Gabriel Figueroa

TV & RADIO Emmys Win TV Deal: Just two weeks before the 50th annual nighttime Emmy Awards, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences--which organizes and presents the Emmys--has agreed to a new four-year contract in which the awards ceremony will continue to rotate among the four major networks. Terms weren't disclosed, but sources say ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox will pay in the range of $3 million per year to televise the Emmys, an increase over their current deal.

"Thank god for these wonderful actors like Jennifer Lopez, Andy Garcia, Jimmy Smits and Antonio Banderas whom we have today," says Luis Reyes, author of "Hispanics in Hollywood." "But contrary to popular belief," he adds, "Hispanics have been part of the Hollywood film industry since the beginning." Cable's Turner Classic Movies is shining the spotlight on these Latino pioneers with its Hispanic Heritage Month film series.

At the first gathering of the Who's Who of Chicano Filmmakers, all eyes were on Luis Valdez. Valdez, the founder of El Teatro Campesino and creative force behind "Zoot Suit" and "La Bamba," was honored, together with his Mexican-American colleagues, by his Mexican counterparts at the first Week of Chicano Films and Videos in Mexico City.

The great Luis Bunuel (1900-83) started out as an enfant terrible of surrealism. His first film, "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), made with fellow Spaniard Salvador Dali, was also cinema's first masterpiece of transgression (it begins with Bunuel himself appearing to slice open a woman's eyeball).

"Frailty, thy name is woman!" When Shakespeare wrote those words for "Hamlet," he could not have imagined there would someday be a woman such as Maria Felix. First, full disclosure: Her death doesn't touch me as much as it moves me to reflection. I never met her, I don't idolize her, and I'd be lying if I said her films influenced me in terms of becoming a film director.

In the 1940s, the legendary actor-director Emilio Fernandez, known as El Indio, became Mexico's most important director. Working with the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Fernandez made a number of highly poetic films--rooted in his country's folklore and dealing with the plight of the poor and oppressed--that were the first to bring international acclaim to the Mexican cinema.