Edward James Olmos is teaching young Latinos how to succeed in Hollywood — and life
LOS ANGELES — Spoiler alert No. 1: This isn't a story about Edward James Olmos. Well, not technically, anyway.
It's a story about the Latino Film Institute, the nonprofit organization that Olmos founded, chaired and — when necessary — quietly paid for out of his own pocket. Its purpose is to celebrate and bolster "the richness of Latino lives" by providing "a launching pad from our community into the entertainment industry," in the ambitious words of its mission statement.
It's also a story about what is arguably California's most innovative and successful education initiative of the last decade that you've probably never heard of: the Youth Cinema Project. The YCP grew out of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF), the annual showcase that Olmos co-founded with Marlene Dermer and the late George Hernández in the 1990s, under the umbrella of the Latino Film Institute.
YCP, the film festival and LatinX in Animation are the Latino Film Institute's three signature programs. If the Latino Film Institute is the launchpad, and the LALIFF festival is the red carpet attraction, the Youth Cinema Project is the organization's maternity ward, its laboratory, its classroom.
It's been known for decades that Latinos and other ethnicities are absurdly underrepresented in the film and TV industry. No news there. It's been the same conundrum since before Olmos got out of East Los Angeles College in the early '60s, when many Latino actors still were confined to bit parts as bandits and floozies, and the handful of bona fide stars often played down their latinidad.
"still hadn'tin Burbank, a classic old-school joint popular with Industry folk where even the waiters seem straight out of central casting.
