Building 'Betty'
How Did Silvio Horta Turn a Telenovela Into Fall's Highest-Rated New Series? One Detail at a Time.

 

LOS ANGELES (By William Booth, Washington Post) October 22, 2006 — Chop chop. If you want to watch Silvio Horta, creator of the new hit television show "Ugly Betty," eat lunch, better be quick. He does it at his desk, while scrolling e-mail. Also? Watch your fingers. In comes the plastic tray of takeout sushi. Three minutes, four minutes, tops. Teka maki down the hatch. Lunch is over.

Horta is only 32 years old, with the most-watched new series of the fall season, which ABC just announced it is picking up for the full season. Outwardly, Horta does not appear to be suffering from the stress of creating 42 minutes and 30 seconds of quality television a week for 22 weeks. "I've only lost 10 pounds," he says. He wears leather loafers without socks and his briefcase is a backpack he's had since college. He looks a little Tom Cruisey. Sleeping? "Not much," he says. But Horta isn't complaining. These are exactly the kinds of problems you want in television.

Initially, his one-hour soapy "fish out of water" comedy -- about a zafty Latina from Queens with the furry eyebrows working at a snooty fashion magazine in Manhattan -- was going to air on Friday nights, a time slot of comfortably low expectations in the TV week, the second-least-watched night, after the graveyard that is Saturday evening.

"It was going to be this nice little Friday night show," Horta says. "The pressure wasn't going to be so heavy. People liked it. Okay. Fine. Then it showed at the TCA." Horrors. That's the semiannual gathering of the Television Critics Association, whose members (when they were not eating or drinking) were shown an early version of the pilot -- and they raved . The ABC executives smelled a hit and shoved "Ugly Betty" into the spotlight of Thursday nights at 8,opposite an obscure show called . . . "Survivor."

"It was hold on, here we go," Horta says. "It was like all your dreams come true." He realizes, perhaps, this bit of dialogue sounds corny and so he explains that when all your dreams come true they become your reality and then your reality isn't really the same as your dreams, is it?

And we think: This dude is under a lot of stress.

"You always have these moments of panic," he says. "It could become overwhelming. But you ask yourself, what are my priorities?" He doesn't mean family, health, God, love. He means: The script, the set, the cast, the director, the music, or the newspaper reporter following you around? "What is the most important thing I need to focus on right now, and then that is what you do."

And so now Horta has to go look at a wig.

* * *

To say that Horta is the creator of "Ugly Betty" is technically correct: He developed and wrote the pilot. He imagined the look and feel, what is known in TV talk as the show's "bible." But ABC's "Ugly Betty" is based on a wildly popular Colombian telenovela from 1999 called "Yo Soy Betty La Fea," which was a blockbuster in Latin America and has since been spun off into successful soap series in India, Germany, Russia, Greece, Spain and Israel (where it became "Ugly Esti").

The actress Salma Hayek and the producer Ben Silverman ("The Office") owned the rights in the United States and were struggling to develop a series when they approached Horta.

Initially, Horta says, he was, like, nah, not really interested. He had just finished working on another pilot for ABC called "Westside" about the crazy Los Angeles real estate market and its agents, done in a "Nip/Tuck" style. "It never aired," he explains, "and there is a saying in town that there is nothing deader than a dead pilot. I said I'm done. I went to Europe for two months." (TV pilot season is Darwinian. This season, for example, ABC bought 70 one-hour scripts, which they whittled down to 16 pilots to shoot. Only seven aired.)

Silverman and Hayek liked the way Horta handled the script for "Westside" -- what a TV person might call his "tonality," his use of humor with a lot of heart. Horta had a track record, too, having created two previous shows (now canceled): the sci-fi "Jake 2.0" for UPN and the horror comedy "The Chronicle" for Sci Fi.

"Their energy was infectious," Horta says of Hayek and Silverman. "And creatively we were all on the same page -- telling the story of Betty as a young woman straddling these two worlds, trying to make her way in the American world, the gringo world, as this first-generation Latina and this ugly duckling."

If you haven't been watching, the ugly duckling is America Ferrera (seen in films "Real Women Have Curves" and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants"), and TV critics essentially agree that she is the soul of the show. Her Betty Suarez is a plucky, plump, good-hearted recent community college grad from the outer boroughs with adult braces who is thrown into a viper pit crawling with fashion-crazed stick people. So to review: "Ugly Betty" is a reimagined Colombian soap opera starring a Honduran American actress who plays a Mexican American in a series created by Silvio Horta, a Cuban American.

* * *

Horta is brushing his hand through the dark tresses of America Ferrera's newly created wig as the mass of Big Hair is held aloft like a cornered raccoon by one of the show's stylists in the makeup trailer at Raleigh Studios. "Nice," says Horta. One of his fellow producers, Teri Weinberg, who works for Silverman, is nodding. "Very nice," she purrs.

You might think: Hmmm, what is Horta doing with the wig guy, but after chasing Horta around the studio for a few hours, you see that the job of creator-slash-executive producer is to view the smallest detail as part of the job. "Trust me," Horta says. "I've had many a hair conversation."

Understand that the wig is huge. In the show, details are paramount.

Horta tells a story about how he and his colleagues obsessed for days on the font of the cover lines of Mode, the ersatz fashion magazine in the series.

On television, unlike in the movies, the audience is infinitely distractible, and so a show has to keep sucking them in. Of course, a winning series has to have a good story, blah, blah, blah. But that's only the beginning. These people massage each little beat, each couplet of dialogue, from the teaser to the tag, and then they fill in "Ugly Betty" with layer upon layer of visual and aural candy. "We treat the clothes," Horta says, "as seriously as the characters." He approves the wig.

Before he heads back to the set, Horta runs back to his office for about seven minutes to sit in front of his Mac. Until you really deconstruct a show like "Ugly Betty," you may not realize how much music there is. There is no laugh track. Every scene begins, ends, transitions, rises, falls with little snips of music, a chorus of constant cues to reinforce emotion. Happy. Sad. Pathos. Sex. Giggles. Rumba! Horta's music supervisor, Frankie Pine, just e-mailed him some song samples they might use to heighten a few-second scene that was shot in a set dressed to look like a New York nightclub.

Horta clicks his mouse. He is a left-hander.

First song: "Too distracting."

Second song: "Euro trash." He adds: which might work.

Third: "Too five years ago."

Fourth: "That's not bad."

On the computer, with the help of Windows Media Player the song is actually playing along with a clip of the club scene, so Horta can hear how the music adds or subtracts. The song he picks is called "Voodoo Juju." He says he likes it because it's party music, but it has a now edge, "but it doesn't sound like a song you know." Of course, each song sample -- called a "needle drop" -- costs money. Some are free, others cost $25,000. "And there's never enough money," Horta says.

* * *

On his desk, there is a bottle of Advil and a lone cigarette. Horta has his assistant, Brian Tanen, hold on to the pack and dole out the butts very sparingly. Horta exits a long, open window and grabs a few quick puffs on the roof.

One of the other reasons why Hayek and Silverman wanted Horta for "Ugly Betty" is because he grew up in Betty's world. Not in a Mexican household in New York, but a Cuban one in Florida.

Horta's parents came from the island to Miami in 1969 and little Silvio was born in 1974. "My parents, my mom, barely speaks English," he says. His mother worked as a cashier in grocery stores in the super-Cuban enclave of Kendall (where just about everybody speaks Spanish). His father was a guitar player in house bands in local clubs and restaurants. His folks divorced when Silvio was 6.

Like many first-generation Latinos, Horta was both appalled and mesmerized by telenovelas, the TV novels his mother was addicted to. These are mostly Spanish-language imports, airing on stations such as Telemundo and Univision, that resemble our American daytime soap operas, but are more like melodramatic miniseries with a limited run.

They often air nightly in Latin America (vs. once a week) and the ur-narrative is a familiar one: A poor but beautiful girl falls for a rich and handsome man -- then all hell breaks out as their families and society do everything they can to keep them apart, until true love ultimately prevails, and they have twins.

"Me and my friends would laugh at the telenovelas," Horta says. "They were so stupid. But we watched them. You're hooked."

In "Ugly Betty," Horta borrows heavily from "Yo Soy Betty La Fea," but the ABC show is not technically a telenovela. It is instead a one-hour comedy with soapy telenovela notes (there is a visual gag in every episode that shows Hayek in an bodice-ripping telenovela role -- a kind of TV show within a TV show). Plus this: In addition to riffing on the telenovela, Horta wanted to touch on the experiences of first-generation Latinos, a quote from his own life. So in the pilot Betty is on the phone negotiating with her father's HMO, letting the viewer know that here is a woman who hears Spanish in one ear and English in the other. Horta is proud of this.

* * *

Down to the sets. "Would you look at the floors?" Horta is pointing at the floors in Betty's family rowhouse in Queens. The wood is brand-new but it has been scuffed and worn in the heavy traffic areas. Just as they would be in a real home in Queens. "It is amazing, huh?" Horta says. The pea-green walls. The macrame throw pillows. The verisimilitude of working-class immigrant life that a network budget can buy!

Next door is the set where they are shooting scenes of the Halloween episode. It is the Manhattan offices of Mode magazine, done in orange and white plastics, so absurdly chic, the place looks like an interior decorator's spaceship.

Horta slips into a canvas chair next to the episode's director, Ross Berryman, and watches them shoot the scene in which Betty is dressed as a butterfly.

It is often news to many TV viewers that unlike film, where the director rules, on TV the creators, writers and producers rule. Horta does not direct. Instead, the show brings in hired guns to shoot each episode. This is because TV is a cruel and unyielding assembly line that must produce a new show every eight days. Horta explains: As Director A is shooting an episode, Director B is preparing to film and Director C is in the editing room. "A train must leave the station once a week," he says.

The schedule is crazy. It's less Amtrak, more NASA. Many shuttles to launch. The team is outlining plots, writing scripts, casting actors, selecting music to film an episode, while simultaneously editing, reediting, adding music and credits to episodes already shot. Throughout the entire process, both the production company, Touchstone Television, and the network, ABC, are shown and are approving everything, offering a constant stream of "notes." "You have to use both sides of your brain," Horta explains. Or, if you don't? He thinks that's funny.

* * *

Ahh, the fabled Writers Room. "At the end of the day the most important thing is the scripts," Horta says. "You've got to have one a week and it's got to be great." He says this with a kind of sweet sincerity. Around a large table and splayed on a couch are 10 writers responsible for "Ugly Betty." They are a sneakers, T-shirt and bluejeans crowd, four women, six men, drinking Diet Cokes and Smart Waters. They don't look exactly fried, but it wouldn't be right to call them fresh.

On this day, they are "breaking" the Christmas season episode, meaning they are forming a rough outline for the six acts of the show (each act ends -- taa-daa! -- with a commercial). And each act contains a dozen "beats," which are written on index cards affixed to a bulletin board, and say things like "Betty finds out who her Secret Santa is."

Horta takes a center seat. The back-and-forth continues, but it is directed at Horta, like a pitch.

Since "Ugly Betty" is a soap with a mystery (and lots of potential amorous hookups), the reporter must pledge not to reveal secrets. It is an easy promise because it is impossible to know what they are talking about. Excerpts:

Writer: "It's a cute beat, but so what?"

Writer: "He's suffocating her."

Writer: "What if three people spike the punch?"

Horta: "That's funny."

Writer: "Walter is a more sympathetic character."

Writer: "Be careful we don't slap the puppy."

Horta: "Are we keeping track of the ratio of effeminate males to bitchy females?"

Horta spends an hour in the room, then he must go work on final sound ("At 18 minutes 14 seconds, the music steps on Betty's dialogue"), then select some cast members ("Hmm, he looks more Sears than Fifth Avenue"), and then and then. You get the picture.

"It's a million decisions a day. You know it's not always black and white," Horta says, getting almost philosophical. "It's a lot of decisions with a lot of gray."