Everything Is a Production

By DANA CALVO and Dana Calvo is a Times staff writer.

March 12, 2000 12 AM PT

Outside this company town, Nely Galan isn’t terribly famous. But Hollywood operates under its own hierarchy, a place where this particular television executive’s name evokes either breathless dedication or, more often, unbridled vitriol.

Things move quickly inside her Venice Beach television production company, and she strides through the aromatherapy-filled hallway smiling. She doesn’t look nearly as vicious as her reputation, but I have been warned about the seduction of her charm.

Galan was not asked to host her own TV talk show, run the entertainment division of a large television network and oversee production of three Spanish-language television series by being a bore.

She is hurrying toward me with open arms, her face beaming with mischief and a playful conspiracy. She uses a stage whisper to imitate what she fears her enemies have already told me. Nely Galan’s pushy. She’s greedy. She hogs all the development deals this town parcels out to Latinos.

But, enough of that, she says and laughs loudly, let’s eat! She can’t wait to hear what they said.

When they’re done spitting nails, they say a lot.

At 36, Galan has made a career demanding that Hollywood get an eyeful of her, and therefore--so her logic goes--take a good look at Latinos.

Whether you love her or hate her, Galan has kicked in the gates of studios that had remained closed to many of her Latino predecessors. The problem, many say, is that she has slammed those gates behind her.

Her story is a seldom-seen aspect of a disenfranchised group trying to break into the power structure. She has become one of the most well-known Latinas at the big English- and Spanish-language television networks over the past eight years, but her controversial reputation among her fellow Latinos provokes difficult questions.

When will Latinos gain enough power in Hollywood to choose their rainmaker rather than uncomfortably accept someone who seems a little too invigorated by the status?

And why, after only 14 months, did she leave her post as entertainment president at the Telemundo television network, a job that made her the highest-ranking Latina studio executive in the country?

By the end of lunch, Galan volunteers what is already lore around this town--that she wants a sitcom based on her.

Enrique Oliver worked with Galan after winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and a 1987 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for filmmaking.

“The funny thing is, she had five different projects she was pitching about herself,” he said. “She took [Oliver’s pilot called “I Love Nely”] so seriously, she wanted to produce it. I told her, ‘Nely, it’s a joke. I wrote it on a Sunday.’ ”

David Evans, president and CEO of Hallmark Entertainment Networks who formerly headed TCI International and Fox Television Inc., where he met Galan, said she is being faulted for simply surviving in a tough industry.

“Nely does a very good job of self-promotion,” he said. “There would be those that might criticize that; however, I’d also say that as an independent operator in this business in this town and particularly as a woman, if you don’t promote yourself, no one else will.”

Galan sells herself as a woman with one mission. She aims to put Latinos on television. She draws similarities between Latino and gay viewers--both of whom, she says, are excluded groups who are forced to watch caricatures of themselves on prime-time television.

This past winter the four major television networks and a minority coalition led by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People signed agreements that aim to offer greater opportunity to minorities both in front of and behind the camera.

“I think that’s what we have not understood as Latinos--that if one person gets something, it doesn’t take away from someone else,” Galan said. The Hispanic Media Coalition honored her in January for the positive image she gives the Latino community, but seated throughout the ballroom were people who had criticized her in private. More evidence, some say, that Galan is a powerful force in Hollywood whom Latinos publicly feel the need to rally around.

One of the men at her table was Roland Ballester, vice president of business development for Fox Latin American Channels, who worked for Galan from 1996 to 1998. In an interview this winter he said Galan is becoming “the biggest promoter and entrepreneur in the U.S. Hispanic market.”

“The criticisms against her usually come from outside the industry, but once you’re inside, you realize she’s created a climate that people can take advantage of,” Ballester said. “Sometimes, the first one in doesn’t get tangible results.”

She contends that some of her unpopularity stems from a culture clash: her distinctly flamboyant and bold Cuban American style in a region that is decidedly more low-key Mexican American.

Her detractors say that’s a cop-out. Most of her critics asked not to be named in this article, but all said that Galan’s Svengali effect on them dissipated as soon as they asked to see her work. One individual recalled a videotape Galan sent around that supposedly featured examples of material she had “produced.” But all that appeared when the tape was played was an enigmatic montage of red banners that billowed to a background Latin rhythm. Fox aired the tape in between shows, Galan said.

But it’s hard to fault Galan for narcissism in a city that invented close-ups. In fact, it’s her ego that’s enabled her to stay afloat in boardrooms filled with white males with little awareness of programming for people of color.

“When I’m with her, I’m cracking up. That’s how she does it. She’s charming,” said a longtime Latino writer and director who worked with Galan on a network project but who spoke only under condition of anonymity. “But it’s like a ‘take the money and run’ mentality. She’s got huge deals and huge publicity and [expletive] them up every time. The product is crap. If you care about your career and you’ve got quality in mind, it’s best to stay away. You won’t make money, but she will. And your reputation will suffer.”

Oliver, the Guggenheim winner, said the “only people” who don’t know about her reputation in the industry are white studio executives.

“There’s only room for one person up there, and she spends a lot of time fighting off competition instead of developing projects,” he said.

His relationship with Galan began to sour, he said, when he came across a script she had co-written that contained blocks of dialogue he had written in scripts he had given to Galan to promote.

In August 1998, Galan had the chance to draw the line between substance and style and to face down her critics in a concrete way at Telemundo, the country’s second-largest Spanish-language television network. The network was flailing against its competition, Univision. As president of the entertainment division, Galan became the most powerful Latina television executive in the country, and one of her objectives was to stop the glut of soap operas brought in from Latin America. The telenovelas, as they are called in Spanish, are old-fashioned, chauvinistic and irrelevant to today’s Latinos in the United States, she said.

Telemundo’s prime-time ratings among adult viewers in November made a nice jump from 12% in 1998 to 16% in 1999, but Telemundo publicly attributed that to the reintroduction of the very telenovelas Galan had tried to do away with. “I think Nely certainly gets some of the credit. Everybody here gets a lot of credit,” Telemundo President Jim McNamara said tightly. “It’s not just the numbers. It really represents a shift of momentum. It’s the fact that everybody was doing their job right [under Galan].” Her unremarkable reign at the Sony-owned Telemundo convinced the top five editors at Hispanic Business not to include her in their annual list of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics, an honor she received in 1996.

“In her case, it’s safe to say that her influence on the industry today is considerably less than what it would have been had she been successful at Telemundo. Or had Telemundo been more successful during her tenure there,” said editor Tim Dougherty. “Given what we know, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that she’s on the downside of apogee, and that was being named president of entertainment at Telemundo.”

But others say Galan’s perceived failure at the network is the curse of being a Latina recruit in white Hollywood, a player expected to hit a home run every time.

“Latinos and other minorities are given an impossible standard that the industry doesn’t hold itself up to,” said Chon Noriega, assistant professor in the film and television department of UCLA and author of the forthcoming book “Shot in America; Television, the State and the Rise of Chicano Cinema.”

“They assume that if they give a Latino a shot, they’re giving all Latinos a shot,” Noriega said.

Galan left Telemundo in fall of 1999, and many in the industry say the network gave her a farewell air kiss--a post as executive producer of three new television shows without a commitment of future work within the company.

While she oversees all three shows, she only created one of them, “Padre Alberto,” a weekday talk show hosted by a handsome 30-year-old priest from Miami Beach. The second show, “Solo en America,” is based on old scripts from the 1970s sitcom “One Day at a Time,” and the third show, “Los Beltran,” is a sitcom about a Cuban American family in Burbank that was created by Carlos Bermudez and Mike Milligan. They have been retained as producers, but Galan has top billing.

The three Galan shows are U.S.-produced, featuring realistic characters not often seen on Spanish-language television, like a loving, divorced mother with a full-time job; a stable gay couple; and Padre Alberto, who’s hip enough to talk about infidelity.

Alex Nogales, who heads the media group that honored Galan in January, said she should be commended for approving progressive programming for Latinos.

“For Latinos in the United States, they have to hear about themselves, and Nely’s doing that,” Nogales said.

But her old boss, McNamara, would not name Galan’s specific successes at the network. Nor would he discuss why she no longer works there.

He explained her departure this way: “At the end of the day, she had probably a year and a half in the pressure cooker that is management at the network.”

Nely Galan was 3-year-old Arnely Alvarez when her family left Santa Clara, a city in the central province of Cuba. They ultimately settled in Teaneck, N.J. Her father supported the family with his sales job at Goya Foods, and Nely, who became fluent almost immediately, translated the new world from English into Spanish for her parents. The Alvarezes were the only Cuban family in the neighborhood, and their oldest child turned to television as an escape.

She was a 10-year-old student at the Academy of the Holy Angels in Demarest, N.J., when she began peddling concepts to her classmates who were poised on the precipice of puberty and forced to wear a school uniform of saddle shoes, white blouses and plaid kilts. They were an untapped market, and Nely sold them glamour by passing around an Avon catalog in class.

The Avon experience taught Galan what she calls her first iron rule of business: “Collect the money right away.”

The year before she graduated high school at 16, a nun accused her of plagiarizing a short story. She fought the accusations and channeled her anger into an essay for Seventeen magazine about “why you should never send your daughter to an all-girls Catholic school.”

Instead of publishing the essay, the editors asked her to be a guest editor. She segued the opportunity into a permanent job, and Galan’s dizzying career took off.

By 18, she was the young wife of a documentary filmmaker (she took his last name) and was hosting a teen TV news show. By 22, she was divorced and the country’s youngest television station manager, overseeing operations at WNJU in New Jersey, the flagship station for a little-known Spanish-language network called Telemundo.

After WNJU was sold, Galan went in front of the camera for three years, this time as the host of a CBS show called “Bravo,” which changed its name after one year to “Nely.”

“They were training me to be Oprah,” she said, laughing. “They sent me to anchorwoman school. They were trying to make me cut my hair, not talk with my hands. They were trying to WASP-ify me. It was hysterical.”

Galan is light-skinned with thick hair and classically beautiful dark Cuban eyes. She could have easily “been a bimbo,” she said. But she chose business.

In 1992, ESPN hired her to launch its Latin American channel. That same year HBO asked her to promote its Spanish-language channel, and she co-created “Tropix,” a production company that aimed to put Latino faces on television. Tropix helped produce “Loco Slam,” a comedy show. In 1994, media mogul Rupert Murdoch hired her to launch Fox’s Latin America Channels.

At Fox, Galan met with a young entrepreneur named Christy Haubegger who wanted to start a national bilingual magazine that catered to the daughters of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Along with several other investors, Galan gave an undisclosed amount of start-up money to Haubegger, and in June 1996 the first issue of the glossy publication hit the stands. Today, Latina magazine reaches 225,000 readers.

“Nely has weathered a lot of criticism,” said Haubegger, 31. “I think anybody would be foolish to underestimate her. She has more drive than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

In late 1994, Galan founded GaLAn Entertainment, an English-, Spanish- and Portuguese-language advertising agency to market U.S. programming to viewers throughout Latin America.

The news of GaLAn Entertainment came to folks at Disney through exquisite baskets delivered to senior and junior executives at the network. They were filled with pens, pencils and a cigar box containing confetti and “Garden of Dreams,” a children’s-book-style biography of Galan. It ended with a suggestive sketch of Galan carrying a pussycat to the gates of GaLAn Entertainment wearing cartoon-high heels, a miniskirt and a jacket.

Galan followed up the gift baskets with invitations to lunch, and even though her company started as a dubbing studio, she told people it was a production company.

Self-promotion like this helped put her on the radar of some of the most powerful white studio executives in the business, a feat that only a few Latinos can claim.

“She’s been out there, and if not properly, she’s at least been out there,” said Dan Ramirez, casting director for both “Solo en America” and “Los Beltran.” “A lot of Latinos will knock her and say, ‘What has she done?’ But I say to them, ‘What have you done?’ ”

But Galan’s flair for embellishment is not limited to conversation. Her own press kit tweaks the facts.

In February 1998 the Los Angeles Business Journal published an article in which Galan’s education was marked with two simple words: Barnard College. Galan confirmed for The Times “that the closest I ever came to college was taking a few courses at Barnard.” When pressed on two occasions by The Times, she said she studied under a professor Michael Moriarty. The Barnard College registrar has no record of her enrolled in any courses.

In 1997 she wrote a small beauty tips article for Vogue, and her attached biography stated she was writing a book on beauty products. Galan admits she never even started the book. “When I wrote that article, I thought for a moment I’d write the book, but I got more in TV and I didn’t write the book,” she told The Times.

In trendy Venice Beach, GaLAn Entertainment sits on Narcissus Court, under the roof of a former sewing factory. Her corner office is filled with aromatherapy called “Feminine,” and the conference room is infused with “Energy.”

The building is brimming with creativity and artwork, which Galan collects. (In 1998 she was appointed to the national board of the Smithsonian Institution.)

She swears that the next deal--the one just about to come together that she can’t discuss publicly yet--is her biggest, best project yet. But if you can get Galan to stop her pitch--about the mural on the office wall or the hamburger she just had at lunch--she’s blunt about what makes her self-conscious. She says she is a Latina without formal business training, who was divorced at 22 and is still unable to lead a balanced life.

Galan and her live-in boyfriend, comedian Paul Rodriguez, are expecting their first child April 1. She says the unplanned pregnancy is a “wake-up call” from God to take time out for her life. Work consumes her, she said, because she loves it.

“I’m success-oriented. I’m money-oriented,” she said. “In this country, money is power. That’s what takes away the color of your skin.”