When most people think of curses, the first image that comes to
mind is that of a horror film rather than an aging knight
determined to save the world. Nevertheless, the focus of “Don
Quixote and the Curse of the Silver Screen: A Complete Night of
Incomplete Films” is the curse that seems to have fallen upon
every attempt to create a full-length film based on Miguel de
Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote.”
The Friday evening event is centered around explaining and
discussing the so-called curse, and will feature guest speaker
Stefan Droessler, director of the Munich Film Museum. The film
night will wrap up a month-long celebration of the 400th
anniversary of the novel’s publication.
The evening is being hosted by Paula Thorrington and Amanda
Williams, graduate students in the UCLA department of Spanish and
Portuguese. The pair has been working on the project since October,
and in the process have developed quite a passion for “Don
Quixote” and its curse.
“We heard about it at a Graduate Student Association
meeting and were excited to get involved on a film committee on the
graduate level. It turned into working with the department chair
and helping him achieve his dream of putting together this film
festival,” Williams said.
The main character of the novel is, of course, Don Quixote, an
idealistic, aging knight obsessed with chivalric romances and
determined to save the world.
“It’s one of the most famous novels of all time and
so appealing because it’s immediately funny for its comic
effects, but it also has a lot more meaning than just the funny
side,” Thorrington said.
Extremely popular, the novel seems like the perfect candidate
for a screen version, but while numerous filmmakers from many
different countries have attempted it, not one has succeeded in
completing a film, leading to the so-called “Curse of la
Mancha.”
“Some of the greatest creative geniuses of cinema have
attempted to make this film, but something always goes
wrong,” Thorrington said.
According to Thorrington and Williams, one of the major problems
with converting the novel into a movie is its 1,000-page length and
the difficulty of condensing that into a two-hour film.
Another issue filmmakers face is the dual reality that is
present in the novel, namely successfully portraying both Don
Quixote’s delusional perception of what is going on and the
realistic view of his sidekick, Poncho, about what is
happening.
“Orson Welles spent the last 25 years of his life trying
to complete the project and just had reels and reels of film. It
became a kind of joke, and he referred to the film as the
“˜when are you ever going to finish Don Quixote?’
project. In fact, one of the actors in the film ended up dying
before they finished filming,” Thorrington said.
The closest Welles’ work came to becoming a film was a
project undertaken by Spanish director Jess Franco to rework some
of Welles’ footage. Released in 1992, the film wasn’t
widely received, adding another layer to the curse.
“Franco said that Welles would have wanted someone to do
this for him, but honestly, it didn’t receive much
attention,” Williams said.
The latest attempt at a film version of “Don
Quixote” was undertaken by Terry Gilliam, most famous for his
role in the “Monty Python” movies. The project seemed
like a guaranteed success, with a well-known director and cast (the
most notable being Johnny Depp), but the curse seemed to
continue.
“They found this perfect actor to play Don Quixote who had
to spend months learning English for the film, and then developed
prostate cancer,” Thorrington said.
Added to the problem of an ailing lead actor were large budget
issues, since Gilliam had to hire a team of cartoonists, artists
and architects and also build massive facades and entire
buildings.
A documentary called “Lost in La Mancha” was made
about Gilliam’s attempt at the movie, from which clips will
be shown at Friday’s event.
“They just had problem after problem. They had to go out
to the middle of nowhere in Spain to film and then these Spanish
army guys got curious and wanted to catch a glimpse of Depp, so
there were literally fighter jets flying over where they were
trying to film. On top of that, there was this apocalyptic storm
that washed away all this really expensive equipment,”
Thorrington said.