Commercial TV Executive Makes Switch to Public Broadcasting

Having spent much of his career as a commercial-broadcasting executive, Luca Bentivoglio is now charged with promoting Latino programming in the challenging arena of public television. In January, he was appointed executive director of Latino Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles supported entirely by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and chaired by the actor and activist Edward James Olmos.

The main mission of Latino Public Broadcasting, which was founded in 1999, is to help develop high-quality educational and cultural television projects of interest to the estimated 40 million Latino television viewers in the United States. The organization has financed eight projects that are now complete, and it has provided support for more than 40 programs now under development.

Latino Public Broadcasting, which has received $1-million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting since 1998, provides $10,000 to $100,000 per project. The organization enlists experts from broadcasting, academe, and other grant-making organizations to help decide which projects merit support.

Once projects are finished, Latino Public Broadcasting tries to persuade public-broadcasting stations to put them on the air.

Among the programs Latino Public Broadcasting has supported: Presumed Guilty, a documentary chronicling the work of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, and The New Americans, a series about immigrant families.

Mr. Bentivoglio, 47, comes to Latino Public Broadcasting after working in production, marketing, and promotion for the Univision Network, the Telemundo Network, and the Warner Bros. channel in Latin America, which he started in 1996. Additionally, he is both an independent producer who created prime-time shows for Univision and Telemundo, and an on-air personality who was host of the long-running Entertainment Tonight-style programs Desde Hollywood and Cine Millonario.

Mr. Bentivoglio hails from a family of artists and scholars. His grandfather was an illustrator and costume designer for the venerable opera house La Scala, in Milan, while his father was a featured actor in more than 40 Italian films. Born in Italy, Mr. Bentivoglio moved to Caracas as a small child with his father and Venezuelan mother, a linguist. As a young man in the 1970s, Mr. Bentivoglio seemed poised to follow his father in the family business: He studied theater arts (as well as anthropology) at the University of Costa Rica, then traveled with a theater company that toured South America and Europe. He also became an accomplished guitarist and composer.

A few years later, Mr. Bentivoglio moved to Los Angeles. Mr. Bentivoglio, who is married, has three sons and now lives in Santa Monica. He became a U.S. citizen in 1997.

In an interview, Mr. Bentivoglio spoke about his career and his new role:

You began life as a performer. Did you expect to end up as a television executive?

Life is full of surprises. First of all, growing up in Venezuela in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not like growing up here. The artistic situation was very difficult. The Latin cultural mentality really respected the engineer, doctor, architect, or lawyer — not the artist. If I’d been born in L.A., maybe now I’d be a director-producer or, who knows, a rock-‘n’-roll star. I wouldn’t have been stopped by that internal fear of being an artist.

In the early 1970s, I went to Costa Rica and found a different situation from my hometown; people were more open-minded about artists. But by the time I came to the U.S., it was a little too late for me in terms of becoming a Hollywood performer. I was already 22 or 23, I had an accent, and I didn’t belong to a family that had been in the business. But my path took me into Spanish-language television, where there was truly a need for people. I was able to get into producing, writing, working on-air, working off-air. Because the field was so new, we were all called upon to do a little bit of everything.

Did your background in the arts affect how you did your job as a corporate executive?

In my career I’ve had to use everything that comes from my background, including my mother’s work as a linguist. To work your way up in business, you have to be a little bit of a ham, a bit of a salesman, and be very articulate.

But it’s interesting how certain cultural biases still exist among some of the people who work in Spanish-language television. I know of a few people who were artists when they were young — one was a singer — who’ve hidden that past now that they’re executives. To them, this is what’s truly important and serious. Of course, there is a potential drawback for artists in the business world. The corporate animal has its own set of rules and characteristics, and sincerity is not one of them. The artist tends to be a little more candid by nature.

What are the stiffest challenges you face now?

First, I’ll mention what’s going smoothly. We have a pipeline of projects that are constantly being completed and presented; we do a lot of outreach among filmmakers by holding workshops, sending out guidelines, expanding our efforts into new territories. The challenge is to get PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] to air these shows. The stations in the public-broadcasting system choose their programming independently, and a certain percentage of them will always say no to our projects. I have to go to each programmer, show them clips of our programs, and convince them that the station ought to show them because they have X number of Latinos in their market.

Are there ways in which you’d like to expand your group’s mission?

We’re exploring the global market for home video. There are countries where our programs would be interesting to viewers there, and we’re reaching out a little further to see where the potential markets are. This will involve a lot of collaborations with other institutions, because there isn’t a lot of money out there for these efforts. But we can succeed.

How do you choose which projects to support?

Unlike for-profit Spanish-language television, we really don’t have to worry about what percentage of our programming is specifically Mexican-themed, or if a certain project is “too Colombian” to work in, say, a primarily Puerto Rican market. We really work to judge each proposal on its own merits. We look for strong stories that have never been told before, that need to be told, and that have a great team behind them.

What will you miss the least about commercial broadcasting?

I woke up every day with an ulcer because I would have to look at the ratings. You have to be young and very strong to deal with those ratings, especially when they’re going down. PBS isn’t about ratings, it’s about alternatives, and that’s a great place to be.

ABOUT LUCA BENTIVOGLIO, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF LATINO PUBLIC BROADCASTING

Education: Studied theater and anthropology at the University of Costa Rica in San Jose; later received his bachelor’s in film and television from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Previous employment: Was president of marketing and promotions at Univision until 1993, then joined Telemundo as vice president of programming and production, where he supervised all programming. He later worked at the WB Channel in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, where he oversaw all programming, marketing, and distribution efforts.

Nonprofit affiliations: Mr. Bentivoglio currently sits on the board of DSG Productions, a nonprofit group in Culver City, Calif., that supports politically oriented documentary producers.

What he’s reading: John Adams, by David McCullough, and as airplane reading, Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett.