We landed in Rio on Sunday, November 2, and checked into the Leme Palace. The next morning I started calling some of the contacts on my list to make appointments. My knowledge of Portuguese was of the most rudimentary sort, but in the course of the week in Brazil I managed to get along in Spanish when my contacts did not know English. However, setting up appointments from the phone in our hotel room proved to be a major chore. One of the puzzlements was when I was given a phone number for a client and was told, for example,: um, sete dois, meia, sete, oito, um. I looked through my pocket dictionary but could find no number listed at “meia”. It took a while before I realized that in Brazil it was the word used for six, deriving from “media” or “half”.
One morning I phoned a company at four o’clock and asked to speak to the contact I had been given. “No, he’s coming at two o’clock,” the polite secretary told me.
“At two o’clock?” I asked, perplexed. “In the morning?”
“Oh, no,” the secretary hastened to reply. “I’m sorry, our clock has stopped. I mean, he will be here at three!”
At that time there was a great shortage of telephone lines in Brazil and communications were touch and go. The wealthier executives, however, found a solution. They hired a secretary whose main duty was to wait to get a dial tone and then pass the receiver on to their boss.
The next day I sallied off in my suit and tie to my first appointment. The dress code in Rio for businessmen was decidedly more lax than in Europe or other parts of Latin America, especially in the film sector where sports shirts and slacks were common. I carried with me an elegant tan-colored attaché case which I had bought in Madrid for the trip – I had never owned such outward signs of belonging to the world of business executives before – in which were stored two copies of a Variety back issue, a half dozen rate cards, a notebook and a supply of pens and pencils. The weather was warm with blue skies and a good scattering of people were sunning themselves on the Copacabana beach.
My appointment was with an art film distributor called Tony Mann in the downtown area where most of the office buildings were located. The address was Praça Mahatma Gandhi, 2.
Outside the hotel, I hailed one of the many Volkswagen Beetles that served as cabs. These usually had the front seat next to the driver removed so the passengers could get into the car more easily, and a rope was attached to the handle inside the door enabling the driver to pull close the door after the passenger entered or left the vehicle. I got into the Beetle and gave the driver the address.
The ride from Leme to downtown Rio, through tunnels and along sweeps of beaches in Botafogo, took about a half hour, with the taxi meter popping up new figures in cruzeiros, a pittance in terms of U.S. dollars.
It was not until a good while later, when we reached the business district of the city, that I realized the driver did not know the square in question. He stopped to ask another cabbie where the address was located. No one seemed to know. On the second or third try, after driving about various streets for a quarter of an hour, the location was at last found and I was deposited in front of an office building.
The Tony Manne interview went well, since Tony was American, and he clued me in on various facets of the film industry in Brazil. But, more importantly, I was introduced to Tony’s secretary, Hanni Rocha, who spoke excellent English. Upon my telling her of the difficulties of finding the Praça Mahatma Gandhi, she exclaimed, “Oh, no one knows the square by that name. It is called Cinelandia because it is near where all the cinemas are located!”
Hanni was to become an invaluable contact whenever I got to Rio. She was a huge admirer of Variety, which Tony subscribed to, and offered to help me set up some of the appointments with film industry leaders. She was a great fan of Frank Sinatra, but I know little else of her personal life.
For the next four days I made the rounds visiting close to two dozen film and television executives in Rio and Sao Paulo, taking notes during the interviews, soliciting ads for my Latin American issue, among them the leading film lab, after which I had a fairly good notion of who was who in the Brazilian film industry, the role of the government film agency, Embrafilme, some of the in’s and out’s of censorship (always of great interest to Variety readers) and the supremacy in the television sector of TV Globo, which I had never heard of before.
One of the key executives of that of TV network was a soft-spoken, congenial ex-New Yorker named Joe Wallach who received me in his office near the Botanical Garden. During my interview he enlightened me that TV Globo was the largest commercial television company in all of Latin America, larger than Mexico’s Televisa.
Walach had come to Rio in 1965 representing Time-Life which had provided some of the start-up capital, programming and technical know-how when mogul Roberto Marinho started the network in 1965, a year after the military dictatorship began to rule Brazil. Walllach would in later years co-found the American Hispanic network, Telemundo, after buying a number of Hispanic TV stations around the United States. By the time of my interview with Wallach, Globo had a virtual monopoly on the Brazilian TV market, with all its political implications. Wallach detailed the network’s new projects to me, ranging from popular soap operas and plans for the buoyant music sector, its expansion into the then-new home video market, and even into feature film production.
In future years, I would always be sure to look in on Globo’s offices near the Botanical Garden, where a slick young Brazilian executive who handled the company’s advertising received me. But though many Globo ads would run in the pages of Variety, I did miss the one-on-one schmoozing with Joe Wallach.
In the evenings I would stroll down the sweep of the Avenida Atlántica that runs along the beach at Copacabana. The avenue was lined with hotels and restaurants, most of them with outdoor seating. It was there that I developed a predilection for one of my favorite Brazilian dishes, camarão bahiana, shrimp in a tangy sauce with rice. I may also have dipped into the local feijoada and downed many a beer at the outdoor tables on each of which a small canapé always stood to get your juices flowing. The only difficulty was getting a coffee with milk at the end of the meal. Black coffee was in the order of the day only excepting at breakfast time. I couldn’t believe that the restaurants did not have milk for the remainder of the day. And it was black coffee that was always offered to me whenever I entered into any office to see someone I had an appointment with.
On a few occasions I dipped into one of the splendid Rodizio restaurants where the beef was carved at your table and a sweep of buffet goodies waited for customers to dig into. And I remember being pleased at finding a restaurant on the Avenida Atlántica that specialized in German fare, where I could indulge in a Wiener Schnitzel or a pork joint accompanied by sauerkraut and potatoes. And then there were the lovely fruit juices that were dispensed everywhere in the city and the stands near the beach where they sliced open cocoanuts and served you the milk.
While in Rio I managed to pick up a few of the Carioca expressions, such as porno chanchada, softcore pornography films, and I got into the habit of pronouncing the Portuguese “c” as “che”, hence “Redje” for “Rede” (network) or “Setje” for “Sete” (seven).
Happily, one day in the offices of Embrafilme, the government film organization, I made the acquaintance of the man who was its agent for foreign sales of the films produced and financed by them. His name was Fabiano Canosa. After having struggled to talk to Embraflme’s chief, who insisted upon speaking only Portuguese and did not seem to look favorably upon Yanks, it was a relief to speak with Canosa, who was living on the Upper West Side in New York and who clued me in on many of the nitty gritty facets concerning the Brazilian film industry, its problems, quotas, restrictions, government interference and censorship, providing me a thumbnail overview of who was who in it.
In later years, I was to make some good friends in Rio, one of whom, Nelson Hoineff, I appointed to be the local stringer for Variety. Nelson was the dean of the film critics in Rio. He also was in charge of producing a film program for a local television channel. He was one of the few people I came across who was knowledgeable in both the film and TV sectors. Another contact who became a friend was,a film buff and critic, Jorge Kuraiem. Having two locals to shepherd me around Rio and introduce me to the city and some of its key film producers and distributors made the week I would spend there each year not only profitable but also a pleasurable experience.
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Buenos Aires was always my favorite stop-over during my swings through Latin America. I arrived at Eceiza Airport with Lucy on Sunday, November 9, 1975, and checked into the Plaza Hotel. This was an old-fashioned place, built in 1909. We strolled up the nearby pedestrian Calle Florida with its elegant shops and the Calle Lavalle (pronounced La Vaje) with its restaurants and cinemas and felt we were in an environment akin to being in Europe.
On Saturday nights there were special sessions called trasnoches where the last show starts at 1 a.m. These were very popular with the Porteños, many of whom were aves nocturnos (night owls) and some cinemas even offered a late-late show starting at 3 a.m. All pictures ran with their original soundtracks and Spanish subtitles, as is the case throughout Latin America and unlike most European countries where the theatrical films are dubbed into the local lingos.
There were restaurants specializing in Italian and German culinary fare. The animation and the buzz of people in the streets and restaurants reminded me of the area around Times Square in New York or the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.
That year the price of a ticket in one of the first-run movie houses was 32 pesos, or about a quarter of a dollar, though an ice cream purchased from one of the ambulant vendors in the cinema cost 20 pesos. (The average ticket pricet in the U.S. was $2 at that time.)
In my notebook I wrote: “In few cities of the world have we seen such a vibrant night scene. The core of the entertainment sector of Buenos Aires is a narrow, tidy street off the Avenida 9 de Julio. The latter is a huge esplanade-lined avenue that the Porteños claim is wider than the Champs-Élysées. It is lined with cafés and handsome stately buildings. The former, the Calle Lavalle (pronounced Cahje Lavahje) is kind of 42nd Street, but only in respect to it being dotted by 15 cinemas, for otherwise the comparison would be an offense to Lavalle. The Calle Lavalle is closed to traffic and is crowded with Porteños. These are well-dressed and orderly, They strike me as European in appearance. Some of the restaurants are still open at midnight for dinner and the cafés don’t close until the wee hours.
“I never counted them, but Buenos Aires must lead the world in the number of record stores. Streets such as the Calle Lavalle, Calle Corrientes and Calle Florida are lined with them, and half are still playing tangos. Incredible as it may seem, after fifty years, the tango still holds sway over the city, not just in a few tourist night spots, but all over the city, ranging from the classic Carlos Gardel songs – he has long since been converted into a quasi-religious cult figure –to modern tango masters such a Piazzola and Troilo. And it was not only in the dozens of record shops that the strains of the tango could constantly be heard, but also on the radio, where the sound of the concertina (bandonion), violin, flute, double bass and piano throbbed out old and new tangos night and day. These, reminiscent of the 1920’s, the heyday of the tango, seem to harmonize perfectly with a cosmopolitan, elegant city that is still lined with tea shops, old time cafés, historic monuments, rickety cabs and bustling all-night restaurants.”
It was not until subsequent years that I was introduced to “Pippo”, a no-frills restaurant off the Avenida Corrientes that dated back to 1936. A huge, sprawling establishment with paper tablecloths, dozens of tables, bustling waiters and rock bottom prices it specialized in Italian fare. Or the Zum Edelweiss, also off the Calle Corrientes, a favorite place for the after-dinner crowd serving all the classical German dishes, that bowed in 1933. (I am happy to see that both are still open). Or the fancier restaurants adjacent to the Recoletos Cemetery, with outdoor dining.
In and around the Calle Corrientes were dozens of legitimate theatres, playing everything from A Taste of Honey to slapstick boulevard comedies with local funnyman Jorge Porcel to small intimate café concertantes where you could hear the heresies of Piazzola’s version of modernized tangos. The entrance price for one of the season’s smash legitimate hits playing in the capital’s most luxurious theatre was Dürrenmatt’s The Visit of the Lady. The best seats cost a mere 30 pesos. Or you could go to the sumptuous Teatro Colón, modelled on the Opera Garnier in Paris.
However, despite the cultural ferment, there were constant reminders that one was in a Third World country. The taxis were vintage Mercedes, the buses were old and contaminating and did not always come to a full stop when getting off them; one had to be careful when walking on the sidewalks since there were often sections in ill repair. As for the lingo spoken, I soon learned that a mina was a girl, and never to use the common word in Spain for “take” (coger) which in Argentina meant to fornicate and to use instead agarrar (to seize).
I had changed some American Express travelers checks in the Plaza Hotel reception where the exchange rate was favorable vis à vis the official peso-dollar rate, obtaining 130 pesos for the greenback. All the currency that circulated in the counry was in bills, with no coins in sight. The galloping inflation made specie useless. Such had also been the case in Brazil though in Peru and Mexico there were still soles and peso coins circulating. These, along with other virtually useless coins from different parts of the world, upon returning to Madrid, I chucked into large pots. Two of these, now filled to the brims with useless coins of old, stand on a shelf in my living room. In Buenos Aires, one large local bank was advertising an interest rate of 53% on half year deposits!
Our correspondent in Buenos Aires, Domingo di Nubila, had previously found a secretary named Gloria who collaborated with the local film magazine, La Gaceta de los Espectáculos, which had a small office on the Calle Sarmiento, to set up my appointments for me. These included a contact at the National Film Institute, lunch with the local manager of an American major film company, the head of a film lab, an executive of a leading TV channel and two film distributors.
The first appointment in the morning of my second day in Buenos Aires was with a small arthouse distributor, Artkino, who had a modest office on the Calle Riobamba in what was known in the trade as the “film quarter” since many of the film producers and distributors had their offices within the radius of a few blocks of each other. The owner of the company was an elderly curmudgeon with a shock of white hair called Argentino Lamas. Jewish and leftwing, he was known in the film community for his outspokenness. The company premises were more like a shop that one entered directly from the street. Lamas sat behind a desk and bade me sit down in front of him for my interview. In fact he asked as many question of me as I of him, mostly about the political situation in the United States and Spain. He was accompanied by his middle-aged son, Hugo Vainikoff, leisurely attired, less intense than his pater. It was Hugo who I became increasingly friendly with in the course of the ensuing 23 years that I visited Buenos Aires.
Hugo had a sardonic disposition. Like Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” He saw the world as a collection of dunces, though on occasions his smile turned into vocal anger. The following year, 1976, Hugo and his father came into mortal danger when a military dictatorship seized power, initiating the “Dirty War” during which more than 20,000 were killed by death squads or went “missing”. On a later occasion Hugo confided to me how he had avoided being arrested for being a “subversive” and perhaps “disappearing” thanks to the intervention – of all people — the main government film censor who pleaded his case with the authorities and told them that Artkino was merely a harmless operation, though it did distribute some Soviet films in a theatre the company owned, the Cosmos.
Hugo and I had in common that we were both collectors. He took me around to some of the antiquarian bookshops in the city, regaled me with a package of vintage New York post cards, and took a certain pleasure in cueing me in on the examples of corruption and malfeasance that was and doubtless still is endemic to the country. “See this highway that leads into the city from the airport,” he sardonically pointed out to me a year or two later, after meeting me at Ezeiza upon my yearly arrival, “it stops about a mile before it reaches the center of the city. That is because the construction company building it, or the politicians involved, absconded with the funds, so they were unable to complete the job. It has been stopped for over a year now.”
Or on a Sunday, strolling through what was mooted to be a picturesque tourist area, La Boca, but in fact consisted at that time of rundown old buildings, some decorated with street-art murals, and shuttered shops, he would quip, “Do you really think this is what foreign tourists yearn to visit after having perhaps travelled to Venice, London or Paris?”
Hugo and his wife Tita lived in a spacious apartment on the Calle Callao, a few blocks away from where he had his office. A large unused living room was crammed with antique furniture, much of which he had bought in auctions. Rather than dwelling there, he spent most of the day in a kind of foyer near the entrance to the large apartment, where he and his wife took their meals. In the adjacent kitchen he kept a number of birds in cages. Down a long corridor, you came to a small, cramped workroom filled with books where he did his writing – long typewritten letters, memoirs, monographs. The letters he often wrote to me were full of details of the latest scandals and misdeeds of the local politicians, sometimes accompanied by a newspaper clippings.
In the streets in and around where many of the film offices were located there was a corner café (boliche) where the distributors and others of the film industry congregated during the morning house, sipping a coffee and munching on a croissant at small stone-topped tables. You would then see a person with a stack of sheets enter the café, handing some of them out to select film people. The sheets contained a list of the box office receipts from the previous day of the capital’s cinemas, and were thus avidly read by the tradsters, anxious to see how many tickets had been sold of a given film of theirs. The messenger knew the distributor could be found in the café rather than in his nearby office.
One of the companies that I visited was a television sales outfit headed by a soft-spoken man named Pedro Leda, who had all the allure and charm of a Viennese aristocrat. After a friendly interview, I glanced out of the window of his office and commented on what a pleasant view he had, overlooking a handsome church tower.
Whereupon Leda, who was not shy of conceding some of the shortcomings of his country, commented:
“Ah, that church was the cause of all our troubles.”
“Why is that?” I queried, thinking that perhaps his sympathies were anti-clerical.
“Well, way back in 1806 when Argentina was still a colony of Spain and was allied to the French under Napoleon, the British launched several invasions to seize the city. They met with popular resistance, and from the top of that church, that was being attacked, they filled cooking pots with burning oil and flung it down on the attacking British soldiers and helped to defeat the British attempt to seize the region. If the British had won that battle with the Spaniards and taken over Buenos Aires, we would now be as prosperous and developed as Canada or Australia!”
By the end of my fourth day in Buenos Aires I had met close to 20 leaders in the entertainment sector: film producers, distributors, exhibitors, television executives and thus could form a pretty good idea of the lay of the land and who were the key movers and shakers.
At the conclusion of my short sojourn I had managed to cull enough information to fill a notebook. From this and other sources I would subsequently be able write up a series of articles for my Latin American issue.