Movies, Misconceptions, and
The Model Mexican:
How Hollywood Lost an Audience of 25 Million

A few months ago, over lunch in Studio City, my agent excitedly predicted what she expected to be an impending explosion of Hispanic projects in Hollywood. As I jabbed at my Caesar, she relished in her instinct that the 1990's was going to be "your decade;" by that, she meant, not only a time of popularity and prosperity for me, but also an era of renewed exposure for the nation's entire Hispanic population.

She guessed that the entertainment industry was, in 1992 and beyond, poised to finally target an immense but historically ignored audience. In Columbus' year, she could not resist invoking the imagery of discovery. Agents were going to discover hot, young Hispanic filmmakers. Producers and directors were about to discover the artistic worth in entertainment projects by and for Hispanics. More importantly, the studio powers-that-be who make Hollywood's world go around were about to discover the market value of projects that appeal, specifically, but not exclusively, to a population of between 25-30 million in the United States. A population whose buying power was over 5 billion dollars in 1990, and has increased steadily each year since then. A population that, television networks should have realized by now, buys a lot of cars, beer, fast-food, Coke, and Pampers. Through it all, she said confidently, Hollywood was about to discover a bottomless pot of gold at the end of the Hispanic rainbow.

"And when it all breaks," she said in between sips of water, "who knows... with your background, I could be sitting with the Hispanic John Singleton." I smiled politely, and tried to hide my skepticism.

I am not John Singleton. Though we are the same age, I have at this point in my life no real desire to make movies, not to direct or produce. I may have once, but like a guidance counselor who tells you to apply to community college and not to Yale, what I have seen of Hollywood's dubious dealings with Hispanic projects has warned me, and I fear others like me, not to put our talent eggs in that shaky career basket.

I am a writer. I make my living through the expression of the written word. I write about the experience of being Latino , specifically of being Mexican-American, with an emphasis on the educational, economic, social, and public policy issues that affect, directly, the nation's 25-30 million Latinos, and indirectly, those in the rest of the country whose lives are somehow touched by them. I know my people well. I meet them daily, and study the complexity of lives.

I write for newspapers and magazines, including a dozen articles for The Los Angeles Times . Across the southwest, and across the country, my editorials are cursed at by Latinos upset at an arrogant twenty-five year-old's public mention of private matters. I have a magazine for young people. And an upcoming book detailing my experience in college. I have two agents, one literary and one entertainment, and a publicist. I began this bizarre stage in my life three years ago; coincidentally, that was also when I was first invited to explore Hollywood's private playland.

I had just published my first editorial for The Times. Jose Luis Razo, a Mexican-American classmate of mine at Harvard, had been convicted in Orange County of several counts of armed robbery. The national press coverage generated by the case of the Harvard Hold-up Man seemed only to obscure what I considered to be the major issues involved in the drama; I came forward, in print, to give a perspective that I felt had not been given.

By far, the most bizarre response to my editorial came from an unlikely corner of the world -- Hollywood. The Los Angeles Times serves a vast audience, and Los Angeles being Los Angeles, some of those who read the paper with their morning toast work in the entertainment industry. There were in the weeks and months after the publishing of Harvard Homeboy , a number of telephone calls from curious television and movie producers -- all of them scrambling to turn tragedy to profit. Always the question was the same: "Who has the rights to the story... ?"

One of the first people to call was the winner of the Hollywood lottery -- the independent Mexican-American film producer who had quickly and shrewdly obtained the movie rights to my classmate's life story and was anxiously preparing a script detailing the intriguing story of the Harvard Homeboy. The producer and I talked for an hour or so about the subject-matter and I shared with him my personal impressions of my classmate in the two years that I knew him. I stressed to my listener what I considered to be the enormous overall importance of the Razo story, and related ones, and volunteered my help in shaping the script. I remember his awkward response: "Well, if you were ever to say... write a book [about Razo], maybe we could talk... "

The producer's perspective on the story seemed to begin and end with the singular experience of the Harvard Hold-up Man. Once a Sun Child himself, he assumed that he could tell the Razo story and that he could tell it alone. I thought then, and know now, that he assumed too much. His response to me, I recognized as the 50,000-word equivalent of Holly-wood's most infamous kiss-off. "Let's have lunch... "

Soon thereafter, there was another, even stranger phone call from another independent film producer. Like the earlier caller, he also expressed interest in the story of a Chicano student at Harvard. "Who has the rights to the story?," he asked. Assuming that he was referring to the Joe Razo story, I responded that, as far as I knew, the Mexican-American producer did. "No, no you don't understand," he said. "I'm not interested in [Razo's] story. Who has the rights to your story... ?" I calmly responded that no one did yet, but that we could have lunch. Weeks later, after discussion with family and friends, I signed a contract on raised letterhead that leased to a well-known television production company, the rights to my experience at Harvard. The letters at the top of the page winked seductively: The Ruben Navarette Story. They also whispered: "Don't take any of this too seriously, kid." I have not.

For the following year, the producer who had called me, and the production company with which he was collaborating on the project, shaped the plot of what they planned as a two-hour, made-for-TV movie about two Mexican-American students at Harvard and the life choices that separated them. Harvard Chicano - twenty five years ago, an entity as fictitious as the Easter Bunny was now subject-matter for a movie of the week. For twelve months, they all sat in offices along Hollywood Boulevard and tugged and weaved at the storyline until the major elements of the drama became clear.

The experience of students like me, they correctly determined, was peppered by the influence of factors like educational success, parental support, community pride, and high expectation. They decided that the character of my father should assume a strong prominence in the story, as a force, along with my mother, that kept the central character on a straight path. They suspected after meeting the career cop that he had, consistent with values that his own father had instilled in him, raised his three children to respect nothing more than law and order.

Due in part to good communication between myself and the production crew, the content of the story that was evolving on the Boulevard was accurate. Despite the reservations of other young people my age who thought I should be concerned with how I might be portrayed by strangers, I was comfortable. What I did not feel entirely comfortable with was that the production company planned to use as a backdrop to the telling of my story, the parallel story of Joe Razo, which it was content to take from public record. It had envisioned and was soon pitching to networks, the problematic tale of not one, but two Harvard Chicanos -- one on his way to prison, one just on his way.

The production crew seemed convinced, as one of its members told me during a frank exchange that, my tale, that of a Harvard success story, if you will was not interesting enough without that of my imprisoned classmate. That angered, me not because of my ego, but because, in a wider sense, I realized the dangerous message it sent to Latino youth in East Los Angeles or the South Bronx or South Phoenix: "If you want to be famous, if you want a production team of white people in an industry controlled by white people to consider your story of interest, then don't play by the rules and graduate from Yale or Harvard... Take this gun, and this ski-mask, and... "

Likewise, the production team considered Razo's story "not positive enough," and certainly not marketable enough without mine attached. It needed a Model Mexican. And so it was that, in the strange world of Hollywood, success and failure were in the case of the Harvard Homeboys oddly linked together.

Meanwhile, across Tinsel Town, the Mexican-American film producer who had previously obtained the rights to Razo's story was having problems of his own pitching a story that no one wanted to listen to. The story of a Chicano student at Harvard who throws away his future in a series of robberies is by its nature, a "downer." Motion pictures like Stand And Deliver and La Bamba were successful, in part, because they tell bright stories of Latino young people who bravely overcome a racist stereotype about negative expectation. In the case of the Harvard Hold-up Man, the protagonist surrenders to it.

Finally, in a clever, strategic move, the two camps, television company and Mexican-American producer, were able to merge their collective stories in the hope of presenting the best project to networks. Yet, even with a full production team and a major film star attached to the project, one by one, each of the networks said no. Each offered a different reason, but at least one of them was blunt enough to admit up front that "Hispanic projects" were not easily sold to corporate sponsors, the immensity of the U.S. Latino market notwithstanding. Apparently, buying pampers was not the same as buying respect in a town whose conception of Latinos seemed to date back to the days of Cesar Romero, Carmen Miranda, and Gilbert Roland.

Some of it may have simply been bad judgment; these were, after all, some of the same networks who had passed on the Cosby Show because they doubted that Americans were ready for prime-time images of a successful African-American couple, a doctor and a lawyer with a daughter at Princeton and not a chicken-bone in sight. But there seemed to be more. The production team had one notion of what were the essential ingredients of a Hispanic project; someone suggested a scene with Joe Razo in homeboy attire standing atop a flight of stairs in a Harvard lecture hall, a beam of bright light illuminating his silhouette. The network had its own notion of what it considered a Hispanic project, some of it shaped with images from the evening news. "When do we see a robbery? Are they gang-bangers? Okay, then, is either of them the son of farm workers, tear-jerker stuff you know?" In sharp contrast to both preconceived notions was Hollywood's most elusive entity -- reality.

The bottom-line was that here was a story of two light-skinned, non Spanish-speaking, assimilated honor students. One was the son of a cop, and a Harvard graduate with an arguably bright future. The other was the graduate of a private high school in Southern California, who after earning A's and B's at Harvard donned a costume to become the gangster that he never was. All in all, the glamour of armed robberies not withstanding, that's pretty tame stuff that conflicts with old stereotypes. No pi–atas, no tortillas on the dinner table, no farm worker parents, no Spanish. Just two American kids, one more confused than the other. And why not? I went to Harvard with your sons and daughters. How dare you make a caricature of me!

Hollywood taught me a more cynical lesson than Harvard ever did: In essence, the experience of Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics in the United States over the last fifty years has expanded and changed and grown and become more diverse at a rate that far surpasses that of Hollywood's image of us. We have moved from the grape-fields to the universities; we have married white and black people; we have sent our multi-cultural kids to private schools; we speak English better than Spanish; we are American. If you call us to dinner, do not feel compelled to serve tacos; in fact, you run into us at Chin Chin's on Sunset. We have lost much of what white moviemakers might loosely term culture. We are a complex and multi-faceted people. We have outgrown yesterday's stereotypes.

Ultimately, Harvard Homeboys -- the story that everybody wanted and nobody wanted may just fade away. The production company has already moved on to other projects. "You know, movies about single mothers are hot right now..." The independent film producer who had the initial vision still hangs onto his script but now seems exhausted by the odyssey. He talks about quitting the business and taking a job up north. After twenty years of trying to share with others a vision that everyone in Hollywood says is needed so desperately and yet has pursued so timidly, his hair is grayer than it used to be. The option on my time at Harvard expires at the end of this year; I doubt that he will renew it.

My experience will become private, intimate once again. At least, until my book is published. Already, my agent talks about movie rights and such. I shrug. I shrug because I have traveled that road before and know its bumps too well.

I will publish this book, and write another. Then another. I will forget about screenplays. I will waste no more of my time or my talent with an industry that is forty years behind the times and whose primary image of Latinos is not Harvard graduates but busboys along Melrose, gardeners in Beverly Hills and parking attendants in Santa Monica. This model Mexican has had enough of Hollywood's Hispanic Tease.

You will not find me protesting outside your offices with placards decrying the shameful lack of Latino television or labeling you a racist. That was another generation. This is business. And, for now, lost business.

As I leave the computer for my afternoon run in the warmth of the San Joaquin Valley, I hear the phone ring and the answer machine turn on. Across the room, I recognize my agent's voice.

"Ruben, it's me. Listen, I just talked to a producer whose very hot on Hispanic themes right now. I told him about you, and he was excited. I want you to do a movie treatment for him to look at. This is your year, kid. Call me..."

Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is a frequent contributor to The Los Angeles Times, and the author of "A Darker Shade Of Crimson," due out from Bantam Books next year.