Ent Weekly article on Telenovelas (with some comparisons to soaps)

[EricMontreal22]

Hope this wasn't posted already. Wow I never knew how cheap they were or that dialogue and direction were wired to your ear with no rehearsal or that so many were just updates of old telenovelas:

Telenovelas: Inside the Bold, Beautiful & Totally Bizarre World of Univision Soaps

Romance! Betrayal! Wildlife attacks! These delicious Spanish-language soaps have it all -- including more viewers than mainstream shows like ''Gossip Girl.'' Here's why

By Vanessa Juarez Vanessa Juarez

We now join Cuidado con el Ángel, already in progress. A young, handsome character named Juan Miguel is battling an older smoothie named Leopardo (Leopard) for the love of a woman and her baby boy. A crowd of shocked onlookers stands nearby. The tension is palpable, and this is the sound of men locking horns for love:

Juan Miguel: I am the father of this child.

''Ahhhhhhh.''

Leopardo [turning to the woman]: No, no! Please, Lirio, talk to me.

Juan Miguel: Her name is not Lirio — it's Marichuy.

''Ohhhhhhh.''

Leopardo: Marichuy? But...that's the name of your wife!

Juan Miguel: Exactly — she is my wife.

''Aaaaaaaaay!''

And so goes another shocktastic rehearsal scene for Cuidado con el Ángel(Beware of the Angel), a popular Spanish-language telenovela where melodrama is never in short supply. Dueling suitors! Mistaken identities! Secret daddies! It's a lot to take in, especially if you're one of the actors at the center of the madness. ''As a man, it's really hard,'' explains William Levy (Juan Miguel) during a break on the show's Mexico City set. ''They want you to cry all of the time.''

American viewers more used to General Hospital may find the dialogue risibly overdone, but telenovelas like Cuidado con el Ángel are no joke. As English-language networks struggle to hang on to their audiences, these Spanish-language soap operas, which have been around since the early 1950s, are kicking culo on Univision, which airs Cuidado here in the U.S. five nights a week at 8 p.m. The clutch-the-Kleenex story of Marichuy (Maite Perroni) and the two men fighting for her affection currently averages 4.7 million U.S. viewers per evening, beating out heavily hyped English-language network offerings this fall like Smallville, One Tree Hill, 'Til Death, America's Next Top Model, and Gossip Girl. On Fridays, Cuidado and another Univision import, Fuego en la Sangre (Fire in the Blood), have stronger ratings among viewers ages 18-34 than all five broadcast networks: What was once ABC's TGIF is now Univision's Gracias a Dios es Viernes.

The telenovela has become such a hot property that it's now in the midst of the most Hollywood ritual of all — the multimillion-dollar lawsuit. The companies doing battle are Mexico City-based Grupo Televisa, the studio that produces Cuidado and Fuego, and its U.S. distributor, Univision. The dispute: Televisa claims Univision has withheld royalty payments and blocked Internet distribution in the U.S. As a result, Televisa wants out of its contract (which expires in 2017), freeing the studio up to negotiate with other outlets like NBC Universal-owned Telemundo. And there's every reason to believe American networks would want in on the telenovela market: The country's Hispanic population has grown from 35 million to 45 million people since 2000, and is expected to triple by 2050.

Given what's at stake, it seemed like the perfect time to venture into the belly of the beast in Mexico City's San Angel neighborhood to find out how Televisa whips up these deliciously cheesy concoctions.

On the set of Cuidado, it's 9 p.m. and some strange things are afoot. An 8-year-old girl in pajamas rests on a tree stump, stroking a fluffy white dog. Her grandmother — who is, by the way, dead — sits close by in a nightgown, telling the story of Hansel and Gretel. Behind them is a bluescreen on which some sort of psychedelic Oz-like scenery will be inserted once the episode is shown on TV. But the freakiest thing by far? This entire scene — special effects and all — will make it on the air in less than 24 hours. In fact, some cast and crew will watch it on the TV in the studio cafeteria while scarfing down flautas the next afternoon.

Quick and cheap is the Televisa way. Budgets for each episode are in the $60,000 range; by contrast, NBC's Heroes reportedly carries a $4 million-per-hour price tag. It helps when most of the ingredients are in-house: the archive of old novelas that are constantly regurgitated, the construction workers who build the soundstages and props, the editing bays, the producers who watch what's happening on set from their offices in an adjacent building, even the corridor where Cuidado's animal actors reside (in one episode, a character was simultaneously attacked by a cat, a deer, and an owl). Watching the wheels turn is amazing to behold (even when wildlife is not involved), but for folks like floor manager Mario Alberto Flores Enciso, the experience is more like Groundhog Day. He wears the 80-hour weeks in his bloodshot eyes, and even though he is capable of a warm smile, stress can get the best of him. Like when actor Levy (a.k.a. ''the Latin Brad Pitt'') is having trouble delivering his lines one morning, and Enciso lets him have it: ''I'd understand if it was late at night, but you just got here!''

Someone somewhere is always working on Cuidado. The show is currently in the middle of its 370-capitulo order. (Each capitulo, or chapter, is 30 minutes long — and most telenovelas end their runs after about six months of episodes.) The writing staff is tiny: It's made up of exactly two people, scriptwriter Carlos Romero, and co-adapter Tere Medina, whose job is to modernize the original novela that was penned 40 years ago. The crew itself isn't much bigger: about 60 people shooting on location and at the studio lot. Cuidado rarely has time for more than five takes — and as soon as a scene is logged, it is immediately beamed to an editing bay in another building. ''We're shooting and airing almost at the same time,'' says executive producer Nathalie Lartilleaux.

The novela cycle is just as hellish for the actors, who are shuffled around for at least six months straight, working 14-hour days, Monday through Saturday. ''Nobody can get sick,'' Cuidado's René Strickler (who plays Leopardo) halfheartedly jokes. ''You need to come to work even though you're dying.'' That's the attitude on set: Get the job done, even when maintaining composure seems impossible. Take the all-important telenovela reaction shots, for instance. Actors stare deeply into each other's eyes for minutes at a time without saying a single word. Cameras roll. It's unbearably quiet — and, to an outsider, really awkward — as cameras close in on their shocked or smitten faces. And they stay there...and stay there...and staaaaaaaaay there until someone finally, mercifully yells, ''Corta!''

On the surface, the acting on Cuidado is reminiscent of Days of Our Lives or any other American soap opera: glistening eyes, dramatic pauses, and those exaggerated hand gestures that seem more like a choke-hold technique than a method of emphasizing dialogue. The one difference: These actors get their lines electronically fed to them during each scene. With the hectic shooting schedule, there's simply no time to learn dialogue, much less figure out how or when to emote. So as one person reads the words into the actors' wireless candy-corn-size earbuds, a second, director Victor Foulloux, also chimes in with notes on delivery and facial expression. ''Hablar desde el corazón,'' Foulloux will tell them. Or ''¡Con más emoción, con más emoción!''

Like any good factory, Televisa has to be able to count on a steady stream of supplies — and that includes the actors themselves. To ensure that its talent pool never dries up, Televisa has a telenovela farm system in place via its own in-house theater school, the Centro de Educación Artística (CEA). Located on the same lot as Cuidado, the school enrolls kids as young as 5. There's no tuition, but the admissions process is stiff: Each year only 60 students out of 7,000 applicants are selected for the three-year intensive-studies program. Students, most in their late teens, are evaluated every three months, and the ones who don't have the chops are filtered out of the system. Only 25 or so survive. ''About 85 percent of the actors that people see on our channels come from this school,'' says CEA director Eugenio Cobo. ''We have always had one or two future stars.'' The school is already paying off for Gloria Aura, a perky first-year student in her early 20s who's attached to play the lead in a Mexican stage version of Mamma Mia! in 2009 — and who is simultaneously being shopped for a telenovela. Like most CEA students, Aura has set the bar high. ''I would like to be a little bit like Julia Roberts and a little bit like Idina Menzel from Broadway,'' she says. ''And a little bit like Britney Spears, because I can sing.''

Among CEA's former pupils are Salma Hayek and Cuidado's titular angel, Perroni. The latter got her start at CEA before appearing on Rebelde, a teen soap that centered on a pop band. That band, RBD, has now sold close to 15 million albums worldwide. Like most everyone at CEA and on the novelas, the 25-year-old Perroni seems to have been specially bred for this existence. ''All my life I was in dance classes, in theater classes,'' she says, twirling her hair. ''So that's why I am here. I want to do movies, I want to do theater — I want to do everything.''

Today at CEA, a group of students is busy working on an Argentinean-style theater piece. Competing for attention at this age comes with the territory, so it's no surprise when the nine young thespians (six girls, three boys) begin hamming it up — especially when a photographer arrives. One boy in particular — sporting meticulously styled bedhead hair and a white button-down shirt over a pink V-neck tee — seems to be going for some sort of south-of-the-border version of Gossip Girl's Nate Archibald. When in character, he enthusiastically tosses his hands in the air to accentuate emotion. A little too enthusiastically, as it turns out. After the scene, the maestra, Lorena Bohorquez, gently tells him the gesturing was actually too over-the-top and needs to be toned down. Clearly the teacher has no idea what it is like to be attacked by a cat, a deer, and an owl.

With Univision's status as the leading Spanish-language network in the United States hanging in the balance, emotions will no doubt run high during the Televisa v. Univision court battle, which kicked off Jan. 6 in Los Angeles. Televisa currently provides Univision with 15 of its 20 prime-time telenovela hours a week, and is credited with raking in $517 million in revenue a year for Univision. ''That programming cannot be reproduced very easily,'' says Julio Rumbaut, a media analyst at Rumbaut & Company. ''And it's the heart and soul of Univision.''

According to one Univision insider, the two sides can't seem to agree on anything these days: ''We go outside and we think the sky is blue, and they go outside and say the sky is red.'' Of course, the color really in question here is green, and the folks at Televisa feel they are simply not seeing enough of it. ''It's important to understand we're not talking about some mistake on the part of Univision doing its math,'' argues Televisa attorney Marshall Grossman. ''This is a case of justifiable distrust on the part of Televisa toward its current partner.'' (A source at Univision dubs Televisa's royalty claims as ''sort of crazy.'')

Whatever happens in the real courtroom — back payments this, new-media revenue that, blah blah blah — won't be nearly as colorful as the legal drama happening on Cuidado. In fact, in the scene about to be shot right now back in Mexico City, Juan Miguel has just arrived home from court with a woman named Blanca. Everything seems normal, but what's up with the odd rip in Juan Miguel's gray pinstripe suit? Explains Levy, ever so matter-of-factly: ''I'm a psychologist, and she goes to jail for killing my wife. But I know it wasn't her; it was her second personality. So I'm trying to defend her and prove that she's crazy. During the trial, she becomes the other person, and she gets a gun from another guy. I try to be like, 'Calm down, I'm going to help you.' And she's like, 'No, no, you can't help me, I'm going to jail.' And she shoots me. I get shot in the arm.'' In other words, it's just another day at the office.

[Aaron]

I really want to get into telenovelas, but I just can't bear subtitles. Does anyone know of any that actually have English dubs?