A Texas Telenovela: AlamoheightsSA, a Melodramedy About the Lingerie Business Set in San Antonio and Made in Houston, Comes in a Sexy 7-Minute Package
By Louis B. Parks, Houston Chronicle
Dec. 4–IT is not business as usual at San Antonio’s hauT’amales Lingerie, where Mexican-American patriarch Andres De Zavala is placing his business in the hands of his scheming family.
Not business as usual either for the Houston-produced cyber-telenovela .
The made-for-the-Internet series features seven- to nine-minute episodes with no commercial breaks. Each episode is shot twice — once in English and again in Spanish — with the same cast.
“It’s one of the first (series) shot in the United States that’s a bilingual production,” says Eric Weymueller, the show’s producer. “We are running with a broadcast license, but it’s on the Internet first. The content is shaped specifically for today’s audiences, which means short and sweet.”
The first six episodes debuted last week; six more will roll out over the next three weeks.
The story follows the travails of two families, the very American De Zavalas of San Antonio and the Montes family of Monterrey, Mexico. Based on a handshake partnership formed by the fathers 20 years ago, the Montes family manufactures the lingerie the De Zavalas design and sell.
But with sons using company trucks for money laundering, a daughter scheming to take control of the business, hot lingerie models with plans of their own, and a politician and gangster or two thrown in, there’s plenty of trouble ahead for both clans.
“We call it a melodramedy,” says Weymueller. “It is melodramatic, it’s dramatic, and there is a bit of comedy in it.”
Except for a few establishing shots filmed in San Antonio, the series is shot entirely in Houston.
“Part of the appeal of Houston was the availability of (bilingual) Spanish-speaking talent,” says Rick Ferguson, executive director of the Houston Film Commission. “That’s a wonderful thing in that it will give that talent even more opportunity for experience and create a deeper talent pool.”
The show has no formal studio or sets. Everything is shot on location.
“They shoot really fast,” Ferguson says. “They shoot one location for multiple locations. One of the heroes’ (primary location) houses in The Woodlands area was used for three or four locations.”
What makes alamoheightsSA.com different from regular TV fare is its business plan. Shot in short segments and aimed at an Internet audience, it has no commercial breaks. There is a 15-second intro commercial and there are surrounding commercials on the Web site, but most of the sponsorship will come from product placement.
Take the hauT’amales lingerie, for example. All the lingerie in the show is provided by a real lingerie company, Yumdrop.com, with links from alamoheightsSA.com.
“Advertisers prefer being in a show rather than around a show,” Weymueller says. “If we can do it in such a way that it makes sense to the stories and the characters, (viewers) will go along with it. They prefer that to watching commercials.”
With Internet technology producers can tell a sponsor precisely how many times the show was viewed, and with product placement they are just as happy if someone watches it off a link on MySpace or YouTube as on the home site. Weymueller expects those sites and other “friends” sites to be crucial to the series’ success. The producers have encouraged cast members to all get Web sites.
“One actress, Cindy Burbano, has 24,000 MySpace friends. We did a special trailer for her MySpace page, and she sent out a bulletin to her 24,000 MySpace friends. That video is being played (a lot). It’s just phenomenal.”
Shot in high definition, the show can be adapted for TV, for cell-phone delivery (that deal is in the works) or HD-DVD. But Weymueller and show creator and San Antonio native Rick Cuellar of El Mundo Entertainment believe they can deliver a big enough audience to make the show successful just on the Internet.
Houstonians also can catch episodes of alamoheightsSA on LAT TV, Channel 30, a noncable station available in about 85 percent of Houston. LAT TV will carry five episodes of alamoheightsSA at 8 p.m. Thursdays (Spanish) and 10 p.m. Saturdays (English), starting this week.
AlamoheightsSA.com will make available two or three episodes each week. So far, about 110 minutes of programming in each language has been produced, constituting sort of a pilot series to set up the characters. Another 40 episodes begins shooting in mid-January for release in February.
louis.parks@chron.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, Houston Chronicle
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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