When John Henry Gomez One afternoon he arrived at the newspaper’s editorial office saying that they should leave him a page because he had found out that Steven Spielberg came to Granada to shoot an Indiana Jones movie in the Alhambra, the one who most and the least put his hand to his mouth to prevent it from bursting out laughing. We knew about Juan Enrique’s film career, his character prone to fantasy and exaggeration in order to get an exclusive, and, honestly, we didn’t believe him. That It was January 9, 1988 and the famous American director had already made two successful films about the experiences of that adventurer nicknamed Indiana Jones and the search for objects of historical relevance such as the ark of the covenant or the holy grail, while facing Nazi and Soviet adversaries to prevent them from using such relics for sinister purposes.
The two previous films about this character (Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark e Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) had been a tremendous success at the box office and Spielberg wanted to shoot a third installment (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) in the Alhambra in Granada and in Guadix. That is the scoop that Juan Enrique Gómez brought. Many of us think that this journalistic exclusive would be very good to give on December 28, the day of the Holy Innocents. But no, the news was published on January 10 of the cited year to four columns.
The next day the agencies did not even bounce the exclusive and days passed without anyone denying it, although no one believed it to be true either. The chuflas against Juan Enrique Gómez intensified because some, myself among them, were convinced that that news had been a shot in the air by our colleague. There were those who sarcastically nicknamed him ‘Juan Enrique Spielberg’, although the nickname with which he stayed forever was given by Soria the cartoonist: ‘Indiana Gómez’.
However, the news confirmed two months later, when the filmmaker’s press office issued a statement stating that the famous film director would be in Granada to see on the ground where the scenes could be shot. The laughter froze on the faces of those of us who had not believed Juan Enrique. Fuck! It was true! exclaimed some. In this way, our colleague scored one of the most striking journalistic exclusives of those years and we were left with the face of having lost a poker play with a full house in hand.
close the monument
At that time he was the director of the Board of Trustees of the Alhambra Matthew Revilla, to which Spielberg explained his intentions. It was about using the Nasrid monument as the setting for some scenes of the next installment of Indiana Jones. For this the producer of the film was willing to pay 900,000 pesetas per day, but the monument would have to be completely closed to the public on the days that the filming lasted. But no agreement was reached. In the end, the production company, which belonged to George Lukas, the one from Star Warssaid that one of the reasons why they were not going to shoot in the Alhambra is that by doing so “at a time when the influx of public to the venue would be large, our presence in the Alhambra could be highly annoying for the normal functioning of the monument”. It was decided that instead of the Alhambra it would be shot in the Alcazaba of Almería.
Yes, the famous director followed with his script choose Guadix for other scenes of the film. In the town of Accitan they waited for Spielberg like a farmer waits for the rain in a dry season. It was announced that 175 neighbors would be hired to act as extras and that these were going to receive 8,000 pesetas a day For his job. A fortune for so little effort.
The casting managers they looked for tall, blonde people to appear as members of Hitler’s army and, above all, people of gypsy ethnicity to play Turks. Those who allowed their heads to be shaved received eight hundred pesetas more.
Spielberg arrived in a small plane from Mójacar and he spent a couple of days in Guadix. They were also Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, who played Indiana Jones and his father. The Guadix station was converted, by the work and grace of cinema, into the station of the Turkish city of Iskenderum. And the station car park became a souk where you could even see dromedaries and German vehicles from the 1940s.
According to the book Guadix and the cinemaby Fernando Advantages and Miguel Ángel Sánchez, the actors Harrison Ford and Sean Cornery participated in some scenes at the crossroads between Las Mimbres and the village of Pradonegroin Huetor de Santillan.
The producer also wanted the famous locomotive Babwil 140but those of Renfe believed that the pocket of the ‘King Midas’ of the cinema was inexhaustible and they asked for so much money for its use that in the end it was used only for some shots at the station. The budget for this film was $36 million (almost 32.5 million euros). Three days after its premiere (which was in May 1989) the money invested had already been recovered. And only in the United States. It was thus shown that Spielberg’s cinema was made to please many people and not the critics, who would put it to birth.
The filming took place amid strong security measures and prevented people from using photo machines. The cell phone with a built-in camera had not yet been invented and photojournalists stationed themselves in unlikely places with their large lenses to capture something of the filming. The authors of the aforementioned book say that there was even a production manager who promised 50,000 pesetas for each reel of photos that managed to snatch a journalist. I know that some reporter did business. It’s all for the movies.
From ‘Doctor Zhivago’
Juan Enrique Gómez tells me that Spielberg chose Guadix to shoot because this region had already been chosen before by David Lean (your favorite director) for your movie Dr. Zhivago, with Omar Sharif, Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin. Lean filmed in 1965 in the plains of the Marquesado del Cenete some of the scenes of that film, without a doubt one of the most recognized titles in the history of cinema. Precisely the shooting of the beginning of the film begins in the plain of La Calahorra where, with Sierra Nevada as a backdrop, the scenes of the burial of Dr. Zhivago’s mother when he was a child were made.
they say Fernando Advantages and Miguel Angel Sanchez in his book that other images of snow-covered Sierra Nevada were taken in this area that appeared as if they were the Urals. The train was also used for other sequences. Although the one who discovered that the scenes in which there was a train in between were better done in this part of Spain was the director John Lee Thomsonwhich in 1959 shot part of the film in the Accitana region India on fire. There is a scene in it in which rebels attack a locomotive going from New Delhi to Kalapur with the intention of kidnapping a prince who is in it. The train was actually traveling through the plains of Cenete.
But as we say, Spielberg was an ardent admirer of the director of films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence de Arabia. In the wake of Dr. ZhivagoGuadix –and more specifically the area of La Calahorra– would initiate a close relationship with the ‘Almería de cine’ brand, mainly in the western movie making. It was Sergio Leone first and the so-called spaghetti westerns that turned Almería and the Guadix region into a kind of permanent film set.
Bill Juan Jose Carrasco Soto in his book Granada and the cinema that between 1965 and 1969 were filmed in this area almost 200 moviesMost of the West. Carrasco says that two or three tapes were shot at the same time and that this caused circumstances given to laughter, such as the extras getting the wrong movie or working in all of them with the same costumes and sometimes even the same person with different clothes. die several times in the same film due to the lack of extras.
And it is that Guadix, La Calahorra and the train convinced many of those who dedicated themselves to looking for locations for westerns. The great Sergio Leone said it in an interview: “In the times that work left me free, I dedicated myself to touring Spain. One day I arrived in Almería and saw that those places had a lot of resemblance to the desert that I had seen in Arizona. Then I came to Guadix and the resemblance to Arizona was accentuated: the land has a pink color and the mountains are low, almost identical to those I had seen in that state of the USA”.
Leone realized that the landscape could well pass for a setting close to the old border towns of the Far West. Serge Leone he had a town built in the American West in an area near La Calahorra station for the movie Until his time camewhich would later be used for a few more movies.
Renfe also had a locomotive and wagons that could be useful with little make-up. The plains of La Calahorra also contributed significantly, as well as the section of the private road of the Alquife mines. The light and good weather also contributed. And as. Extras were cheaper here and the gypsies who were hired to play Indians didn’t even need makeup.
Carrasco Soto tells that there were many the young gypsies of the area those who dedicated themselves to being extras in those years and who even they specialized in falls from the horse. “In the end, the normal falls from a horse were done wonderfully by the gypsies, for much less money, leaving those of the specialists for more professional issues such as when they got stuck in the fall and the horse dragged them”.
Saloon fights were also cheap for the producers in Guadix. the extras charged between 300 and 400 pesetas a day in the sixties, so some humbler economies were relieved during filming. “In Western films or those set in India, Afghanistan or Mexico, the figuration was made by gypsies and country people, who flocked to filming looking for a salary much higher than the country peonadas, to the point stop harvesting crops at specific times,” says Carrasco Soto.
Some extras even thought they were important people in the world of cinema. And here comes to mind that anecdote that I have told some time or another about that gypsy who played a Sioux Indian and who was on break from filming the film. It was noon and his wife brought him a pot of potato stew for lunch. The gypsy opened the pot and then kicked it while, indignant, he said to the gypsy: You think this is food for an artist!
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