Long Lost Gabriel Garcia Marquez Screenplay to be Filmed
A long-lost screenplay written 40 years ago by a struggling author named Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about to get the feature film treatment.
Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda says he has just acquired the rights to the long-forgotten screenplay and plans to start filming next year. Titled Frontera, the film was written before the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude turned Garcia Marquez into an international literary star known to most of the continent simply as Gabo.
"Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western. I don't think anybody knew he had written anything like that," De Anda told Mexican newspaper Reforma.
De Anda says he first heard of Frontera as a young actor about 40 years ago when he was offered the part of the younger hitman. He assumed the screenplay had been written by Alcoriza, one of the giants of Mexico's cinematic golden age.
"When I finally bought the rights, about a month ago, I discovered the surprise that the story was not in fact by Alcoriza, but by Gabriel Garcia Marquez," De Anda said. He now plans to play the older partner, and is considering pursuing Mexican stars Gael Garcia Bernal or Diego Luna for the role of the upstart.
It will be interesting to see how the screenplay translates to the screen. We feel fairly sure that the Nobel Prize winner is going to be pretty surprised to see his old screenplay finally made into a movie.
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