Marcos Santana

World Screen Weekly, July 20, 2006

Chairman and CEO

Tepuy International

For half a century, telenovelas have been keeping audiences spellbound day after day thanks to a unique mix of drama, passion and intrigue. And for decades, Latin American producers have been the guardians of this successful formula—a novela has a beginning, middle and an end, runs an average of 150 episodes, and often involves two young lovers trying to overcome all odds in order to live happily ever after.

Marcos Santana, as chairman and CEO of Tepuy International, oversees the development, financing, production and sale of telenovelas, and is considered one of the foremost experts of the genre. Aside from producing its own telenovelas, Tepuy is also responsible for distributing programming from Telemundo, the Spanish-language network in the U.S. Together, Tepuy and Telemundo have perfected and updated the classic telenovela thanks to their commitment to high-quality production values.

Santana has witnessed the rise in the popularity of telenovelas outside of Latin America—first, thanks to the sale of finished novelas, and, more recently, due to the sale of novela scripts and formats. In fact, in the last 12 months or so, many countries around the world have discovered the value of homegrown telenovelas. A well-done novela, one that provides high-voltage emotion and is set in familiar surroundings, can hook the audience and generate guaranteed ratings and ad revenues for a broadcaster.

Countries as diverse as Germany, Russia, India and now even the U.S. are producing their own telenovelas, most of them based on scripts of popular Latin American novelas.

“The success of the telenovela is due to several factors,” says Santana, “The first is that novelas are performing well in prime time in more than 60 countries around the world. Secondly, multinational advertisers like Coca-Cola and Unilever have a presence inside novelas in the form of product placement. The benefit they derive is that their products are seen by millions of viewers for months at a time.”

The third factor, Santana explains, is that from a production standpoint there is nothing as efficient as the telenovela—it takes seven months to shoot and uses the same cast, sets and crews day after day.

ABC, NBC, and FOX have announced their own telenovela projects. They all differ in look and style and even in the number of episodes and in the way they will be scheduled, but eventually these novelas will begin to compete on the international market with their Latin American counterparts.

A long-time observer of telenovela trends, Santana is not alarmed by the entrance of American players in the novela market. “If these novelas are well made and get good ratings, then they can open up new markets for the genre on the whole,” he says. “The American-made novelas will travel to other Anglo-Saxon markets and to some countries, but minimally to territories such as Spain and Latin America, first of all because they have to be dubbed, and secondly because they will have a [different] look and style and will portray behaviors that are quite distant from Latin culture.”

When asked whether local versions of novelas will impact the sale of finished Latin American novelas, Santana doesn’t think these local productions will be much of a threat. “Our product, with its magical realism, its nuances, its color, and its tenderness, has its own niche in the international market. No other product can replace it.”

Among Tepuy International’s recent novelas are Corazón partido, co-produced with Argos; Amores de mercado, Tierra de pasiones and the series of self-contained episodes, Decisiones, all produced by Telemundo-RTI; as well as Cómplices and Entre medias, novelas from TVN in Chile.