pioneering PBS series “Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.”

Jesus Salvador Trevino

THEN: Senior at Occidental College and member of the educational issues coordinating committee, the community walkout support group. Made Super-8 film of sleep-in and arrests at school board headquarters to demand reinstatement of teacher Sal Castro.

NOW: Award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker and director, with TV credits including episodes of “NYPD Blue,” “ER,” “Third Watch” and “The Practice.” His memoir, “Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement,” was published in 2001.