Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. Let’s turn back the clock to forty years ago, when the then-struggling Weinstein brothers brought some Latin rhythms to art houses by distributing a Spanish Harlem-based, indie musical.
For the first Miramax title to hit the film-festival circuit, you’d think Crossover Dreams would be a more well-known release in the Miramax canon.
This rags-to-riches-to-rags dramedy/musical stars Rubén Blades as Rudy Veloz, a struggling Nuyorican musician who, as the title implies, has aspirations of becoming a mainstream star. After his mentor dies while performing at an East Harlem club, Veloz vows not to go out the same way.
He gets a smooth-talking producer (actual producing veteran Joel Diamond, who claims that Harvey Weinstein cast him in the role) to record an English-speaking salsa single he’s been shopping around. Before the tune even drops, Veloz goes into big-headed mode. He breaks up with his loving girlfriend (Elizabeth Peña) after discovering hot-tub threesomes, and even kicks his longtime trumpet-playing partner (Shawn Elliott) to the curb during recording. You can easily guess how mighty Veloz falls when his track fails to find an audience.
This black-comic cautionary tale was the second film for Cuban-born filmmaker Leon Ichaso, who previously took on Cuban exiles in New York with his 1980 Spanish-language stage adaptation El Super. In the early ‘80s, he and his co-writing/producing partner Manuel Arce were failing to get projects off the ground in Hollywood — and that includes writing a script for Universal about Miami and Cubans that was rejected in favor of another similar film. You might have heard of it: Scarface.
They went back to their indie roots with Dreams, scrounging up $600,000 (Ichaso got most of the dough from directing commercials for Latin food giant Goya Foods) for a film that would take two years to finish. Ichaso had previously worked with Blades (who co-wrote the script with Ichaso and Arce) on Pepe Gonzalez, a Saturday Night Live short film from 1980 that starred then-cast member Gilbert Gottfried as a bullfighter who battles anything – cars, subways, people – that moves. (It’s located at the 26-minute mark of this episode.)
Ichaso found his ideal lead in Blades, a Panamanian singer/songwriter who already recorded several albums and collaborated with salsa legends Ray Barretto, Willie Colon, and Hector Lavoe before starring in Dreams. (Blades also has several degrees in political science and law.) Blades has said Veloz is a complete 180 from himself, as he didn’t have to sing in English to build a following. “Crossover has never worked because it implies forsaking.” Blades told the Boston Globe in 1985. “My own proposition is very different. It’s convergence, a meeting halfway on the bridge. The idea of going places at the expense of your cultural identity cannot work. It’s been proven a thousand times.”
Amid all the cynical, deadpan satire Dreams serves up, Ichaso also stages fantastic musical sequences for Blades, like an early-morning salsa number Veloz performs (only using a couple of wooden claves) on his rooftop or a drunken serenade a guitar-strumming Veloz gives his girlfriend after a night of partying. The story was supposed to end tragically, as a broke, desperate Veloz heads to Miami to do a drug-smuggling deal and dies in a hail of bullets. Ichaso had a change of heart and gave his self-absorbed protagonist an optimistic second chance in Dreams’ final minutes. “We didn’t want it to be another Latin hero dead in the street,” Ichaso said in a 1985 Miami Herald interview. “There are so few Latin films that we didn’t want to do a stereotype.”
Dreams debuted in March 1985 at the New Directors/New Films Festival in New York, the same place where Ichaso showed Super a few years before. Dreams got a glowing review from New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who showered the picture with more praise when Miramax gave it a theatrical rollout later that August. Canby wrote, “…[Ichaso and Arce] have a singular understanding of an important segment of our society that has, so far, been largely ignored by other film makers.” Canby added that they “provide a bridge that allows us to cross over to a world that surrounds us every day, though we seldom take the trouble to see it.”
Despite the critical love, Ichaso didn’t exactly cross over after Crossover. He directed very few subsequent features, like the 1994 Wesley Snipes gangster film Sugar Hill and the 2007 biopic El Cantante, starring Marc Anthony as Hector Lavoe and then-wife Jennifer Lopez as his loyal spouse. He did direct a lot of episodic television: Miami Vice, The Equalizer, Medium, and Criminal Minds are just a few of the police-procedural dramas with eps helmed by Ichaso.
Before he passed away in 2023 from a heart attack at age 74, Ichaso worked with the Weinsteins one last time when he wrote and directed Piñero, the 2001 biopic on Nuyorican poet/playwright Miguel Piñero (played by Benjamin Bratt). But that experience was nowhere near a dream. In the book Down and Dirty Pictures, actor/producer Fisher Stevens recalled how Ichaso was fed up when Harvey and them mishandled the film: “They threatened to bury it, and basically they did. As soon as Ben Bratt failed to get a Golden Globe nomination, that was it. They do things behind your back, like saying, ‘We’re thinking of pulling Piñero from festivals,’ when they’d already pulled it from festivals.”
It’s understandable why Ichaso felt betrayed by Weinstein; Dreams was one of several acclaimed, low-budget films Miramax released in the ‘80s, elevating the Weinstein bros from overseas rock-doc distributors to legit, independent-film producers. Sadly, Dreams is yet another forgotten, noteworthy Miramax title that’s damn-near-impossible to locate.
With Ichaso no longer with us, Arce has taken it upon himself to keep Dreams’ memory alive by hosting screenings of his very own 16mm print. (Earlier this year, he did one at Carnegie Hall.) I can only assume younger viewers may find the idea of a Spanish-speaking musician angling for popularity by going English to be a bit dated, since we currently live in a time when some of the world’s biggest pop stars – including Latinx performers Bad Bunny, Rosalia and Karol G – usually drop music in their native language.
While a 2K/4K digital restoration remains to be seen, at least one of the men behind this movie is making sure audiences know about the time a Latin American filmmaker gave moviegoers Dreams – sweet, savage, salsa-filled and ultimately discarded by those disrespectful-ass Weinsteins.
“Crossover Dreams: isn’t available to rent, buy or stream, but a shitty VHS rip Diamond uploaded to his YouTube page is out there. (You’re better off tracking down the DVD New Yorker Video released 20 years ago, which you can also purchase on Blades’s website.)
