 Jim McNamara expects Panamax to produce half a dozen Spanish-language movies a year [Photo: Eileen Escarda] |
“Toda buena estafa necesita una distracción,” declares the leading man to his sexy female co-star, who’s clad in a navy blue mechanic’s suit, her skin glistening under the Los Angeles sun as she works outside on a car. “Every good con needs a distraction.”
“¿Y cómo voy a ser la distracción? — “And how am I going to be the distraction?” — she responds provocatively.
With a quick flick of the wrist, he answers by unzipping her top. The pheromone-rich encounter is one of many in Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón — an Ocean’s 11-type flick in which two good-hearted thieves and their cronies scheme to rob a crooked infomercial guru who’s made millions selling worthless health products to poor Latino immigrants.
The film is steamy, funny, fast-paced and crassly commercial — just the way Jim McNamara wants it, right down to its formulaic plot and predictable ensemble of characters. “It’s just a heist job,” he says. “You’ve got to have a ringleader, a big muscle guy, an expert electrician — only in our movie they’re all Hispanic.”
McNamara is the founder and CEO of Panamax Films, the 3-year-old Miami-based company that produced Ladrón and plans to turn out at least half a dozen similar Spanish-language films every year. His target: The fast-growing audience of American Hispanics that already numbers some 40 million and is growing at a rate three times the national average. The Census Bureau estimates that the Latino population will rise from 13% to 20% of the U.S. population by 2030.
Panamax and its business strategy arose from a simple realization. McNamara, a bilingual TV executive, saw a glut of Spanish-language television stations, radio stations, record companies, magazines and newspapers. It struck him as odd, however, that not a single one of the 10 to 15 movies released every week is in Spanish.
“Warren Buffett would like what we’re doing,” he says. “I know he doesn’t like the entertainment business, but he would like the idea of a vastly underserved market, not a lot of competitors out there and trying to build a product for this market. And this product costs in some cases 1/100th of what it costs to make for the mainstream American audience. Also, in theory, the potential of another 350 million people south of the Rio Grande who could be consumers. They don’t even know what it is to have movies made for them.”
 Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón (A Thief Who Steals from a Thief) “is the prototype of the type of movie we want to make at Panamax,” McNamara says. “Purely commercial. We’re not doing the intellectual message.” [Photo: Panamax] |
| Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón |
So how did a guy named McNamara come to run a Spanish-language film production company?
McNamara’s father worked as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense in the Panama Canal Zone, where McNamara was born and where he grew up speaking both Spanish and English. McNamara graduated with a political science and business degree from Rollins College in Winter Park and went to work as a sports agent for IMG, the giant sports, entertainment and media company.
After managing professional golfers and recruiting tennis players from South America, McNamara moved into IMG’s television business. There, he says, he found he could use his business background to do something creative. “That’s when I actually said, ‘Ooh, that’s what I like.’ ”
By the 1980s, McNamara had landed at New World Entertainment, where he worked for the company’s international division. One of his coups: Getting American soap operas such as “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “Santa Barbara” on the air overseas, where they became big hits. Named CEO of New World in 1991, he stayed until 1995.
A year later, Universal Television Enterprises hired McNamara to jump-start a sleepy division involved with international and domestic syndication. He oversaw the development and production of shows like “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,” “Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Jerry Springer” and “Sally Jessy Raphael.” McNamara recalls a “very fun time” that ended when his division was sold in 1998.
That same year, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Liberty Media bought Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network headquartered in the Miami suburb of Hialeah. At the time, Telemundo was getting clobbered by Los Angeles-based Univision Communications, the No. 1 Spanish-language network in the country. Univision had an 81% share of the prime time viewers between ages 18 and 49, the most important demographic audience. Telemundo, meanwhile, was only pulling in a 19% share of those viewers.
Sony hired McNamara to turn Telemundo around. The company’s biggest need, he saw, was better programming. Initially, he adopted a simple, low-cost strategy of buying popular Latin American programs that Telemundo could broadcast in the U.S. But the network quickly hit a plateau. “We realized that the audience here in the United States wasn’t the same as the audience in Venezuela. There were certain similarities, that were about the same as the similarities between the U.K. and the U.S.,” he recalls.
McNamara realized that if Telemundo wanted the U.S. Hispanic audience to tune in, it would have to produce its own original TV melodramas, or telenovelas. He caught some flak for his efforts — “I was accused of ‘Americanizing’ or ‘Mexicanizing’ the Colombian novelas” — but he also hit paydirt. The in-house novellas, most of which are filmed in the old “Miami Vice” studios on 41st Street in Miami, made a splash with the U.S. Hispanic audience, and Telemundo’s ratings began rising. In 2001, Sony/Liberty — which had purchased Telemundo for $539 million in 1997 — sold it to General Electric and NBC for $2.7 billion.
‘PanaMac’
McNamara remained as Telemundo’s CEO and president for six years, until he got the itch to start a company to make films for the same audience as Telemundo was reaching on TV.
McNamara needed a creative partner — someone who had more experience with the nitty-gritty aspects of film production. He turned to Ben Odell, a hard-partying television and film screenwriter whose name stuck out on the credits of a hit telenovela, “Fuego Verde” (“Green Fire”) that McNamara had seen in 1998.
 Ben Odell, a television and film screenwriter who spent eight years in Colombia, is the creative force behind Panamax. McNamara liked the fact that Odell’s credits included the hit telenovela ‘Fuego Verde.’ They created Panamax Films three years ago. [Photo: Eileen Escarda] |
Odell had returned to New York in 2000 to complete his master’s degree in screenwriting at Columbia University and start his own production company, Centrifugal Films. He says McNamara’s offer to head production at Panamax came at a perfect time: “I was in fact developing three Spanish-language film projects when he called me, so it really made sense for me to come in under the Panamax banner.”
In 2005, McNamara and Odell created Panamax Films. The company’s name has several connotations, not the least of which includes McNamara’s connection to Panama. There’s also the Pan Americas and the Panamax container ship — the largest size ship that can pass through the Panama Canal. “Sometimes I’m referred to as ‘PanaMac,’ ” McNamara says during an interview at his company’s Coral Gables headquarters.
The company’s first film was a project Odell was working on with writer and director Christopher Zalla called Padre Nuestro. The film tells the story of a Mexican boy named Pedro who smuggles himself to Brooklyn to meet the father he’s never known. Along the way, he meets a man named Juan, who steals his identity in a quest to steal the father’s fortune.
| Padre Nuestro |
The film took top honors at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, one of the most recognized showcases for new independent films. But while Padre Nuestro was an artistic success, it was never intended as a template for future Panamax films. “Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón is the prototype of the type of movie we want to make at Panamax. Purely commercial. We’re not doing the intellectual message,” McNamara says.
Aside from sticking to established plot formulas, Panamax’s strategy minimizes risk in other ways. For one, the company can keep production costs low. A teeming pool of telenovela stars calls Miami home, and by Hollywood standards, the actors work cheap. While Tinseltown’s brightest stars command upward of $10 million per film, McNamara says Panamax typically pays an actor around $25,000 for 20 days of work. When it can, the company shoots its films in Mexico City, Bogotá and other places with favorable incentives.
Meanwhile, Panamax has a deal with
Lionsgate Films, based out of Santa Monica, Calif., to handle the domestic distribution of Panamax movies — which are shown in multiplex theaters in heavily Hispanic areas of the United States.
Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón, he says, cost $1.5 million and took 20 days to shoot. It was released Labor Day weekend at 300 theaters across the U.S. — and pulled in $4 million in box office sales. The 2006 film titled La Mujer De Mi Hermano cost about $1 million and grossed about $3 million.
| La Mujer De Mi Hermano |
As healthy as those margins sound, Panamax won’t see any immediate profit. To begin with, theater owners and distributors get a cut of that money, and McNamara says that after marketing costs, the company will basically break even on the film. Profits for Ladrón will come, he hopes, with the recently released DVD. “The film business is a slow payback business,” he says.
McNamara also says the turnouts for his films didn’t meet his expectations. Initially, he assumed Latino audiences would flock to theaters to watch new films in their native tongue. In fact, it’s been a harder sell. McNamara attributes the slow turnout to the fact that almost all of the two dozen Spanish-language movies released in theaters over the past decade have been art films — not commercial movies like Ladrón. “So what’s happened is the big general public for Spanish-language movies have not developed a habit of going to see a Spanish-language movie. And so you have to create that habit.”
Meanwhile, Panamax is careful to keep the appeal of all its films as broad as possible. As in telenovelas, actors in Panamax films will speak a neutral, uninflected Spanish calculated to play well among filmgoers from many different Latin countries — each with its own idioms and accents. When they see Ladrón, there’s no hint in the diction of Ivonne Montero, the actress who gets unzipped, that the Miami-based star hails from Mexico.
What do McNamara’s Spanish-speaking friends think of the Panamax venture?
“I think there’s some amusement on the part of the Latinos that these two gringos are bothering to do this,” he says. “I always explain to my friends that are running MGM or CBS that, you know, fishermen go where the fish are, and this is a little bit of the same thing.”
As Panamax continues to try to develop its theater audience, McNamara is looking for other profitable venues. Recent belt-tightening at Telemundo will likely make it harder for his old television network to continue doing all of its programming in-house. McNamara believes Panamax could fill the void by setting up a new unit in Miami and Puerto Rico to make a slew of made-for-TV movies.
“Trust me,” he says, “I can do it better, cheaper and faster.”