Excess baggage, Alicia Silverstone's first film as producer as well as star, opened in the US on Friday. The Hollywood scandal sheets have taken great glee in reporting the many alleged hitches in the movie's progress: the script rewrites, Alicia's weight gain, her battles with director and studio.One of the earliest clashes centred on Benicio Del Toro, the actor she picked to star opposite her. An actors' actor, admired for character roles in ambitious independent features such as Abel Ferrara's The Funeral and Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, he has, like all Puerto Rican actors from Jose Ferrer to Raul Julia, been considered simply `too ethnic' for mainstream romantic leads.The acclaim Del Toro won as the mumbling Fenster in The Usual Suspects meant little to the executives at Columbia Pictures. Nor the best supporting actor prize he received two years running at the Independent Spirit Awards (for The Usual Suspects and Basquiat). That the 29-year-old is six feet tall and unselfconsciously handsome was also irrelevant. He remained, as Movieline magazine pointed out, not Benny or Ben but Benicio.Hollywood history has shown that it is even harder for Latinos to become film stars than it is for blacks. Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Eddie Murphy all took romantic leads opposite white actresses. The closest Raul Julia seemed to get was in The Addams Family.Jennifer Lopez (a Cuban) is the first Latino actress to be paid a million dollars for a picture. In the title role of Selena, she plays the Tejano pop diva who was about to become the next Gloria Estefan when she was shot dead by the president of her fan club. It is an achievement, in that 30 years ago the role would probably have gone to Natalie Wood. It will be more interesting to see if she now gets mainstream love-interest roles. Will casting directors say ``We had this part pegged for Kate Winslet/ Michelle Pfieffer/ Claire Danes, but let's get in Jennifer Lopez''?Although no Arnold Schwarzenegger script explains why the all-American hero speaks with a thick Austrian accent, having a Latino in an action/romantic lead is considered too confusing. With rare exceptions, Latinos play Latinos, not `ordinary' people. Why else was Rita Moreno's Oscar-winning role as Anita in West Side Story her career highlight? Beautiful and outrageously gifted, she found her career mostly dried up, despite the Oscar. Although she continued to work, by her own admission it was usually unfulfilling parts as ``the second banana''.Italian actors have crossed over in a way that Latinos haven't. Italians can play Jews (De Niro in King Of Comedy, John Turturro in Barton Fink) and Jews can play Italians (James Caan in The Godfather), but Puerto Ricans can only play themselves. And often not even that. Talented actress and dancer Rosie Perez, a kind of Nineties Rita Moreno, was outraged when The Perez Family, an epic Hollywood saga of Puerto Rican life, starred not a single Puerto Rican. The leads went to Alfred Molina, Anjelica Huston and Marisa Tomei.The Rita Morenos and Katy Jurados were never offered anything bigger than sidekicks or servants and little has changed. Salma Hayek, one of the most stunning women in Hollywood, started her career in 1988 as a theatre actress in her native Mexico. According to legend, besotted young men rushed the stage to save her when the villain tried to do her harm.In 1993 she moved to Los Angeles and found herself playing a maid in the TV sitcom Dream On. Her film debut was as a gang girl in Mi Vida Loca. In her big break this year, she plays opposite Friends' Mathew Perry as a `wild' bohemian in Fools Rush ln. The plot, however, is not about a bohemian and a yuppie but interracial love. It was not a happy shoot. Hayek said Perry was a jerk. He responded that she didn't know what she was saying: ``English is not her first language.''Are things getting better? As Jennifer Lopez said of Anaconda: ``It's nice to see a movie where the black and Latino don't get killed off halfway through the picture.'' Although a preposterous film in every way, Lopez has a point.On the other hand, the only Latino actress to genuinely make it huge in Hollywood is the Cuban Cameron Diaz, whose looks are remarkably Orange County (California). Similarly, Ramon Estevez looked so Irish that his agent demanded he change his name to Martin Sheen. The actor, presumably, would not have had such success otherwise.The attitude of privileged American whites is mirrored in the movies they make. It was as recently as 1993 that Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close and Meryl Streep a veritable triumvirate of whiteness were `blacked up' as South Americans in the film adaptation of Isabel Allende's House Of The Spirits.With the release of Excess Baggage, word is strong on Benicio Del Toro. Currently shooting as the attorney to Johnny Depp's Hunter S. Thompson in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, he has just been given the lead in the movie bio-pic of Che Guevara, a star-making role if ever there was one. The industry gossip is that Del Toro is about to go supernova, soon to be in the $5-million-a-picture league. Of course it took the 20-year-old Alicia Silverstone to spot - and fight for - his potential as a leading man.The Observer News Service
