Making a movie in Mexico is still rather different from making one in Hollywood. But here’s a plot twist: after years of decline and an early-1990s avalanche of Hollywood films, the once-proud Mexican film industry is in the midst of a revival. Last year “Sexo, Pudor y Lagrimas” (“Sex, Shame and Tears”), a story of yuppie love in Mexico City, earned $12 million, a Mexican record. Another local film is No. 1 at the box office so far this year, and two others have landed in the top seven (sidebar). At Cannes last month “Amores Perros,” (“Love’s a Bitch”) a “Pulp Fiction”-style thriller, won the Critic’s Week Grand Prize. These successes are likely to spawn more. Private investors are starting to see movies as business opportunities, and U.S.-backed distributors are rolling out expensive marketing campaigns. Rimoch, for example, persuaded Buena Vista, a part of Walt Disney, to guarantee distribution of his film in Mexico and advance him $100,000.
But he still has problems Steven Spielberg never faces. “Demasiado Amor,” the bittersweet story of a shy, pudgy young woman’s sexual awakening, is based on a book, and it took four years to get the author to drop her price for the screen rights to $25,000. Rimoch can pay his star only $5,000 for seven weeks of shooting–less than she would earn in two days of making beer commercials. To finance the movie, Rimoch begged and borrowed from the government and private investors, carefully avoiding those who had funded his last film only to see it get clobbered at the box office by a string of Hollywood hits.
Born in 1952, Rimoch can remember when the Mexican film industry was among the most vibrant on the planet. In his youth, stars such as Maria Felix and the Chaplin-like Cantinflas won international fame. But in the late 1960s, the government took over film distribution in an ill-conceived attempt to protect the industry from growing imports. With ticket prices capped at a few cents, only the cheapest films–mostly soft porn and tales of border bandits–got made. The government-owned cinemas grew so run-down that you could often hear two movies at once. Moviegoers got fed up, and by the late 1980s the richer ones just stayed home with Hollywood-made videos. Rimoch, meanwhile, was following the path of many young filmmakers: he fled the country–first to Britain, where he enrolled at the National Film School in 1978, then to Paris, where he stayed until 1994, producing television documentaries.
Back home, the then president Carlos Salinas had come to see the movie business as a national embarrassment. In 1992 he eliminated the cap on ticket prices, sold off government-owned theaters and fully opened the market to U.S. distributors. Ticket prices now average about $2.80. Deregulation had three main effects: it made movie-going the domain of the middle and upper classes, it opened the floodgates to Hollywood fare and it spurred a boom in construction of state-of-the-art cinemas.
The law still requires that the owners reserve 10 percent of their screen time for Mexican movies. But by the middle of the 1990s, so few Mexican films were being made that it was hard for theaters to comply. The number of Mexican productions plunged steadily from 88 in 1991 to a low of 8 in 1998, rebounding to 11 last year. At Blockbuster stores, Mexican videos sit on a single shelf adjacent to the foreign section. Hollywood has become king.
Rimoch learned that lesson with his first feature movie, “El Anzuelo” (“The Hook”). He shot the story, a comedy about a wedding gone bad, for $650,000. It opened in 1996 on just 13 screens, and worse, just before the Hollywood blockbuster “Mission Impossible.” In a desperate attempt to understand why Tom Cruise was killing him at the ticket windows, Rimoch and his wife stood in a theater lobby one night surveying moviegoers. “They didn’t even really like ‘Mission Impossible’,” Rimoch insists, shaking his head.
Indignant, the director joined forces with Mexico’s political left to help pass a film law aimed at boosting national movie production. It sets up a fund for filmmakers and offers tax incentives to investors in Mexican movies. The leader of the movement is Maria Rojo, a congresswoman and actress who makes a cameo appearance in “Demasiado Amor.” Rojo has also fought to maintain the government’s ban on dubbing, arguing that if Mexicans could see Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking Spanish–apart from “Hasta la vista, baby”–they might be even less inclined to see a Mexican-made film. But Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association recently won a Mexican Supreme Court ruling that could clear the way for dubbed movies. “This is the imperialism of a rich country in the culture, politics and economics of a poor country,” Rojo says. “This is unfair intervention.”
There are still many Mexican filmmakers who agree. But the profits racked up by last year’s hit, “Sexo, Pudor y Lagrimas,” opened a lot of eyes–Rimoch’s included. He sees government help as a form of cultural preservation but also believes that the future of Mexican cinema depends on box-office returns that can be used to make more movies. Not surprisingly, the theater owners concur. “We are capitalists,” says Matthew Heyman, an American who in 1994 started Cinemex, a chain of theaters in Mexico City, with two Mexican partners. “We play movies that make money. If they are from Mexico, all the better.”
So Mexican moviemakers continue to adapt–and sometimes, to play the globalization card themselves. Rimoch and his wife, Eva Saraga, wrote the script for “Demasiado Amor” with the help of a Dutch grant. A Spanish producer is financing postproduction work in Spain and shooting on the Mediterranean coast, in exchange for 100 percent of the revenue the movie generates in Spain. Rimoch struck a similar deal with a French co-producer. Like most Mexican directors and producers, he hopes his movie will find a distributor in the United States, where Latinos happen to be the fastest-growing minority.
Rimoch hopes to have “Demasiado Amor” ready for Mexican theaters by the fall. If he can’t, he’ll hold on to it until February 2001, after the Christmastime flood of Hollywood movies. Big stars will draw crowds to the American movies. But in Mexico, there are no Julia Robertses or Tom Cruises. Most actors don’t even have agents. Ari Telch, Rimoch’s 37-year-old leading man, agreed to do the movie for $7,000. He once starred in a popular soap opera, which set him up to earn real money: $300,000 a year as a TV pitchman for a cellular-phone company.
The movie’s star is Karina Gidi, a 28-year-old stage actress. Her only prior experience in front of a camera was a Miller Lite commercial for Latinos in the United States, another commercial for an energy drink and a part in a movie that ran out of money two years ago and remains unfinished. Rimoch believes she is immensely talented.
So are plenty of other people in Mexico’s movie industry, if recent productions are any indication. “We need to make at least 40 movies a year to have an industry,” Rimoch says. This year the total will be more like 20. But it could be that Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly on happy endings after all.
