The hacker tourist maps Brazil - a thriving media powerhouse built on soaps and savvy.
Lorenzo Lamas has been following me across Latin America for years. Wherever I go - from Havana to Patagonia - the star of the B-grade series Renegade is sure to show up, riding his Harley-Davidson across the TV screens of Peruvian bars, Argentine hotels, and Bolivian huts. Likewise, I've watched Lois & Clark in a remote Chilean fishing village, and have seen one of the world's great miracles: David Hasselhoff speaking fluent Spanish. Wherever I've traveled in Latin America - in the world, for that matter - US TV was always close behind. Until I reached Brazil.
In the rising tide of a blue jeans-and-burgers global monoculture, Brazil is a land that refuses to go under. Instead, it bobs on the waves of foreign influence: The Rio de Janeiro music scene is heavily influenced by rock, jazz, rap, and reggae; cinemas show Hollywood movies; and Candomble, a popular religion, blends Catholicism with African spiritualism. But all cultural imports seem to pass through a filter that reframes them, producing in the end something utterly Brazilian.
Encompassing half of the land and population of South America, Brazil is an economic and cultural powerhouse, set apart from its neighbors by language, custom, and a vibrant mixture of African, European, indigenous, and, more recently, Asian bloodlines. Divided by broad stretches of wilderness and immense belts of poverty, eclectic in religion, regional dialect, and race, Brazil is united by only two things: soccer and television.
The country consumes and produces the latter commodity in staggering quantities: It is a nation of 35 million television sets and 100 million viewers watching an average of seven hours a day, a country where illiteracy is widespread and twice as many people own televisions than own telephones. TV, understandably, is a powerful, centralizing institution that delivers the national voice of Brazil.
And the influence of Brazilian television doesn't stop at the nation's border: 130 nations consume Brazilian programming, making Xuxa - the lip-synching queen of Saturday television - a star around the world. Hundreds of millions of Chinese watch Brazilian shows (dubbed into three dialects), Nicaraguans are obsessed, Scandinavians are hooked, and even Lech Walesa and Fidel Castro are fans.
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which assumes that the most developed nations control knowledge-intensive industries like communications and entertainment, while the rest of the world does the manual labor: assembling electronics, stitching sneakers, and growing tomatoes. As one pundit in Washington told me with unconcealed nationalism, "We may not make the VCRs any more, but we still make what goes into the VCRs."
So much for conventional wisdom. Brazil is a poster child for the new global economy: a decentralized, dynamic, multidirectional marketplace in which anyone can play. With the eighth-largest economy in the world, not only does Brazil manufacture such sophisticated products as automobiles, airplanes, and computers, but the South American giant has become a global media powerhouse - a feat few non-Western countries have managed. The vast majority of its television programming is made locally. And watched globally. As I sat in my hotel room in Rio, remote in hand, I had to wonder about the appeal of this low-budget, low-concept TV. Just how did the Brazilians trump Hollywood and the multinational media cabal?
The soap factory
It all began with the humble soap opera. Like most things nefarious in Latin America, the rise of the Brazilian soap, or novela, can be traced to Fidel Castro. In the 1930s, Cuba developed an industry in writing, performing, and exporting radio novelas. Soaps were such a lucrative industry that when Castro's army stormed Havana on January 1, 1959, many writers fled. The first
"Brazilian" soaps were written in Argentina by Cuban exiles. Today, Brazilian soaps are virtually synonymous with Rede Globo. The media giant produces 4,420 hours of original programming a year - including news, novelas, sports, music, and children's shows - more than any other network or studio anywhere, the company claims. Globo's primetime soaps run six nights a week, routinely garnering a 75 percent audience share, and the network's 105 stations earn 2.1 billion Brazilian real (US$1.9 billion) annually. Measured by audience, Globo is the fourth-largest network in the world after ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Rede Globo's parent company, Globopar, employs some 23,000 people in businesses ranging from O Globo, the nation's largest daily newspaper, to books, magazines, real estate, construction, insurance, and banking. But no Globopar business reflects the scale and influence of the company more than its soaps: Malhaçao, Love Is in the Air, The Untamed, and Zazá. These series are produced at a new BrR324 million (US$300 million) facility set in the lush grasslands outside of Rio.
A self-contained 1.3-million-square-meter complex, the Global Production Center could sit out a nuclear war quietly churning out episodes of Love is in the Air for the survivors. The soap factory resembles nothing so much as the villain's lair in Thunderball. The walled-off complex is staffed by 2,500 employees, most of them wearing various uniforms in Globo Blue, the company's official color. Globo is vertically integrated, which is another way of saying the company likes to have its own toys: The production center has a 5,000-kilowatt power plant, a helipad, an explosives bunker, a bus system, and machine and model shops. Globo employees buy Globo magazines at the Globo newsstand, and eat Globo food in the Globo restaurant (with low-fat selections for actors). To make Globo soaps appealing to everyone in this diverse country, Globo actors are even coached to eliminate regionalisms from their accents - they call it "Globotalk".
Most of this I learn from Antonio Nascimento, an earnest Globo junior exec who briefs me with a pointer and map before grabbing the keys to our golf cart (complete with Globo license plate) for a three-hour tour. We roll silently southeast through the complex until - 20 minutes and a thousand miles later - we come to a stop in the town square of Greenville. A Potemkin village of flimsy facades and streets leading nowhere, Greenville is the setting of The Untamed. All the details are right, down to the carefully faded Metallica poster on a kiosk.
"Quality," Antonio says, knocking on a stone movie theater's wooden facade. This is his explanation to my nagging question: What is the secret of Brazil's television success?
Quality? I ponder this answer at our next stop, an airplane hanger on the set of Zazá. The night before I'd watched the villain - a Marlon Brando lookalike minus most of the weight and all of the talent - as he schemed to kidnap the heroine's love child. There were clumsy special effects and embarrassing horror-movie music. This was quality?
Night after night the evidence poured in, until I could no longer deny the obvious: Brazilian TV wouldn't win any Emmys. To be sure, Globo is raising its sights: a new, US-style police drama, for example, is being shot on film rather than video. But most programming occupies a dusky niche between US daytime and nighttime fare, better than General Hospital but nowhere near the standards of pacesetters like ER.
O teatro popular
If it isn't quality that explains Brazil's media dominance, then what? Before I'd left for Rio, some Brazilians in the US had enlightened me on the profound social significance of the novela.
One of the country's most famous soaps, Roque Santeiro, was banned in the '60s and '70s for its subversive parody of the nation's social system. When the show ran in 1985, one episode received a 98 percent rating - virtually every TV in the country tuned in. Dias Gomes, the program's author, is Brazil's elder statesman of soap writers. A slight man with a shock of gray hair, he sits across from me in his spacious beachfront apartment in Ipanema, analyzing the Brazilian novela. It is a sort of people's theater, he explains, in which social aspirations are "integrated into our daily reality." The majority of people don't read much, the theater is elitist, and the domestic film industry has buckled under pressure from Hollywood. "We had to have some form of popular expression," he says. "With an audience of 50 million, television is a medium of expression for the masses."
Globo takes this idea seriously, and actively embeds social messages in its plots. One recent soap, O Rei do Gado (The King of Cattle), addressed the issue of land ownership. Another, Salsa e Meringue, questioned standards of beauty in a multiracial country by pitting a dark-skinned woman against a light-skinned woman in a love triangle.
But the idea of the novela as a catalyst for social reform simply didn't jibe with what I was seeing. I rattle off my nightly viewing menu to Gomes, a catalog of stories about rich white people and love affairs, private jets and formal parties. Where are the masses? What is the redeeming social value? "Azar," Gomes mutters, using the expression Brazilians exclaim when the ball just misses the net. "Azar, you came during a bad week."
Escaping Rio
I stumble upon another answer on a shuttle flight from Rio to São Paulo. As I'm taking my seat, I recognize the ruggedly handsome man sitting next to me as Paulo Gorgulho, one of the stars of Zazá. I've been watching him all week as he fought off the advances of a nymphomaniac virgin; how can viewers in the favelas, the hillside slums of Rio, stomach the absurd unrealism of this stuff? How, I ask him, does Brazilian television manage to speak to so many people?
What's the appeal?
"You must understand that the favelado knows the novela is a lie, he knows it is false," Gorgulho explains. Of course the stories are not realistic, Gorgulho says; the villains are very, very bad, the heroes are very, very good, and the plot ends neatly after six months. Life for Brazil's poor, disenfranchised masses is far more difficult - which is precisely why they relish the success and excess of these fictional characters.
It's a tried-and-true formula that's been around since Shakespeare, Gorgulho notes. The Bard's great plays are filled with romantic triangles, clashing dynasties, troubled marriages, action, comedy, and violence. And the way Paulo describes Zazá, gesticulating passionately over his tray table, it sounds like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet - with a Brazilian twist, of course. Both offer the same thing: catharsis, and a kind of emotional escapism. With so many people condemned to life without hope, the novela is a chance to fantasize, to enjoy the success of others, to see the lives they will never lead.
Globo-lization
Gorgulho's theory explains why the soaps strike such a chord around the world - people everywhere want to escape. But another possibility lingers in the background: Globo's not-high-quality, occasionally socially relevant, multicultural soaps are backed by a world-class marketing machine. The principle is the same at home or abroad: Give viewers what they want. Where price is the issue, Globo sells programming cheaper than syndicated competition from the US. Where quality is the issue, Globo sells soaps that are markedly better than those produced by Mexico, Latin America's other novela exporter. And where social standards are the issue, as in the Middle East and Singapore, Globo provides a mild alternative to violent, racy US fare.
One man has been behind much of this strategy: Roberto Marinho, the legendary owner of Globo. Born at the cusp of the century, Marinho took control of his father's daily newspaper in 1925, forged a critical alliance with the military regime that came to power in 1964, and moved into television the next year. The dictatorship provided Marinho with station licenses and other support, and he provided it with a tool for uniting and controlling the nation. For a while, at least. Marinho turned against the dictatorship in the 1970s, and supported the return to democracy in 1984. He became a king-maker among citizens, helping elect the conservative Fernando Collor de Mello president in 1990 by slanting the network's coverage, and then breaking Collor two years later when the politician turned out to be corrupt.
My requests to interview Marinho were ignored, and one Globo official told me - before tossing me back onto the street in a most polite and discrete manner - that at age 92 the man was no longer transmitting on all channels. Though day-to-day control of the private company has passed to his three sons, they have their father to thank for putting Brazil on the international media map. None of the world's big media players blocked Brazil's entrance into the market because no one wanted to sell what it was selling. And selling well. Globo had perfected its product, boiling it down to the essential dramatic elements, stories that appeal to viewers of all cultures, classes, and societies. The cultural melting pot of Brazil proved to be the best possible preparation for the international marketplace.
Now the next generation of Marinhos is taking Globo to bigger budgets and playing fields. Roberto Irineu, João Roberto, and José Roberto - all in their 40s and all company vice presidents - have accepted that Globo will lose its near monopoly on Brazilian media as multinationals move in, and are counterattacking by going global: Globo has courted deals with AT&T for cellular phones, Ted Turner for cable, and Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp for satellite television. It also plans to launch dozens of magazines, start five channels across Latin America, open theme parks, and sell "off-the-shelf" TV operations to less-developed countries. Globo predicts a gross income of BrR5.4 billion (US$5 billion) by 2000.
Meanwhile, Globo's success has already inspired others. The country's upstart television networks, based mostly in São Paulo, knew they could get nowhere competing against Globo's established sports, news, and novelas. So they created a new kind of program known as news agressivo, a mixture of violence and social advocacy that resembles a guerrilla campaign fought over the airwaves. The first such program, Aqui Agora, launched in 1991. Six years later, these "real life" shows have become programming staples, by appealing to the same millions of viewers who bought into Globo's dramas. Where soaps are pure flights of fantasy, agressivo shows are an optimistic take on a grim reality. If novelas offer escapism, agressivo offers the promise that escape is possible, that hardships can be overcome.
Be Aggressive
Dawn is not a bad time to set eyes on São Paulo - at least not as bad as other times of day. Largely flat and featureless, it is the world's third-largest city, a gritty urban nightmare to Rio's sunny daydream. With 22 million people, SP is the engine of the Brazilian economy, a bustling city that would stretch to the horizon if you could see that far; the pollution is so bad that the view actually improves when it rains.
I'm cruising with one of 13 camera crews of Cidade Alerta, the leading news agressivo program, meaning that the show earns a respectable 12 or 13 percent share competing against Globo's novelas. Filled with crumbling tenements, sobbing families, and faces of every color, Cidade Alerta is a sort of COPS narrated by Noam Chomsky: direct-democracy TV in which ordinary people are the subjects and the editing is minimal.
At 7:30 a.m., we arrive at a police station where some alleged murderers are being held. Correspondent Ulisses Rocha leaps from his gold Chevy Blazer, already talking into the microphone. Camera blazing behind him, Ulisses charges into the station house, interviews the police officers standing around, films the guns used in the crime, films the bullets that were in the guns, films the prisoners sitting on the floor, gets thrown out for filming the prisoners sitting on the floor, films himself being thrown out for filming the prisoners sitting on the floor, all the while chatting calmly with the viewer as if narrating a cocktail party. Outside he films the getaway car and the witnesses. He then films himself driving away from the scene. The show delivers two-and-a-half hours a night of stabbing victims, bank robberies, jail house revolts, more stabbing victims, fires, and other delights of urban Brazil. Each segment runs with a banner summarizing the story in a half sentence: ASSAULT AT AIRPORT ENDS IN SHOOTOUT; POLICE CATCH RAPIST WHO BARBARIZED 20.
Cidade Alerta doesn't simply retail mayhem; it documents the raw wounds of poverty and social alienation in a you-are-there style. I watched one reporter take a guided tour of a poor person's refrigerator that began, "You see here a liter of milk ..." Following the police station episode, Ulisses profiles a family that has gone broke due to medical bills. "If you can help," he tells viewers, "please call," and he offers the phone number of a local charity. The agressivo programs have pushed conservative media organizations to criticize the government and pushed the government towards reform. Last year Jornal Nacional - Globo's staid news show - ran an amateur videotape of cops beating street kids à la Rodney King, provoking a national crisis. But today, here on the streets of São Paulo, the crime rate is unusually low. By the time the sun breaks through the clouds mid-morning, we're flat out of dead bodies and weeping mothers. But in keeping with the agressivo doctrine that anything and everything should be scrutinized, filmed, and broadcast - especially if the light is good - Ulisses decides to do a story about me. Suddenly I'm the one being filmed and interviewed, forced to discuss globalization and the differences between American and Brazilian television while imagining the banner that will run over my face: GRINGO SPEAKS BAD PORTUGUESE TO AUDIENCE OF MILLIONS.
There's a very Brazilian moment when the photographer I'm traveling with takes pictures of them filming us taking pictures of them - with Ulisses narrating it for the viewers and me writing it all down. It is media created in the scrappy, reinvent-on-the-spot tradition of this rising nation. The very tradition that is enabling Brazil to become a power in the emerging free-for-all global media landscape.
