We are told in S’Agaró that last week the Hostal de la Gavina hosted the production team of ‘The Night Manager’ (‘The Infiltrator’), which resumes the successful 2016 series on the novel of the same name by John le Carré with other two seasons for Amazon Prime. Screenwriter John Farr brings back the characters played by Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie (the popular Dr. House) and Olivia Colman to recreate the “dark corners and suspicious identities” of espionage: the adventures of the hotel manager and former soldier recruited by agents of the intelligence to infiltrate an arms trafficking network. ‘The Infiltrator’ is considered one of the best productions about spies. The first season featured Majorcan settings: the Fortalesa de Pollensa was the luxurious mansion to which the trafficker played by Laurie returned. Ten years after that 2015 shoot, the ‘The Infiltrator’ team has chosen the Costa Brava. S’Agaró commemorates its centenary with its beauty intact, a rare thing in these times. The enclave that Josep Ensesa turned into a model garden city in 1924 is still on the agendas of audiovisual productions. The BBC series is added to a long list of productions that turned the Hostal de la Gavina and its surroundings into a “dream factory.” The magazine ‘S’Agaró’, which Ensesa founded in 1935, reports on these filmings. The best known, ‘Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’ (1951). The journalist Jaime Arias, who worked for North American distributors, experienced the stormy reunion of Ava Gardner and a jealous Frank Sinatra who flew to the Costa Brava upon learning of the actress’ affair with Mario Cabré. The grandchildren of the creator of S’Agaró and regents of the Hostal de la Gavina ABC. Albert Lewin’s film obtained an unexpected global echo. The Hostal de la Gavina was filled with Anglo-Saxons and from then on English became the lingua franca in a country that was trying to escape from its autarkic closure. Journalists from the British ‘Daily Express’ and the American ‘Variety’, ‘Colliers’, ‘Time’ and ‘Life’ fell in love with S’Agaró: «Neither I nor anyone imagined that a town with this Californian tone existed in Spain, but with the superiority of the harmonious and classic ensemble of its stately buildings,” declared Lewin. The director of a US news agency urged Arias by telephone. «Give us all the information you have. Today S’Agaró is more interesting in the United States than all the news from the White House. Sinatra gave Ava an emerald necklace. It was after a fight in the bar that echoed throughout La Gavina: “They started drinking and yelling at each other, they hit each other several times,” the ‘maître’ Diego Herranz would remember. “Within half an hour the name of S’Agaró crossed the Atlantic once again,” Arias recorded in his chronicle. California in the MediterraneanSince the fifties La Gavina attracted press magnates such as Lord Astor, owner of the ‘Times’ of London and Henry Luce, of ‘Time’ and ‘Life’; the musician Cole Porter, the British Minister of Defense Selwyn Lloyd or the actress Madeleine Carroll… The infatuation of S’Agaró as California with the Mediterranean explains why American tourists abound in La Gavina: «At some point they descended and were replaced by the Russian client , but now they are predominant again; some for several generations,” Júlia and Carina Enses tell us. The filming crews have not stopped arriving at S’Agaró. In June 1954 it was seventy years old. Orson Welles continued filming ‘Mr. Arkadin’ filming scenes in Senya Blanca, the Ensesa family home. The classicist terrace overlooking the Camino de Ronda was a Mexican mansion in the film. Pla, a regular guest in rooms 113 and 114 of La Gavina, greeted Welles: “This is a man who weighs a lot,” the man from Empordà said ironically. Both signed the book of illustrious visitors: “After the film maker, sign an anti-film maker,” Pla signed. A cinema place Above, Peter Sellers and his wife, Britt Ekland, at a party at La Gavina. Below, Sean Connery in the 60s and Liz Taylor ABCIn 1967 the author of ‘Gray Notebook’ denounced in the magazine ‘S’Agaró’ “the frenzy of making money at all costs, very quickly, without taking into account any consideration of place, of time, or human way of being. Josep Ensesa and his children, by prioritizing natural heritage over economic heritage, share the diagnosis of the Empordà native: «We have continued the work of our father and tried to safeguard that place from mass tourism that invades and spoils so many places on this coast. . “I think we have achieved it,” declared Josep and Carme proudly. The same pride of the grandchildren of the creator of S’Agaró and current regents of the Hostal de La Gavina: Júlia, Virginia, Carina and Josep. Thanks to its owners, S’Agaró remains an undisturbed paradise that continues to attract illustrious visitors. And thanks to cinema, the beaches of Sant Pol and Sa Conca can take on magical dimensions. Liz Taylor walked through Sant Pol in ‘Suddenly, the Last Summer’ (1959), by the great Joseph L. Mankiewicz, in some scenes in front of La Taverna del Mar. She wore two swimsuits: one tailored to the Spanish censorship and another, transparent, for the foreigner. Those sequences, which cost the production half a million dollars, were eliminated in the editing of the film. «It was said that the actress, with her bathing suit soaked, had lain down on the silk and silver bedspread in her room, and Josep Ensesa, when he found out, went to ask her to leave the suite. Her grandchildren have denied this last point, but clarify that the stains were from the sunscreen that Taylor had put on when returning from the beach,” reported the S’Agaró centenary exhibition at the Palau Robert in Barcelona. From Sydne Rome NureyevSa Conca could be filled with cyclops in the filming of ‘Sinbad and the Princess’ thanks to the mastery of Ray Harryhausen; or be the beach of Lilliput to which Gulliver arrives; become a place of tropical flora in Verne’s ‘Two Years’ Holiday’ and ‘The Mysterious Island’. At the Garbí swimming pool in La Gavina, Sydne Rome chatted with a Bond emulator in ‘Some Girls’, by Ralph Thomas. Nicolás and Alejandra walked through the gardens of Senya Blanca like a palace in Tsarist Russia: the beach of Sa Conca became Crimea in the blockbuster directed in 1971 by Franklin J. Schaffner, who won an Oscar for ‘Patton’. Rudolf Nureyev – who appears in a photograph talking with Josep Ensesa – was Rudolf Valentino in Ken Russell’s film of the same name: the Sant Pol beach could be that of Santa Monica in the 1920s and the church of S’Agaró, the house of a producer from Hollywood. Among the filming of the 21st century, scenes from ‘The Sea Inside’ (2004) by Alejandro Amenábar or ‘The Promise’ (2016), with Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac. La Gavina’s stays could be Los Angeles in ‘Marlowe’ (2022) starring Liam Neeson and directed by Neil Jordan. The film roster would continue with Xavier Cugat, Lawrence Olivier, James Mason, Lucía Bosé, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Wayne, Dick Bogarde, Lex Barker, John Mills, Robert De Niro, Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Lee van Cleef, Jack Nicholson, Lady Gaga…«Everything has changed»The Ensesa brothers remember that those film idols shared dinners at their grandfather’s house or their parents’ house: «Now everything has changed, the film crews no longer maintain human contact from other times when Peter Sellers or Sean Connery chatted with our family over long after-dinner meals. From the Connery of the sixties, at the crest of the wave as agent 007, Júlia has not forgotten “his beautiful voice.” Of the native series, the Ensesa family fondly remembers the filming of ‘Three Stars’ with El Tricicle in the summer of 1987: «We had the hotel fully operational, the actors mixed with the guests… Despite the complicated situation, My father had a lot of fun. “The second part of the series was already recorded with the hostel closed.” In the reception, the bell that in the series caused the appearance, like a spring, of El Tricicle with his ‘groom’ uniforms is preserved. Some guests are tempted to touch it again. The same reception that could appear in a scene from ‘The Infiltrator’. Because everything is possible in S’Agaró, the little Hollywood of the Costa Brava.
#SAgaró #Hollywood #Costa #Brava #hosts #filming #Infiltrator
