A crazy Dream

During the 1960s, many foreign movies were filmed in Spain. Samuel Bronston made Spain fashionable and countless technicians, actors, second unit directors and others in the industry who weren't successful in the USA achieved a higher quality of life in Madrid than they could have ever afforded in their own country. Chamartín, and particularly the so-called neighborhood of "Corea" (Korea), in the upper part of Dr. Fleming Street, was full of such personalities. Bruce Yorke, an Australian I met in London, introduced me to Gilbert Kay, a second unit director in some of the movies filmed here. Kay was looking for a producer and handed me a script called "Comanche blanco" (White Comanche). Westerns had become popular again thanks to the financial stimulus Spain had given to the genre. I would like to take this opportunity to remind readers that the first Western movie to be filmed in Europe was "Tierra Brutal" (Brutal Land, 1961), produced by the Carreras brothers -owners of Hammer- and coproduced in Spain by José G. Maesso. It wasn't the Italians, as is commonly believed, who created this fashion. In order to produce "Comanche blanco," Augusto Boué set up a new family production company, Producciones Cinematográficas A.B., Sociedad Anónima, with his wife and brothers-in-law as shareholders. I founded Baton Films, S.A. and settled into one of the three offices on the premises of the lawyer Alvaro Núñez M. Maturana in the district of Argüelles, on Francisco de Ricci Street, No 13. The other two offices were used by Alvaro and a recently graduated lawyer, José Luis Sanz Arribas, who was single at the time, but not for long. He was going out with Filín, whom he soon married and has remained so until today.

Probably one of José Luis's first jobs was to establish Baton Films. Since then he has helped me out of the many messes I've gotten myself into over the nearly 40 years of our professional lives together. If it were possible to measure loyalty, the fidelity we professed towards each other would certainly excel and the balance would surely be in his favor. His support and help throughout these years has been enormous and the affection and fraternity between us goes well beyond friendship or a relationship of a client and his lawyer.

Obviously, "White Comanche" was to be a coproduction between Producciones Cinematográficas A.B. and Baton Films. The financial resources of A.B. amounted approximately to one million pesetas and Baton Films' to two hundred thousand pesetas. Both Augusto and I contributed towards the project with our work and since I was the only one who spoke English, I acted as executive producer.

COMANCHE BLANCOThe estimated budget of the film was eight million pesetas, to which should be added the salaries of the scriptwriter and co-director, Gilbert Kay, and the actors, William Shatner and Joseph Cotten, which were paid by an American production company based in London. The American company in turn received funds from Westinghouse, the owner of several local TV broadcasting stations in the USA. The film was co-directed by Gilbert Kay and the Spaniard, José Briz.

Baton Films and A.B., through an accountant, Julián Buedo, got in touch with Benito Aflalo, a Sephardi Jew and owner of "pinball" machines, with certain financial resources and contacts amongst the entrepreneurs from the Jewish community in Madrid. In that way, with Benito Aflalo's money and the American contributions, we started shooting the film in Colmenar Viejo, a Western town near Madrid built as a set for the movie.

During the shooting, the Arab-Israeli conflict broke out - the Six Day War. We encountered financial, creative, trade union-related problems and all sorts of other difficulties, in which I found myself involved and was able to resolve gradually, despite my lack of experience and certain "juvenile arrogance". I recall those days with nostalgia though also with some regret: I was not sufficiently respectful towards some excellent people around me who, because of their experience, had much to teach me.

LAS PRIMERAS PRODUCCIONES - COMANCHE BLANCO

The film was sold, thanks to Aflalo's Jewish contacts, mostly in Europe, so that he was able to recover his investment. Augusto and I, on the other hand, failed to market the film successfully in Spain and lost our investment. In his case the main loss was the money of his family, and particularly the funds supplied by film critic Luis Gómez Mesa. As for me, I lost my job and became indebted to several suppliers. Eventually, the film's negative went out to public auction at the request of the laboratory that had custody of it. I could have retrieved the negative many times subsequently with little money but frankly - and this also applies to other negatives - I didn't (and don't) feel the need to have the rights to these films just to prove to myself or anyone else that I produced them.

Given my little success as a producer, and sorely aware of the misery and poverty in the world, I undertook preparations to make a full-length documentary film with the intention of releasing it through theater houses. I worked with José Briz, with whom I had developed a close bond and had also promised him to produce a film as compensation for all the help he gave me with "White Comanche." We gave the project the provisional title of "El hambre en el mundo" (Hunger in the World). Through an uncle of Briz, Manuel Méndez, we got in touch with UNICEF in Paris for sponsorship purposes and they agreed. Our intention was to report on and condemn the hunger that was widespread in most developing countries. UNICEF introduced us into all the countries we wanted to visit and we began filming in Uganda. We travelled to Kampala, the capital, and from there, to Karamoya, near to the border with southern Sudan. And there we witnessed extreme hunger, though it didn't compare to the terrible urban misery we were to encounter later on. We then went back to Spain, very impressed by our experience. To judge from the images I see on television, the situation is still horrendous 35 years later as the essentially secret war between Uganda and Sudan continues to be ignored by the "civilized" world. 

Curiously enough, the film was being financed totally by the owner of the Melodías Club, located on Desengaño Street in Madrid. A character involved in small-scale real estate speculation and businesses that revolved around prostitution, he gave us the money to make the film - four or five million pesetas - in exchange for taking his 20-year-old son with us to Africa. He was hoping to get him into filmmaking and away from the local cops and crooks who used to show up regularly at his night club and with whom he'd already developed an unhealthy relationship.

Our second trip was to Peru. We travelled across the Andes to Lake Titicaca, on the border with Bolivia. Our destination was a crowded settlement known as "Little London" because of the great multitudes who lived there. We were very impressed by the grating poverty, the shacks crammed with families living amid stinking waters and sick children coexisting with their dying elders. All this, together with Machupichu, the Altiplano (high plains), the llamas and the indigenous folklore, enabled us to see a world that was full of contrasts.

Our third trip was to Pakistan and India; we toured Calcutta, Benares, Karachi, Islamabad and the Himalayas for a period of three months. We filmed thousands of rolls of footage with a crew of five people: two cameras, sound (technician), direction and production. We visited lepers' camps; we bathed in the Ganges and ended up eventually with a film, which we presented to UNICEF's New York office. However, the film was rejected on the grounds that it was too sensitive and bound to offend the governments of the countries we visited. According to our agreement with UNICEF we were supposed to shoot a film presentation with Robert Kennedy, but he was assassinated before we had a chance and the film was never shown in public. Recently, I saw a black & white copy of the film in its editing stages. The only usefulness I found in it was to be able to show that those countries are worse off today than they were 35 years ago. What Fromm predicted at the time turned out to be true: the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing and will continue to do so. During the shooting of "El hambre en el mundo" we met Louis Malle, who was filming "Calcutta," at Mother Teresa's Charity Center. His film, unlike ours, saw the light of day. 

Upon my return from India, married as I was, with two children, aged three and two, I decided to give up the movie business. To earn a living I got together with an employee from the Banco Coca, a dreamer although also a very enterprising man who wanted to do big international business. He was Manuel Michelena, originally from Bilbao. He had some important contacts amongst which were businessman José Lipperhide -who years later was kidnapped by ETA-, and a Palestinian trader. All I had to offer as a partner were my language skills. We tried to sell Romanian cement to Argentina and Algerian oil to Germany. These big operations, which in the end failed, took me to Beirut and Algiers. I met sultans from the Persian Gulf and guerrillas from Al-Fatah. It was all very exciting and brings back memories but I was quickly losing faith in its usefulness and started to doubt that anything tangible would materialize from our Spanish-Arab endeavors.

A few months later, Manolo Michelena introduced me to Elías Querejeta, whom he knew as a client of the bank where he still worked. Elías reawakened my interest in cinema and gave me a job in his production company as a vendor of his films abroad. At the time, Elías had finished "La madriguera" (Honeycomb), directed by Carlos Saura, filmed in English and starring Geraldine Chaplin and Per Oscarsson. He was looking for someone who spoke languages and was willing to market it outside Spain.

This happened between 1969 and 1970. In those days, Elías was a daring producer - the inventor of a new esthetic that was close to high-quality European cinema - more in line with Scandinavian films than Italian cinema. He was also a progressive man who unsettled everyone around him because people took him for a radical left-winger. Although we never developed a very close personal relationship, Elías opened up a new professional and fascinating world for me and, for many years, he remained a point of reference as regards my work. Thanks to him I discovered that filmmaking was a huge creative act as I became acquainted with the new esthetic and ideological currents of cinema in those pre-democracy years. Although I respect and have affection for some of the producers I have met over the years, it is Elías Querejeta that I most admire, despite the fact that when he played as a footballer for Real Sociedad from San Sebastian he scored a goal against the team I support - Real Madrid.

During the nearly two years I worked for Elías, I travelled to a lot of Festivals and markets in cities all over the world. I did a good job and managed to sell most of his films wherever it was possible. But I continued to feel the urge to produce films myself. I tried to do so in his production company, under his protection and umbrella. Thus, while I carried on with my marketing duties, at the same time I developed projects and established links to launch films as a producer. Somewhat reluctantly, Elías allowed me to coproduce "Belleza negra" (Black Beauty) and "Diábolica malicia" (Night Child), which were my first collaborations with Englishman Harry Alan Towers, now a legendary producer of "B" films, with whom Nick Wentworth worked as an editor. Elías proposed that I buy a commercial name - Eguiluz Films - to draw a line between such "half-dirty businesses" and Spanish co-productions that were close to intellectual art house movies, which he personally dealt with. Profit-wise, the breakdown was 75% for Elías and 25% for me. Thanks to selling films abroad and the proceeds from the "half-dirty co-production businesses" in which the quality of the film was what mattered least, I made so much money then that some of Elias' close acquaintances and friends didn't forgive me. Eventually I found myself in a very uncomfortable position because of that, which ultimately led me to pull out and work on my own. However, the businesses I started under the umbrella of Querejeta were so numerous and varied that when I left his production company I had a considerable amount of cash, plus the production company Eguiluz Films and the complete RKO film catalogue (600 short films and 750 feature films).

Elías brings to mind some very happy moments. When I worked for that man I felt great affection towards him and his whole environment. There was a mutual understanding and complicity between us. I think he sincerely trusted me, to the extent of leaving his daughter Gracia (who at the time was six or seven years old) under my care during her trips to England where she was going to boarding school. I used to travel with her during such trips and we'd stay overnight in London together.

DIÁBOLICA MALICIA.The info about "Diabolica Malicia" and "Belleza Negra" figure in my filmography and I haven't much to say in that regard other than when the films were shot, I met and became a close friend of Luis Cuadrado and Teo Escamilla, two of the greatest directors of photography in this country with whom I had the pleasure of working. Sadly, both are now dead.

But "Belleza negra" and "Diábolica malicia", whose physical production I was almost exclusively in charge of, offered me the opportunity to acquire considerable experience and above all prove that I could handle difficult situations with international actors, co-productions involving different countries and foreign directors. Harry Alan Towers, an active man with several films going in different continents and a special antagonism towards filming and its associated problems, entrusted me fully with the responsibility for successfully finalizing the movie "La isla del tesoro" (Treasure Island), a Spanish-Italian-German-French-English coproduction, made for a North American distributor. There were so many foreign companies and countries involved in the same film that considerable confusion arose. The film was directed by an Englishman, John Hough, and an Italian, Andrea Bianchi (also known as Andrew White). The script was written by Spaniards, Italians and Frenchmen although the original had been written by Harry, using the penname Peter Welbeck. The role of Long John Silver was to have been played by Yul Brynner, but due to budgetary problems we hired Orson Welles instead. The French were represented in the cast by Jean Lefebvre, the Italians by Rick Battaglia, the Germans by the Austrian Walter Slezak and the Spanish by Ángel del Pozo, a ladies' man of those times and currently a friend of mine as well as an efficient executive at Telecinco TV.

CARTEL "LA ISLA DEL TESORO"