Variety had been founded in New York in 1905 by Sime Silverman, Syd’s grandfather. A year later, in 1906, a London office had been established and freelance correspondents in Paris and other European cities followed in the following decades, making Variety a truly international show biz trade paper, the only one of its kind covering vaudeville and live performances. The first ever recorded reviews of two short one-reel films appeared in the January 19, 1907 issue. In later decades, sections on radio and television were added, as these new media came into existence. Later, a short section on the legitimate theatre ran at the back of the paper, as well as night club reviews, a “chatter” catch-all column and – importantly – obits of those in the entertainment field.
In the course of the post-war decades, Variety’s operations had expanded prodigiously outside the United States. By the 1960’s, in addition to a six-person office in London, full-time correspondents were busy in Paris and Rome, working out of their own apartments. Both of these individuals were “hybrids”, which is to say they handled both editorial and advertising, as was also the case with the bureau chief in London. Moreover, a slew of Special Sections were published, many of them written in conjunction with European bureau chiefs. One focussing on New England was put together by Rome’s Hank Werba, who also came up with a section focussed on the “Maghreb”, a term many staffers were puzzled to understand until it was explained that it referred to a region comprising northwest Africa, including Morocco, Libya and Algeria. Far East sections as well as others zeroing in on Australia and New Zealand were blazed by former London bureau chief Harold Myers, which brought in a bountiful volume of advertising dollars and prompting the opening of an office in Sydney where Don Groves eventually became bureau chief. Myers also blazed a new trail in the Far East, mounting special sections, a task later undertaken by Chicago-based Frank Segers. Out of London, sales for a section zeroing in on the Scandinavian countries and even Iceland was done by salesman John Willis and largely written by Copenhagen scribe and film critic Keith Keller. Sections on Germany and the Benelux countries were undertaken by Roger Watkins, based in the 49 St. James’s Street office in London.
All these lucrative efforts brought in new advertisers not only for the special sections but often also in the major film and television market issues – Cannes, Mifed, NATPE, MIP, MPCOM, and later the American Film Market in Los Angeles.
It was thus a propitious time to launch a foray into Latinoland, though Syd had initially expressed some doubts about what business could be garnered there and whether payments in dollars would be forthcoming from countries whose economies and currencies were notoriously shaky, at the best. Heretofore only minimal attempts to canvass advertising from Mexico had been made by Mort Bryer, the sales manager in New York, who spoke no Spanish but who had made a foray south of the border. The outcome was that Mexico’s mammoth television company, Televisa, thereafter yearly ran an ad in the Anniversary issue that was published at the beginning of each year (Variety’s first issue had in fact been published on December 16, 1905) which simply consisted of the Televisa logo spread over two pages. The yearly Anniversary issue, which for many years featured an ad for the Ringing Brothers Circus on a hard color cover, was always well filled with congratulatory ads wishing the paper well for its “birthday”. Other than Televisa, the remainder of the Latin-American world, including the Hispanic companies in the United States, remained virtually unexplored from an advertising standpoint, though the paper did have “stringers” in Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Rio who occasionally filed news items.
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A slight digression may here be allowed on where the term “stringer” came from. At the end of each month, correspondents who were not on a retainer would cut out the articles written by them that had been published and tape them together in a long “string”. This was mailed to the New York office where an amiable lady in the accounting department by the name of Silvia Kaplan would measure the length of the “string” with a ruler and instruct payment to be made to the correspondent on the basis of so and so many dollars per inch (around $12 in my case). A check for the corresponding amount – mine might come to $83.10 one month – would then be sent in the mail.
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After the beachside luncheon, when staffers broke up each to pursue his quest for breaking news on and off the Croisette and in the film offices that had been set up in the suites and lobbies of the major hotels (the key ones were the Carlton, the Majestic, the Martinez, the Grand), I set out to start gathering what information I could on who was who in Latin America in the entertainment sector. Five or six days remained for me to contact as many Latin Americans in Cannes as I possibly could before the Palme d’Or was awarded at the closing night ceremony.
It was Hank Werba who first pointed me in the right direction. He told me to speak to a woman who handled the Latin market in a Rome-based sales company headed by Eduard Sarlui. I soon tracked down Sarlui’s savvy assistant, Beatrice Kowatschew, on the terrace of the Carlton hotel. After introductions were made and I had explained my Latinoland quest to her, sitting in the Midi sun, she graciously pulled out her agenda and started to run down the names and contacts of her company’s associates in Lima, Bogotá, Sao Paulo, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Buenos Aires. These were golden leads, the key movers and shakers throughout the vast territory I was now to plunge into.
By the close of the festival, I had managed to cull a sizeable list of contacts in the major Latin American markets, among them the names of the heads of film companies (“CEO” was a term not used yet) and who was important and who not to waste my time upon.
Upon returning to Madrid my initial list was then greatly expanded after a four-hour session with a charming Argentine sales representative, or “middle man”, Isidro Gabriel, who came to my house and unstintingly provided me with an exhaustive rundown on the dramatis personae in the Buenos Aires film industry, pointing out who were the “serious” producers and who were the chantas, the fly-by-nights and swindlers who might take ads and never pay for them. Isidro was to become a close friend in the years to come.
In the ensuing months after May, I lost no opportunity to research my Latin project and latched on to any Latin American tradsters I encountered at the San Sebastian Film Festival and the Milan film market that year.
Moreover, I started to pin down which were the major television companies in each country. I was knowledgeable about how the film industry worked – producers, distributors, exhibitors. But understanding the in’s and out’s of the television sector was unfamiliar to me. In Spain, only two black and white government channels emitted broadcasting until midnight each day. But in Latin America each country had its own structure, public and private. The television market was far more potent commercially than that of theatrical cinema. I started my learning curve by contacting the head of Latin sales at Television Española, a jolly Madrileño named Javier de Paul. Soon the names of Latin television companies such as Tupi, RTI, Caracol, Telemundo, Univision, the SIN, Radio Caracas, Telefé, Bandeirantes and a host of channels throughout the Latin world became known to me, each of them potential advertisers that produced Latin programming and bought popular series and films from the leading American TV giants.
Unlike in the independent film sector where the producers and distributors tended to be entrepreneurs of all stripes, ranging from bohemian iconoclasts to wealthy, sometimes idiosyncratic businessmen, often- free-wheeling mavericks, all of them proprietors of their companies and thus the ultimate arbiters on whether to take an ad or not, the TV people tended to be button-down executives on salary, or lower level salespeople who did not make the final decisions. The bulk of programming on sale tended to be telenovelas, soap operas that targeted mass markets in Latin lands and in the United States Hispanic market. On the whole, I would find the film people more congenial and culturally akin to my own predilections.
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That summer I had written to Syd asking to be put on a retainer basis. Until then I had been paid by column-inch for articles that were published, though I was reimbursed for certain expenses in Madrid such as transport, meals with clients, etc. and also received a commission for ads sold. After due delay, Syd replied by mail (direct phone calls were almost never used in those pre-fax, pre-Internet days) agreeing to pay me a monthly retainer which was somewhat less than I had proposed, since I argued I could hardly be expected to undertake my ambitious Latin American project on a mere “stringer” basis. Moreover, I said I would need to have some sort of a title, rather than just the “correspondent from Madrid”. He replied that I should pick any title I wanted. I opted for “Director of Latin American Operations”, which sounded grand enough, and had business cards printed with that monicker.
By October, provided with a fairly clear notion of who was who in Latin America and how to proceed with my trip to the equinoctial areas of the world, I sent out typewritten letters to close to a hundred company heads announcing the dates of my arrival in their cities. All were typed, one by one, on my sturdy Facit typewriter in those pre-word processor days.