To Russia ... and Bosnia .. and Latvia, with love: Latin America's quintessential cultural product--the TV melodrama--sees a storyline abroad.

A rusty bus rattles down a dirt road on its way to Mexico City. (Or is it Bogota, or Caracas?) Maria, a country girl with flowing dark hair and inexplicably straight, white teeth unfolds a worn letter from her widowed mother. "Be careful, my dearest one, in the big city," the letter reads. "Who knows what misfortune might befall you?"

She steps from the bus, a cardboard suitcase in hand, and into the chaotic city jammed with big cars, glass buildings and well-dressed people. "You look lost. Can I help you?" drawls an unfamiliar voice.

With that simple question, Yuri a handsome Russian oil worker, changes the young woman's life forever.

If Leonard Yanovsky could have his way, the Latin American telenovela of the future might look something like that. Yanovsky, president of Russian television company Intra Communications. sees little demand for weepy Latin American love stories not long ago the heavy-weights of Russian television--unless they are somehow made more Russian. "Latin American telenovelas arrived in Russia at the end of the '80s, when the country was undergoing very tough times," Yanovsky says. "They helped people escape from the hardships in their lives."

Soon, however, U.S. feature films displaced them in prime time, then Russian productions began to kick even Hollywood out of the best slots, knocking the novelas nearly off the air. "High-quality, usually Brazilian, productions enjoy strong ratings, but it's quite clear that Latin American telenovelas are not returning to prime time in the near future," Yanovsky predicts.

So goes the globalization of Latin America's ubiquitous cultural export, a more than US$2 billion industry affecting 100 countries and broadcast in 50 languages and dialects. About $1.6 billion is made inside the region, with $341 million coming from foreign sales, according to Carlos Bardasano, president of Venevision Continental and a vice-president of Venezuela's Cisneros Group. The Venezuelan and the Russian crossed paths not at an off conference, as you might expect, but at the recent First Summit of the Telenovela, held in Miami. A number of topics were planned--writing workshops, product placement deals--but the buzz in the hallways among producers and executives was about how to sell more abroad.

A multitude of countries around the globe are thirsty for new programming and many, often developing countries, buy Latin American soaps to pull in viewers, But keeping pace in this lucrative export market is forcing novela producers to change the way they write and cast their serials. Local tastes eventually mature and viewers begin to demand characters and plots closer to their own experiences.

Even without exports, novelas are good business, says Bardasano. More than 12000 hours of shows are made in the region every year at an average cost of $48,000 an hour, an investment of close to $650 million a year. He figures for every dollar spent producing a show, $2.50 in advertising comes back to the channel behind it. A six-month run of 120 episodes spreads risk better than a single program like a concert or a sports event, the Venezuelan executive says, which might fall flat for any number of reasons.

Gold mine. Spin-off marketing opportunities abound, ranging from simple tourism promotions to pop music sales. Bardasano says he persuaded Enrique Iglesias to croon the theme to a recent Venevision production for nothing. Not only was it great marketing for the show, but the tune turned into a runaway hit for Iglesias in Venezuela. "There's a little gold mine" in tag-along novels marketing, Bardasano says.

The average novels rakes in $28,000 per programming hour when re-broadcast abroad, by Bardasano's calculation, and that's on top of the money it's already made at home. French research company Eurodata TV says 54 soap operas are found in the Top 10 lists of programs in 72 countries it tracks. In 1999, that number was 33. But while the number of hours of novelas being watched outside the region is rising, the money made on such sales has been sliding on weak ad markets, Bardasano says.

Mexican shows have had the most success outside their home market, followed by Brazilian productions and, more recently, by Venezuelan and Colombian hits. Colombia's Yo soy Betty, la fea is considered the most successfully exported novela to date. Its sequel, Eco Moda, took globalization head-on by moving part of the story to Miami.

Getting the product to travel is the job of Helena Bernardi, director of marketing and sales at the international division of Brazilian TV giant Globo. She jets around the world, looking for places she thinks a Brazilian production might find an appreciative audience. "Before, no one liked our novelas, because they were dubbed," says Bernardi. "Then Globo made a huge effort to improve the dubbing in Spanish." In the rest of the world, the Portuguese-language version is subtitled, except in Russia, where characters speak Portuguese at low volume while a Russian voice-over explains what is happening.

Like Brazilian steel and sugar, the Globo novels is a product that's king at home--and that's the problem. "We're leaders in the market," says Bernardi. "If we're going to grow, we have to travel outside our borders." It doesn't hurt that scriptwriters are turning out bicultural stories, like the recent smash O Clon, about a Brazilian-born woman of Muslim parents who moves to Morocco. The serial is in contention to displace Betty la lea as the biggest global hit; O Clon's far-flung markets include Arab satellite TV.

Globo is typically looking to exploit a country hungry for programming but not entirely up to the task, either financially or culturally, Bernardi says. Success in selling a novela abroad "is directly inverse to how much they produce," she says. "It would be very hard for me to export to [Mexican media giant] Televisa, because they produce."

And that's how you get to Bosnia, a place where cab drivers can curse in Spanish because they watch so much Latin American television. Almir Sahinovic, a producer from Sarajevo, has come to the conference talk about the novela market in his home country. He is joined on the dais by a half-dozen people from eastern European countries that are, today, where Russian TV was a decade or so ago: Politically young, relatively poor, and struggling to pull together programming.

Sahinovic has equipment. He also has plenty of talented filmmakers and writers. What be doesn't have are ideas that will bring in ratings and money. He also doesn't have any notion of how to pace and produce a television drama. So he's plying the hallways of the conference, looking for bridges to the novela world.

Real stories. His company, Heft:, copied a common U.S. model--the situation comedy--and found itself with a hit. Now it's working on a Bosnian-made knock-off novela called Visa for the Future. At the summit, Chilean novela clips roll by on a giant screen with the professional flair of a flashy car commercial, but the Bosnian actors in Visa stammer through their lines in ratty apartments that look to be actual homes, not sets.

Sahinovic is undaunted. "Bosnia has 4 million people, but our language is spoken by 25 million on our borders," he says. Heft is talking with Italians about financing the new show, but what Sahinovic wants even more is a Latin American partner to teach him how novelas work.

Sahinovic does not lack for ideas. There are 10,000 foreigners living in Bosnia, he says, and his country has hosted Spanish peacekeeping soldiers from NATO for a decade. Perhaps a love story, he suggests, between a Bosnian woman who works at the United Nations a man from Spain. "It's not imaginary. We have real stories on the ground," he says. "You turn around and there are stories."

PASSION PLAY

Telenovela titles among the world's most-watched programs

       Latin America   Other Countries

1999        24               9
2000        32               7
2001        26              13
2002        42              12

SOURCE: Eurodata TV survey of 72 countries

Note: Table made from bar graph.