Since Wednesday, very different critical appreciations of the “Eternetflix” led by Bruno Stagnaro are decaying, and quantitative data is still probe that place it among the most reproduced series these days in several countries.
But beyond the discussed successes and mistakes and success measures, it is worth stressing that the premiere of this blockbuster cut a wait for almost seven decades to see an audiovisual version of the cartoon The Eternaluta With industrial magnitude.
A wait that was non -passive, but was dotted with frustrated projects, which reached some preliminary advance or did not go far beyond the acquisition of rights and resource management.
In that sequence of truncos, there were from a broken animation short started at the end of the 60s that remained in pilot test, to feature films projects in live action which followed from the 80s, in charge of notable surnames of national cinema such as Aristarain, Solanas and Martel. In relation to the possibility of bringing to the cinema the adventures of Juan Salvo and the very mentioned “Collective hero” also sounded Luis Puenzo, Gustavo Mosquera and Damián Szifron.
Martín Móltola, grandson of the cooker of the series – Hector Germán Oesterheld – came to affirm that each Argentine filmmaker who obtained a folding success with any of his releases began to probe the possibility of obtaining the option to face an adaptation.
The interest came even outside our borders: the Spanish Alex de la Church was investigating in this regard, and was the first to speculate with Ricardo Darín as the protagonist.
The 1968 short film was initiated by a Porteño advertising audiovisual studio –bertolini & Gil – in a pause of her television works, she was going to combine animation with a real image section, she had designs of the cartoonist Jorge Moliterni and with an asset involvement of Héctor Germán himself, who was appearing giving entry to the drawn fiction.
The details, as the journalist Alejandro Agostinelli rescues in a recent investigation, appears profusely exposed that same year in an article in the magazine 2001, journalism in advancein which the geologist accrued all -terrain writer collaborated regularly. But, for the first time, the lack of economic perspective that would solve the great volume of work, left the idea halfway.
Francisco “Pino” Solanas’s attempt was born in 1989, among his films On y The trip. “Pino” knew Elsa Sánchez, a widow of Oesterheld: had given her employment in her producer when the woman – a grandmother of Plaza de Mayo – was suddenly helpless after the forced disappearance of her husband and her four daughters, just started the dictatorship.
But that was not enough to overcome the stumbling block that Elsa could not dodge: the rights to the work were in the hands of an Italian producer, sold by Alfredo Scutti, owner of Editions Record, who had obtained them from the widow himself at a time when his very difficult personal situation clouded Elsa’s tranquility to decide properly.
With the same difficulty, the “eternal” impulse of Adolfo Aristarain, which came from before but charged special strength between 1989 and 1995, between his renowned films A place in the world y Martín Hache.
The director was accustomed to co -productions with Spain, and eight years before he had done The Strangerin English and with the Banca de Columbia Pictures. So North America was, when the legal conflict over intellectual property opened a window, in search of the essential foreign investment that demands a science fiction film “catastrophe” of great dimension.
But this time – when I surely needed a much greater budget than that required by that thriller in which, among others, Federico Luppi, Julio de Grazia, Cecilia Roth and … Ricardo Darín – did not get it.
Producers to seduce would have objected a similarity of the argument with that of the eighties television series V, extraterrestrial invasionquestioning that is absurd to a story that had been published in the late 50s and had been innovative in several issues, even in the midst of an international fury for the fictions of alien attacks.
Already in 2007, with the comic approaching its fifty year, advanced the legal process of restitution of intellectual property to the heirs of their screenwriter and their original cartoonist – Francisco Solano López – and granted the temporary option for an audiovisual adaptation to the Argentine producer K & S Films, its headline Oscar Kramer summoned, to the surprise of many, Lucrecia Martel as a scriptwriter and potential director.
The filmmaker was about to release the third film of her “Salta trilogy”: The headless woman.
In an interview that this journalist was able to do with Guillermo Franco for the magazine The central In mid -2008, Martel, who had been committed to conceptual work and the elaboration of a plothe evidenced that he was very clear about what he meant doing “a gender one,” and that he was excited about that leap to an action blockbuster in what would also be his first long filmed in Buenos Aires and without a prominence of a woman.
He said, however, that his decision to transfer history to a contemporary temporal atmosphere – as the Netflix series now did it – was going to involve, among others Update Regarding the original work, a change in the presence granted to female characters.
Together with that, the filmmaker firmly supported other author’s convictions on how the film version should be addressed, and was intransigent to any kind of concession to hypothetical demands or limits of the producers.
The plan pointed to a premiere in 2011, but so things, the resistance that the script progress proposed by Lucrecia found in part of the heirs of Oesterheld disinfled that initiative in 2009.
But the legal chance to carry The Eternaluta The screen followed, with the agreement of the true owners of the work, in the hands of K&S, who a decade later managed to associate with Netflix to specify the series that we enjoy and debate today.
