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Spanish Language Films Launch DVD Company
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by Larry Jaffee
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(Dec. 10, 2002) Phoenix, AZ
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The first titles from Desert Mountain Media, a DVD production company founded by former Sony Pictures DVD Center vice president and general manager Leslie Haas, are being released in December.
Desert Mountain, based here, has acquired exclusive rights to 40 acclaimed Spanish language films, which were digitally restored from the original film negatives and are being marketed as "The Latin Cinema Collection." Titles will be released every month through next year.
Targeting a North American Hispanic market that has been somewhat undeserved by a dearth of Spanish-language DVD movies, Haas noted in an interview that Hispanics have been early adopters in purchasing DVD players. "They're not big PC households. They leaped over [home computers], going from VHS to DVD," she said, citing June 2002 research from Knowledge Networks/SRI that shows 34 percent of Hispanic households have a DVD player.
Although most mainstream Hollywood films offer a Spanish soundtrack option, DVDs that were made with Spanish as the first language are few and far between in the U.S., yet both Mexico and Spain have vibrant film industries, she added. Desert Mountain is focusing on films that have won awards. Most of them were produced in the 1990s through 2001, but some are from the 1970s and 1980s. For the most part, the films have not been broadcast in the U.S. on Spanish language television networks, or played theatrically except for film festivals. The first release, Cilantro Y Perejil, is a romantic comedy that won nine Mexican Academy Awards and was one of the most successful box office hits of recent years in Mexico.
Haas pointed out that the titles are the first DVDs to have specially designed menus that ask after putting in a disc whether the viewer would like the menus in Spanish or English. The DVDs offer English subtitles as an option. The series' menus have been designed by Steve Gustafson of Los Angeles-based DVD production facility B1 Media, which also handled authoring on the first four titles. The discs are being replicated by Sony Disc Manufacturing in Terre Haute, IN. Packaging is bilingual.
Desert Mountain has arranged for distribution through Ventura Distribution. The discs will be available for rental at U.S. Blockbuster Video stores that have large concentrations of Hispanic customers.
Desert Mountain partnered with Mexico City-based The Film House, a 15-year-old state-of-the-art post-production facility, for the digital remastering of the films to ensure the highest quality audio and video.
Films from 1999 and 2000 "needed a lot more restoration than we thought," noted Haas. Daniel Malaguilla, Desert Mountain's vice president of sales and marketing, previously served as general manager of the Spanish language division of a Texas-based video distributor.
Desert Mountain was launched last year by Haas as an independent home entertainment and multimedia company to fulfill the increasing demand from niche markets in the DVD and television marketplace.
The company acquires, licenses and distributes television and DVD entertainment programming in the U.S. as well as international territories. On some of the titles for Latin Cinema Collection, Desert Mountain also holds the distribution rights for Spain.
http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2002/december/dvd_02.shtml
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