Word: hollywoodizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There are, to be sure, reasons to dream. One is the burgeoning Hispanic audience: young, urban moviegoers who prefer American action-adventures to the low-budget Mexican films traditionally shown in Latino theaters. Now Hollywood is catering to this bloc by offering Spanish-subtitled prints of Rambo III and ) Red Heat, and the grosses for those theaters have sizzled. "The studios have re-evaluated their outdated perception of the 'ethnic' audience," says Columbia Pictures Executive Katherine Moore. "We now realize that Hispanics aren't a segregated group that attends only films that relate to them. They're a permanent part...
...maybe, are Hollywood's Hispanic films. "They're made for a little and make a lot," says Cheech Marin, whose Born in East L.A. cost $5.1 million and grossed $17.4 million. "In a business where only three out of ten films show a profit, Hispanic films return more on the dollar than their mainstream counterparts." If Hispanic films produce black ink -- and they have -- studios will take an educated gamble on making more. As La Bamba's director, Luis Valdez, notes, "There are more projects in the works now than in the rest of the '80s combined...
There are scars to heal and miles to go before Hispanic-Hollywood assimilation is complete. Begin with the wondrous and confounding diversity of Latin cultures. "Cubans," says Julia, "are as different from Mexicans as French are from Italians." Menendez, Cuban-born, catalogs the differences: "First-generation Mexican Americans are still emotionally connected to their homeland. They want movies that remind them of home. But Cubans don't identify with the underclass. Would you, if you owned Miami...
...days things were almost better. Compared with Hollywood's caricaturing of other minorities, the industry's treatment of Hispanics was benign. In the silent era of the Latin lover, actors named Ricardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno and Ramon Novarro all wooed Garbo on screen. In the '30s and '40s, Hollywood called on Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland or Ricardo Montalban for Continental elegance and rewarded them with careers as durable as Corinthian leather. Even those two camp goddesses of the '40s, Carmen Miranda and Maria Montez, did not wallow in the spitfire stereotype so much as they exploded it, with...
...good feeling ended in the '50s when, ironically, Hollywood got a liberal conscience and concentrated on making amends to blacks. Hispanic roles became rare, and even those tended toward gang lords and victims. Mexican-born Anthony Quinn went abroad to graduate from Frito Bandito roles to stardom in La Strada and Zorba the Greek. The signal film was West Side Story. It said Latins were no longer domesticated birds of colorful plumage; now they were a social problem, a political cause set to barrio rhythms. What kind of guarantee was that for box-office gold...