A fixation now in focus

LIKE a lot of proud fathers, actor Andy Garcia keeps a drawing made by his daughter, Dominik, pinned to the wall behind his busy desk. It’s a sketch of Havana’s iconic sea wall, with a billowy blue sea splashing below the city’s historic skyline.

The precocious painter, a Valley girl by birth, had never been to Havana, but she knew how much the city meant to her father. He was 5 when he left his hometown, three years younger than she was when she made the drawing, inspired by images of Cuba that abounded in her household. The future actor and his family had been forced into exile by the Cuban revolution, escaping with little more than their memories and the beginnings of a haunting nostalgia for a vanishing way of life.

For as long as Dominik could remember, her father had wanted to make a movie about that bitter exile experience. He even had a name for the film in his head, “The Lost City.” And he had a script about a family ripped apart by Cuba’s civil war, a 300-page screenplay by the late novelist and fellow exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Even a schoolgirl knows that in Hollywood, a movie needs a good marketing plan. So when she brought home her Havana-in-Crayolas, Dominik announced: “Papi, I’ve got the poster for the movie!”

The drawing survives as a reminder of Garcia’s 18-year crusade -- his obsession, really -- to make the film of his dreams. “The Lost City,” which marks the actor’s feature directorial debut, finally opens Friday in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, with Garcia leading a cast of primarily fellow Cuban Americans. It opens wider May 12.

The publicity poster for the film isn’t based on that drawing by Dominik, now 22. But the budding actress still does her part for her father’s film, playing his sister-in-law in a brief supporting role.

In the time it took Garcia to make the movie, he went from relative anonymity to become the most successful Cuban American actor since Desi Arnaz. He earned an Oscar nomination (“The Godfather: Part III”) and won an Emmy (for the soundtrack of HBO’s biopic “For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story”) and a Grammy (as producer of “Ahora Si” by Israel Lopez”Cachao”). He lost his beloved father 10 years ago and his esteemed screenwriter last year.

This month, Garcia turned 50. He was prepared to go another 50 to make his movie a reality, he said. He even envisioned playing older characters in the cast as he aged, or not playing in the cast at all. One way or another, this film was going to be his life’s work.

“It had to happen for me,” says the actor. “Or I was going to die trying.”

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The wounds that don’t heal

TWO things have not changed in half a century: Fidel Castro remains in power, and Garcia remains in exile along with countless other Cubans around the world.

For many of them, becoming part of the diaspora is the defining act of their existence. The moment of leaving their cherished homeland marks the before and after in their lives. The state of exile keeps them always in an unsettled balance between yearning for what they lost and hoping for its recovery.

Time is so precious to exiles that Garcia measures it in small increments, like a child. He says he was “5 1/2 “ when he left Havana. He marks the year as “1961 and a half,” 30 months after Castro rode victoriously into the capital on Jan. 1, 1959.

There have been several movies about the Cuban revolution and its lionized leaders, most recently “Motorcycle Diaries” about a young, idealistic Che Guevara. But one part of the story has never been truly captured on film, says Garcia: The story of those who chose to leave. And that’s why he made this movie.

“It’s really a homage to the generation of parents who brought us here,” says Garcia, who left the island with his mother, his grandmother and two siblings, with his father soon following. “They made that sacrifice, to come to a country with no money, not speaking the language, just to make sure that their children are free to think for themselves and pursue their dreams....

“It takes a lot more courage to leave than it does to stay.”

Made for $9 million and shot over 35 days in the Dominican Republic, “The Lost City” is the story of a well-to-do Cuban family swept up in the rebellion led by Castro and Guevara, both portrayed briefly in the film. It’s set in Havana of the late 1950s, the glamorous Paris of the Caribbean where U.S. mobsters ran casinos and elites frolicked while peasants went hungry and dictator Fulgencio Batista kept order with an iron fist.

Garcia stars as Fico Fellove, the oldest of three brothers who take radically different paths as the revolution engulfs their city. Two would stay and fight for the revolution. Fico tries to stay above the fray, but he eventually decides his only alternative is to get out.

Aside from starring and directing, Garcia also wrote music for the film. One setting -- Fico is the owner of a nightclub called El Tropico, patterned after Cuba’s fabled Tropicana -- also gives Garcia the opportunity to spotlight the classic Afro-Cuban music that defined the period, the height of the mambo and cha-cha-cha dance crazes.

His love of music is evident at the offices of his film and music company, CineSon Productions, located in a cozy but compact Sherman Oaks home. If the place looks lived in, it’s because this was the first house he owned after moving to Los Angeles in 1978. It’s where he started his family and where Dominik brought home her proposed movie poster.

Against one wall, there is an upright piano with maracas and a cowbell resting on top and sheet music (Beatles, Jobim, Cachao) spread open at the keyboard. Across the room are his congas, the instrument he plays during performances with Cachao, the octogenarian inventor of the mambo whose career was revived at age 75 by Garcia’s 1993 documentary, “Cachao ... Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos.”

Some 40 songs are woven into the soundtrack of “The Lost City,” with familiar Cuban lyrics serving as cues or echoes for the action. The movie also replicates performances by some of the top musical stars of the time, including the late Beny More, considered the greatest Afro-Cuban singer ever.

Fans of the music will be enthralled by the performances, including the dazzling dancing of Cuban prima ballerina, Lorena Feijoo, and the cool closing rumba by trumpeter Chocolate Armenteros, More’s bandleader in Havana. The music makes the film’s hefty 143-minute length seem more like two hours plus 20 minutes of music videos.

Still, the Afro-Cuban sounds were no hook for a reviewer from the trade publication Variety, who saw the film last year when it opened the Telluride Film Festival. The critic found the musical numbers distracting and thought the lyrics would be lost on anybody who doesn’t understand Spanish.

“It’s as though Garcia had started out trying to make the Cuban equivalent of ‘The Godfather’ and ended up settling for ‘The Cotton Club’ instead,” wrote Variety’s Scott Foundas.

Though many more reviews are to come, Garcia has heard all the criticism before. He’s been through 16 years of rejections as he peddled his script from one studio to another -- multiple times. Whenever a studio got a new boss, there was Garcia, making yet another try. Garcia says he first got a green light for the project in the late 1980s from Frank Mancuso Sr., then head of Paramount Pictures, who had recruited him for “Godfather III.” Mancuso authorized money for a script, but the studio balked when it came in too long. By the time the project was in its third draft the following year, the studio chief was gone.

“From then on, it was forever looking for a home,” recalls Garcia, who still keeps the original script in a fat binder by his desk. “But there was never any real fire to make the movie within the system.”

Still, the critiques kept coming:

Too long. Too much music. Extraneous characters (“Who’s this More guy?”). Fico, Garcia’s character, was too passive and needed to kill a few people. His romance with Aurora (his brother’s widow, played by Spanish actress Ines Sastre) needed a happy ending. And, someone suggested, maybe the project could use a new writer.

There wasn’t enough money in all of Hollywood, however, to persuade Garcia to trash Cabrera Infante’s screenplay. To him, it was “the Bible” (and practically as thick).

“You don’t rewrite Hemmingway,” Garcia asserts with defiance.

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‘He’ll never make that movie’

GARCIA realizes that he has taken on the aura of a man possessed. His actor buddies would ask the same question year after year: “Y la pelicula?” (What’s up with that movie?) Even Cabrera Infante would poke fun: “How’s ‘The Lost City?’ Still lost?” (Before his death last year, the London-based writer saw an early version of the movie.)

Garcia wonders now what his friends and colleagues must have said when he left the room: “Poor Andy. He’ll never make that movie.”

But he said he doesn’t believe his obsession has hurt him in Hollywood, where perseverance is prized.

“If you look at the movies that were [recently] nominated for best picture, they were all independent films that the studio did not want to make,” says the actor. “I think everybody gets turned down before they make anything. It’s just the nature of it.”

Garcia’s career has been too diverse to be pigeonholed by a single project. Since appearing in a bit part as a character named Manuel in a 1979 TV episode of “Archie Bunker’s Place,” he has starred in an array of films large and small, including Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables (1987), and Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001).

He’s due to appear in three upcoming projects: “Smoking Aces,” a Las Vegas crime drama with Ben Affleck; “The Air I Breathe” a philosophical romance with Kevin Bacon; and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” the second sequel with George Clooney.

In the end, the actor went outside the Hollywood system to finance his pet project.

“The Lost City” is the first film venture for Israeli-born Tom Gores and Cuban-born Johnny O. Lopez, principals in Beverly Hills-based Platinum Equity, a global merger and buyout firm. The pair launched Crescent Drive Pictures, a partnership with Garcia, to make the movie, which is being distributed in North America by Magnolia Pictures. Gores is also partnered with Frank Mancuso Jr., who serves as the film’s producer and who previously worked with Garcia on the 1990 police drama “Internal Affairs.”

“I couldn’t understand why Hollywood would pass it up,” said Lopez, who left Havana as a child seven years after Garcia. “In business, sometimes you have to go against the current.”

Garcia is not your average independent filmmaker. He’s a Hollywood insider who runs into Al Pacino, a buddy since their “Godfather” days, as both celebrity dads shuttle their kids to karate class in the Valley. He plays golf with Bill Murray and gets invited to the wedding of Dustin Hoffman’s daughter, two friends who costar in the movie.

One day on the golf course at Pebble Beach, Murray had suggested he’d like to work with Garcia someday. Funny he should offer. Garcia launched into description about a role he said was tailor-made for the sardonic comic, that of an American expatriate and gag writer who hovers throughout “The Lost City” as both Greek chorus and comic relief, a cynical counterpoint to Fico’s earnestness. Murray read the script and, as Garcia recalls, later called him up to accept by saying, “I don’t know if anybody’s ever going to see this movie, but I want to be in it.”

That’s when Garcia had to break the bad news: “Bill, I’m honored, but I’ve got to tell you, unfortunately, everybody’s working for scale.”

Long silence. “I lost him,” Garcia recalled thinking.

Finally, Murray quipped, “What’s that?”

Some actors might have appeared in the film for free, so strong is their passion about the topic. Fico’s brothers are played by two U.S.-born Cuban-Americans with established television credits: Nestor Carbonell (“Suddenly Susan”) as the intense middle brother, Luis, and Enrique Murciano (“Without a Trace”) as the youngest, Ricardo, the hothead.

In true Latino tradition, Garcia eventually put his whole clan to work. Murciano’s wife is played by Dominik, Garcia’s daughter, and their son in the film is played by her real-life little brother, 4-year-old Andres, Garcia’s youngest child and only son.

When an actress playing a bit part as a waitress had to drop out, Garcia decided to cast his middle daughter, Daniella, 18. But first, he checked with Murray, to see if his friend would be comfortable with the switch.

Without a pause this time, Murray cracked: “Another family member?”

For all his pride in Cuba and its culture, Garcia doesn’t want his movie to be considered a Latino film. The industry tends to marginalize movies that are pigeonholed for ethnic markets, he complains. His story is universal, he says.

“It’s really about the resilience of the human spirit,” Garcia says.

It’s also about politics, Cuban politics, the perennial hot potato. Garcia says “The Lost City” has already been rejected by some film festivals in other countries with close ties to Cuba, though he declined to name them.

He claims the movie is historically accurate, though he acknowledges he set out to debunk the Hollywood image of Che and Fidel as romantic idealists. In one unscripted scene at a diplomatic party, an exasperated Fico throws a wine glass at Che, who responds with urbane humor, though the Argentine revolutionary is portrayed elsewhere in the film as a cold-blooded executioner.

On the other side, the movie’s most evil character is Colonel Candela, a sadistic enforcer for the Batista regime. The pre-Castro oppression explains why so many affluent Cubans would side with the revolution, including Aurora, Fico’s lost love.

“I think if the movie has resonance and stimulates the viewer to talk about it, you can have as large an audience as you want,” says Garcia. “The most important thing for me is that the movie exists. And that’s success enough already.”