MEXICAN FILM AND TELEVISION IN TRANSITION: THE CASE OF CLUB DE CUERVOS

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SCREENINGS MEXICAN FILM AND TELEVISION IN TRANSITION: THE CASE OF CLUB DE CUERVOS Paul Julian Smith The seventh edition of the Statistical Yearbook of Mexican Cinema, which covers 2016, was launched

1 SCREENINGS MEXICAN FILM AND TELEVISION IN TRANSITION: THE CASE OF CLUB DE CUERVOS Paul Julian Smith The seventh edition of the Statistical Yearbook of Mexican Cinema, which covers 2016, was launched at the Guadalajara International Film Festival by IMCINE (Instituto Méxicano de Cinematografía), the national film institute. Some months later the eleventh edition of the Ibero-American Observatory of Television Fiction, also devoted to 2016, was presented by international research group OBITEL (Ibero-American Observatory of Television Fiction) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Both surveys compile exhaustive quantitative data and track qualitative trends in their respective media. This year, the pair offer invaluable evidence for evolution and convergence in the Mexican (and Spanish American) audiovisual field, thereby providing an account of the most important trends. Sometimes the findings can be counterintuitive, proving for example that (contrary to industry complaints) the Mexican government does indeed strongly support cinema and that (contrary to journalistic rumors of its demise) broadcast television is by no means dead in the region. But the handbooks also provide essential context for Netflix s first production in Mexico and one of the most important and innovative series of recent years the soccer comedy, Club de Cuervos ([Crows Club], 2015 ). In spite of pervasive economic gloom and Leftist filmmakers hostility to a centrist government they believe is starving their industry of funds, things seemed to be looking up for Mexican cinema. Jorge Sánchez, director of IMCINE, noted a decentralizing trend in a country hitherto dominated by its capital: film commissions had been opened in the various states in order to promote production. Meanwhile the cinema industry grew at three times the rate of the general economy. The number of features hit an all-time record high of 172 (including seventy documentaries), a figure not reached since the end of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in Records were also broken in admission numbers Film Quarterly, Vol. 71, Number 2, pp , ISSN , electronic ISSN by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press s Reprints and Permissions web page, ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: The launch of the Statistical Yearbook of Mexican Cinema at the 2016 Guadalajara International Film Festival. and grosses, and 35 percent of the year s features were later screened on regular free-to-air television, yet another increase. Unlike previous years, which were dependent on a single local blockbuster, the reports for 2016 show no fewer than ten films attracted audiences of more than 700,000 to theaters. José Woldenberg, of the National Autonomous University, also insisted at the launch that there was much cause for celebration. Never had public and private funds produced so many titles (the split is roughly down the middle) with average budgets pushing a million dollars. Moreover, thirtyseven features were directed by women, another record. Although the ten most popular films still came from Hollywood studios, Mexico s market share had risen to almost 10 percent, helped by the biggest grossing local title of the year Qué culpa tiene el niño? ([Why Blame It on the Child?], Gustavo Loza, 2016) a romantic comedy starring local superstar Karla Souza, known in the United States for ABC s How to Get Away with Murder (2014 ). It is no accident, then, that the yearbook for the first time includes statistics on the bankability of local actors (Souza comes in third, having attracted some six million fans to theaters). Even distribution, long the pet peeve of local producers resentful of the dominance of three U.S. companies, showed some improvement: four local titles commanded openings on a massive four thousand screens each. 72 WINTER 2017

Jorge Sánchez, director of IMCINE. The exhibition sector also expanded and diversified with the opening of alternative theaters and a boom in festivals.

2 Jorge Sánchez, director of IMCINE. The exhibition sector also expanded and diversified with the opening of alternative theaters and a boom in festivals. Mexican feature films draw the highest audiences on stillpowerful TV networks Televisa and Azteca, albeit behind the habitual telenovelas. While legal DVDs are on their way out, as elsewhere, piracy remains a valuable if unmonetized means of connection with the local public. IMCINE found that almost half of Mexican titles shown in movie theaters that now cater to the middle class were soon available for a more accessible price from informal street vendors. If the affections of local fans for local films now seem secure (after years of Mexicans looking more favorably on Hollywood fare), foreigners have embraced the renaissance, too. Eight Mexican films gained theatrical distribution in the United States, and globally Mexican cinema won no fewer than one hundred prizes. Academic Ana Rosa Mantecón, who also spoke at the launch, was less sanguine. Considering the specialist sector, she questioned whether there was a future for a national cinema, whichsheclaimeddoesnotconnectwithits public and has not benefited from the industrial growth cited by the presenters who preceded her. Citing a divorce between creators and spectators, she suggested that there was now no single national cinema nor public one but rather a plurality of films and publics. Therefore, the big grossing romantic comedies did nothing to help the plight of highly praised but overlooked art movies. Her example in this case was Alonso Ruizpalacios s Gu :: eros (2014), which won best picture at the Ariels (the Mexican Oscars) but was shown on just fifty screens to a total of only fifty thousand viewers. The Yearbook, in turn, cites Matías Meyer s Yo (2015), a high-profile festival favorite that was named best film at Morelia but attracted only 7,282 Mexicans to theaters. Mexican cinema s 10 percent market share, Mantecón pointed out, was actually puny compared to the 20 percent of box office that European films now reach in their home markets. Films from other Latin American countries went practically unseen in Mexico, earning only 0.1 percent of the box office. Mantecón praised television (once more) but also YouTube and Netflix as valuable windows for Mexican production. In spite of the explosion of film clubs and festivals mentioned earlier, she argued that cinephilia should be redefined for a multiplicity of screens and that movie theater attendance should be demystified, an unwelcome suggestion for the industry establishment assembled at Guadalajara. Finally, presenters at the Guadalajara festival were ambivalent about the future of the film sector. While Sánchez credited Donald Trump for inadvertently causing Mexican Americans to reconnect with the films from their home country that were shown in the United States, Woldenberg warned that the U.S. President s call for the renegotiation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) raised the opportunity (or threat) of including an audiovisual sector that has hitherto been excluded from the agreement. Yet hidden among the yearbook s three hundred pages of statistics is a further promising sign: the number of TV series (as opposed to telenovelas) produced in Mexico also increased in For the first time, most of those series are made by and for original-content streaming services newly operative in Mexico, such as Televisa s Blim and the local division of Netflix. While it is striking that commentators from both industry and academy pay lip service to a multiplicity of screens, IMCINE s inclusion of TV series in a survey of what is still titled Mexican cinema testifies to the de facto convergence between the two media. The launch in Barcelona of OBITEL s survey of Ibero- American television fiction testified, as did IMCINE s yearbook, to a time of transition in an established medium. Founded in 2005,OBITEL aims to give an accurate account of a huge field: all of the fictional programming shown freeto-air on national channels in no fewer than twelve Spanishand Portuguese-speaking countries, which crucially include both Spain and the United States). Unlike the national focus of IMCINE, OBITEL s remit is both individual and comparative, with a survey that is published on paper and online in three languages. (Read past yearbooks at Each edition is divided into sections on audiovisual context (audiences, public investment, merchandising), production (titles, episodes, formats), transmedia (from official websites to social media), comparative trend analysis (such as the rise of biographical series), and, finally, a special theme of the year (in this case, a decade of Ibero-American television ). FILM QUARTERLY 73

3 Qué culpa tiene el niño?, (GustavoLoza,2016). One key question raised here is that of cultural proximity. Although the closeness of television content to its local audience is an acknowledged strength of the medium (and one that art cinema sometimes struggles to match), OBITEL questions how it is possible to share shows between countries with such different cultures as Mexico and the United States. Of the transcontinental trends sketched by University of Guadalajara professors Guillermo Orozco and Gabriela Gómez, perhaps the most important were the gradual decline in traditional TV ratings and advertising in the wake of increases in audience and revenue for pay TV and streaming platforms. Orozco and Gómez also noted a decrease in the number of episodes being commissioned for telenovelas, a genre now blurring with other series and miniseries to create a new category of mega-series that boast more controversial topics and higher production values. The key example is a graphically violent narco-novela El señor de los cielos ([The Lord of the Skies], 2013 ), shown in its entirety on Telemundo in the United States but aired only in a censored version by Televisa in Mexico. While the researchers attribute the reduction in episodes in part to the influence of Netflix bingeing (viewers are losing the patience required to follow a daily series over a six-month period), they caution that only half of Latin America s population has broadband access. If, as we saw in IMCINE s annual, theatrically screened feature film is still surviving, so is free-to-air television, according to OBITEL. Broadcast television, the research team proclaimed in Barcelona, is not dying. Indeed, the Mexican section of the yearbook presented by Orozco showed (as in the film sector) signs of healthy growth. In 2016, a new network, Imagen, arrived to challenge the duopoly of Televisa and Azteca. A total of fiftyfour new Ibero-American titles had been aired (an increase of fifteen on the year before), of which twenty-seven were produced wholly at home (an increase of eight over 2015). Although Azteca made two Spanish-language coproductions with the United States, foreign-language titles shown in dubbed versions in Mexican primetime originated instead from Brazil and even culturally distant Turkey. In line with a trend away from the heritage genre, a number of the highest-rated shows are no longer telenovelas, 74 WINTER 2017

4 Por siempre Joan Sebastian (Televisa, 2016 ). Using statistics from IBOPE, the Latin American audiencemeasurement company, OBITEL awards first position to a biographical miniseries on the troubled life of a veteran singer, the so-called Poet of the People (Por siempre Joan Sebastian [Forever Joan Sebastian], Televisa, 2016 ). Second was La rosa de Guadalupe ([The Rose of the Virgin of Guadalupe], Televisa, 2008 ), a one-off drama series in which social problems such as drugs, sex work, and bullying are handily resolved each afternoon by tearful appeals to the Mother of God. In 2017, this series, reviled by journalists and loved by mass youth audiences, reached the extraordinary milestone of one thousand episodes, complementing the trend of episode downsizing. In keeping with this changing scene, OBITEL focused its case study of transmedia on Netflix s limited series Club de Cuervos. As noted in the handbook, the producers aim was to avoid telenovelizing its content. With that in mind, they carried out a sophisticated strategy of blurring the divide between fiction and reality aimed at the series selected target audience: characters tweeted under their own (fictional) names in specially crafted feeds, and a YouTube video drew half a million views when protagonist Chava (the mediocre soccer manager on the show) received the gift of a jersey from glamorous real-life Real Madrid star James Rodríguez. This transnational theme (the reliance of a Mexico with an inferiority complex on former colonial ruler Spain) is a key element in the series. Club de Cuervos exemplifies the trends seen in current Mexican film and television production, even as it blurs the distinction between the two in typical Netflix fashion. Club de Cuervos currently consists of three seasons of, respectively, thirteen, ten, and another ten hour-long episodes, as compared to the telenovela norm of one hundred, released in successive years starting in Its initial premise is the death of the father, who owns a struggling provincial soccer team. His death sparks a struggle for control by son Chava (Luis Gerardo Méndez), a vapid playboy obsessed with social media, and daughter Isabel (Mariana Treviño), an earnest overachiever deeply devoted to the team and town she loves. Set in the fictional city of Nuevo Toledo, the series is shot in Pachuca, an unsung place best known in real life for precisely, its successful soccer club. Netflix s production, therefore, follows Mexican cinema s new strategy for decentralizing beyond the capital. In spite of its macho sports theme, the series also follows the trend for a higher female profile in the Mexican audiovisual sector. Although showrunner Gary (Gaz) Alazraki is male, the writing team includes a woman who aims to represent female viewers point of view. Its female characters are consistently shown as smarter and more responsible than their feckless male counterparts. Indeed, at the end of the first season, in an episode of surprising pathos, the scheming Isabel takes over the club from the dejected brother who, initially at least, cares more for his shit-load of [Twitter] followers than he does for the beautiful game. Echoing the boundary-pushing themes that have reached even the traditional networks new mega-series and including strong doses of profanity and nudity that could not be aired on broadcast TV, Netflix tackles controversial issues even within its chosen comedy format. Therefore, a novice player bribes the gruff coach with the gift of a transgender sex worker in order to get off the bench, and the all-pervasive corruption of the sports milieu (with a team manager significantly known as Presidente ) is clearly a satire on Mexico s current political climate. There are even resonances for U.S. viewers, as when Isabel asks plaintively, Why can t awomanbepresident? Another major plot strand in the first season is the arrival of a sophisticated and highly paid star player from Barcelona who, unimpressed by the modest resources of rural Mexico, insists on being lodged in a penthouse in the capital. The series transnational theme is, therefore, not Mexico versus the United States, as one might expect in this Trump era, but rather Mexico versus Spain, with the viewer s familiar home country set against the still-resented imperial power. The fact that the new center forward is avowedly pansexual and is unabashed when caught on camera kissing his (male) publicist reinforces Netflix s distancing of itself from the heterosexist heritage of the traditional telenovela. No longer just a window for Mexican film, the streaming giant here remakes itself and the Mexican audiovisual scene for a multiplicity of screens and publics, including professional women, gays, and the younger and more educated demographics that scorn traditional television. FILM QUARTERLY 75

Netflix s Club de Cuervos (2015 ). Mexican industry insiders still resent the U.S. domination of film distribution in theaters, and Club de Cuervos raises those stakes.

5 Netflix s Club de Cuervos (2015 ). Mexican industry insiders still resent the U.S. domination of film distribution in theaters, and Club de Cuervos raises those stakes. It might be criticized for intensifying that cultural colonialism and not just by opening up a large new market to an American media behemoth. The Mexican director of the series imported not only the hitherto unknown U.S. concept of the writing room for his show but also the writers themselves. The scripts were drafted by American screenwriters and then translated into Spanish. This raises thorny problems for cultural proximity, as futbol is a sport that is considered essential to Mexican identity but with a relatively low profile in the United States. Yet somehow the detail of the scripts, revised during the shooting process, stays close to the everyday life of Mexican viewers. The very title of the series is a local in-joke: Netflix s bedraggled Cuervos [Crows] are contrasted implicitly with the more heroic Águilas [Eagles], the nickname for the legendary América team that happens to be owned by Televisa. Likewise, Chava s long-suffering personal assistant, who is secretly in love with his boss, is named with conspicuous irony Hugo Sánchez after Mexico s most celebrated soccer player of the twentieth century. More precisely, the series is well aware of the differences between Mexican and Spanish vocabulary and gastronomy, exploiting them for comic effect. The Englishspeaking writers claimed that the translation process proved creatively helpful to their work. Unable to exploit verbal gags, they were forced to focus on a more subtle comedy of character. Moreover, the experience of watching the series is further Mexicanized for local audiences through authentic locations (such as picturesque Pachuca) and canny casting. The latter is the series closest connection with cinema. Alazraki, executive producer of Club de Cuervos, is also the director of one of the most successful film comedies of all time, Nosotros los Nobles ([We are the Nobles], 2013), which charts the humiliations of wealthy siblings who are forced for the first time to earn their own living. They were played by movie stars Karla Souza and Luis Gerardo Méndez. Netflix first approached Alazraki to make a series that 76 WINTER 2017

6 would be a sequel to that earlier feature. While Souza was unavailable (as she was making her first U.S. series at the time), Méndez agreed to reprise his earlier role as a mirrey (a Mexican Internet meme meaning an entitled rich kid) in the new soccer setting. The series also developed a social media strategy that knitted the show into the fabric of the everyday lives of its viewers, in one case quite literally through the marketing online of copies of Cuervos s black and white striped uniform for fans to take selfies in. In another example, not cited by OBITEL, Club de Cuervos even responded to the real-life shift of soccer programming onto the Internet. When Guadalajara s established team, Chivas, moved the broadcasting of their games to a pricy app that fans were then obliged to purchase, the fictional Cuervos posted a deliberately inept YouTube video announcing the same mercilessly mercantile strategy. Ironically, the series itself is readily accessible on cheap pirate DVDs, a valuable means of distribution for the many Mexicans lacking broadband access or the ability to pay for streaming services. While Netflix does not release viewing figures in any territory, there is little doubt that Club de Cuervos achieved wide distribution and intense social buzz in a Mexico that had experienced no comparable example of quality comedy featuring name actors and witty up-tothe-minute scripts. Netflix s first Mexican series is a hybrid, condensing two current trends in film and television the vogue for comedies in cinema and the fashion for short-run series on TV just profiled in the two yearbooks. Beyond its industrial dimensions, however, Netflix s Club de Cuervos shows how a global streaming service can preserve and exploit the cultural closeness valued by local audiences around the world even as it ventures into a new and potentially perilous territory: the traditionally anti-american Mexico. FILM QUARTERLY 77

Motion Picture, Video and Television Program Production, Post-Production and Distribution Activities

The 31 th Voorburg Group Meeting Zagreb Croatia 19-23 September 2016 Mini-Presentation SPPI for ISIC4 Group 591 Motion Picture, Video and Television Program Production, Post-Production and Distribution