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.