| | |  Entertainment | September 2008 
Spanish-Language TV gets as Bloodthirsty as the Rest
 Glenn Garvin - MCT
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It's hard to say which is more audacious: Miami's Spanish Broadcasting System tossing aside the telenovela model that's been the backbone of Spanish-language television since the dawn of TV, or the grisly subject matter of its first full-blown dramatic series: vampires. But the minute Angelica Celaya heard about the new SBS show Gabriel, she knew she wanted to be part of it.
"Vampires are very sexual, very sensual," says Celaya, who's been both the biter and the bitten in her acting career. "They don't just attack you, they seduce you at the same time. It's like, 'I'm going to kill you, and you're going to like it.'"
And SBS hopes you're going to like Gabriel, which features Celaya as a Miami nurse caught in a sometimes-romantic, sometimes-homicidal triangle between a pair of ancient vampires played by Hispanic heartthrobs Chayanne and Jose Luis Rodriguez.
When it debuts at 10 p.m. Sunday, Gabriel will mark a departure from one pop-culture trend - the dependence of Spanish-language television on the quick, cheap and predictable soap operas known as telenovelas - and the resurgence of another: the endless fascination with the suave, sexy and sanguinary vampire. The undead have never been livelier.
True Blood, HBO's redneck-goth drama about vampires in the Louisiana bayous, drew more than four million viewers to its first episode earlier this month - and the audience jumped by another million the second, making it the cable network's most successful new show since Deadwood in 2004. HBO has already renewed it for a second season.
Robert Pattinson, who plays the handsome but awfully thirsty boyfriend of a mortal girl in Twilight, the film adaptation of a wildly popular series of teenage novels by Stephenie Meyer, was nearly trampled by a mob of frenzied fans at a comic-book convention this summer - five months before anyone has seen so much as a frame of the film.
Thousands of fans continue to crowd into annual conventions for Dark Shadows, a vampire soap opera that left TV 37 years ago but is still so popular that Johnny Depp is planning to produce and star in a film version directed by Tim Burton.
"The public has an insatiable appetite for vampires," says David Royle, vice president of programming at the cable Smithsonian Channel, which next month airs a documentary titled Vampire Princess that argues that the character Dracula was modeled on a morbid real-life Czech princess of the 18th century whose own family thought she was a vampire. "If you look at Hollywood movies in terms of historical figures, there are two people who figure in more films than any other characters - Sherlock Holmes and Dracula."
The allure of vampires is so strong that it's even able to overcome TV's version of a wooden stake through the heart, poor Nielsen ratings. Three network shows about fangsters - Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel and Moonlight - have been cancelled in the past five years, without dimming TV's enthusiasm.
"The vampire is this archetype that just doesn't die," says Eric Nuzum, author of The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula, a study of America's peculiar fixation with fangs. "Vampires are like cockroaches - they're always around, you never notice them, and by the time you do, they're everywhere."
Celaya, the Arizona-born actress who walked away from a highly successful career in Mexican telenovelas to make Gabriel, doesn't think that's surprising. Vampire mythology touches a deep wellspring not only in human sexuality but its kissing ousin, death.
"It's the whole immortality thing," she muses. "The one thing definite is that we're going to die. Everything else in life is only a possibility. Consciously or unconsciously, our whole lives revolve around death. So everybody's fascinated with immortality. Would that be good, or bad? Is it life that's good, or what you do with it?"
Immortality vs. immorality is right at the heart of Gabriel. The title character, played by Chayanne, is tormented by his vampire status and even visits a Catholic priest to beg for help saving his soul. His nemesis, Pizarro (Jose Luis Rodriguez) - yes, he's the real-life Spanish conquistador who slaughtered Peru's Inca Indians by the thousands in the 16th century, damned to vampirism by one of his victims - kills without remorse and longs for the day when vampires rule the world.
"To me, that's what's interesting about vampires," says Agustine, the one-name-only director, writer and producer of Gabriel. "What if you didn't want to be a vampire and became one only when you were attacked? Is your soul damned? What if you want to be saved? What if you want the redemption of God? Isn't that available to anyone who asks?"
Not, Agustine adds quickly, that Gabriel is a dusty exercise in theology. "I'm a guy, I like to see people flying and fighting and killing," he says. "I loved all the Blade movies ... We've got all that. There's killing and bloodsucking and horrible deaths. But I also wanted to explore the social connections. Being a vampire isn't just about biting people. What about loving your family, dealing with the people next door, saving your soul, all the things the rest of us do?"
Even more than that, Agustine wanted to free the Hispanic audience from what he sees as the yoke of the telenovela, the nightly soap operas churned out by the Spanish-language nets like a chorizo factory.
"Spanish-language television has become a prisoner of the novela form," he argues. "There's no quality on Spanish television because the novela doesn't allow for it. How could there be? You're shooting 40 scenes a day. There's no time for attention to detail. There's no time for nuance. There's just no time, period."
Adds Celaya: "In Mexico City, we all watch all the American shows - The Sopranos, Entourage, 24, all of it dubbed. Well, why dub it? Why not just make it?"
When Agustine, a veteran director of videos and commercials with a couple of low-budget feature films to his credit (including Carlito's Angels and El Vacilon: The Movie), became head of SBS' new movie division last year, network president Raul Alarcon suggested his first project be a vampire love story. Agustine agreed - if it could be an anti-novela, without the abbreviated production schedule, formulaic plot or contrived nightly cliffhangers.
"I told him I'd like to do a 12-hour film with a 600-page script, something that starts and ends without all the daily roller coaster," Agustine recalls. "And to his credit, he said yes. I really do think that the other Spanish TV networks disrespect the public. The people who control the Latin market think it's a bunch of dumb Indians and they'll watch anything we want to give them."
Instead of shooting Gabriel in usual novela fashion - filming simultaneously with three cameras from fixed angles, a set-up designed to hold each scene to one quick take - Agustine used a single camera with multiple takes, the way most feature films and English-language TV dramas are done. In the four months it took him to shoot Gabriel's 12 hours, a traditional telenovela would have turned out close to 90 episodes.
And although the principal photography was done in Miami, he also did some location shooting in Rome, Venice and Puerto Rico - though, like any director, he still grumbles about budgets.
"I'd write a scene that opens with a hundred horses riding over a Peruvian mountain," he ruefully laughs. "And then you show up in (Miami) to shoot and it's flat and you've got a donkey." |
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