R.I.P., Jesus “Jess” Franco

Spanish filmmaker Jesus “Jess” Franco—a towering figure in the world of grindhouse cinema, and one of the most prolific movie directors who has ever lived—has died at the age of 82. Franco, who often wrote his own scripts and also frequently doubled as his own producer, editor, composer, or cinematographer, made literally hundreds of features over the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years. (Like his American counterpart Roger Corman, he sometimes cut corners by incorporating footage from one shoot in a later production. However, he denied rumors that he ever had more than one movie going at the same time, telling The A.V. Club in 2009, “This is impossible! I only have one head.”)

Franco, who started out in the movie business by writing the scores for such films as Comicos (1954) and Historias De Madrid (1958) before making his own feature directing debut in 1959 with We Are 18 Years Old, had begun playing and writing music as a child, though he finally chose a career as a director over one as a jazz trumpeter because he figured the pay would be better. He certainly never had need to worry about whether music would have resulted in more steady work. Franco turned out so many movies that he wound up using pseudonyms—some 50 of them—so that his high productivity rate would not appear unseemly. In a bow to the special place jazz had in his heart, the aliases he slapped on some of his pictures include “Clifford Brown,” “James P. Johnson,” and “Betty Carter.”

Franco enjoyed his first international success in 1962 with his fifth feature, the horror film The Awful Dr. Orloff, a grindhouse riff on 1960’s Eyes Without A Face. His other notable films in that decade included The Diabolical Dr. Z (1964); the S&M-flavored thriller Necronomicon, A.K.A. Succubus (1967); The Blood Of Fu Manchu (1967) and The Castle Of Fu Manchu (1968), starring Christopher Lee as the Asian super-villain; The Girl From Rio (1968), a spy spoof starring Goldfinger’s Shirley Eaton and, toward the end of his life and career, George Sanders; Venus In Furs (1968), featuring Klaus Kinski and a title lifted from Sacher Masoch; and a loose adaptation of a Marquis de Sade novel, Justine (1969), also starring Kinski.

In 1970, Franco moved to France to escape the censorship limitations imposed on Spanish filmmakers by the other Franco, the dictator who finally died in 1975. He continued to turn out reams of horror movies, women-in-prison flicks, cannibal torture epics, slasher films and zombie pictures, as well as hardcore sex films. More than a hundred of these featured his longtime muse Lina Romay, who took her own stage name from a Mexican singer who’d performed with Xavier Cugat’s band. While still in her teens, she made her film debut in Franco’s The Erotic Rites Of Frankenstein (1972), and was soon taking larger roles in such Franco movies as Female Vampire (1973), Barbed Wire Dolls (1976), the Ilsa-has-risen-from-the-grave vehicle Wanda The Wicked Warden (1977), and Marquise De Sade (1976), as well as many of the director’s X-rated porn flicks. Romay and Franco were a couple for decades before finally marrying in 2008. She died of cancer last year.

In his 2009 interview with The A.V. Club, Franco was characteristically humble—even dismissive—about his life’s work. “I don’t like my movies. I prefer John Ford’s movies,” Franco said. However, when pressed, he allowed that “if you’re curious about which film I would save from a fire,” the likeliest candidates would be Necronomicon, Venus In Furs, and The Diabolical Dr. Z. Still, he summed up his career thusly: “I don’t think I’ve done anything important or magnificent. I’m a worker, and the thing I prefer in my life is cinema. When I’m working in cinema, I’m happy. And that’s all, you know?”

Jess Franco “finished” Orson Welles incomplete version of Don Quixote. Jess signed the voucher for the film because Orson Welles couldn’t get backing for movies with his own name (too great a risk of overruns).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_(unfinished_film)

Principal photography was between 1957 and 1969; while test footage was filmed as early as 1955, second-unit photography was done as late as 1972, and Welles was working on the film on and off until his death in 1985.

“I once had a finished version where the Don and Sancho go to the Moon, but then [the United States] went to the Moon, which ruined it, so I scrapped ten reels [100 minutes].”

At the time of his death, he was still discussing doing more filming for Don Quixote, and had produced over 1,000 pages of script for the project.

Irigoyen and Franco faced several problems in putting the Welles footage together. Welles had worked in three different formats – 35mm, 16mm and Super 16mm – which created inconsistent visual quality. The wildly varying storage conditions of this footage had further exacerbated the variable visual quality. The lack of a screenplay also hampered efforts. Welles recorded less than an hour’s soundtrack where he read a narration and provided dialogue for the main characters, but the rest of the footage was silent. A new script was created by Franco and voiceover actors were brought in to fill the silence left by Welles’ incomplete work, although their impressions of Welles’ narration and Welles’ Quixote/Sancho Panza voices were far from convincing, especially when intercut with the original recordings.[15] Joseph McBride refers to the soundtrack of Franco’s version as “an off-putting melange of dubbed voices.”[20] A further controversy was the inclusion by Franco of footage of Welles filming in Spain, taken from a documentary he had made on Spain in the 1960s. Welles had not intended to appear in the film himself, other than in its framing scenes as the narrator, and yet the Irigoyen/Franco film features several scenes with Quixote and Sancho Panza on Spanish streets, with Welles apparently looking on. Additionally, Franco inserts a windmill scene into the film, even though Welles had not filmed one or ever intended to film one - the scene relies on footage of Quixote charging across plains, interspersed with windmill images (which were not filmed by Welles), zooms and jump cuts.

Furthermore, Welles feared a repetition of the experience of having the film re-edited by someone else (as had happened to him on The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil), so he divided up all the reels of film for Don Quixote and deliberately mislabelled many of them, telling Mauro Bonanni, “If someone finds them, they mustn’t understand the sequence, because only I know that.”

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