My favorite summer began with a failure. My biggest academic failure. The Olympic summer of 1992 was approaching, I was 22 years old and I had rushed to finish my journalism studies. In my second year I also completed half of my third year, and the following year I finished what was left of my third and fourth years. I was looking forward to finishing my fifth and final year, when everything fell apart. In April I received a letter of acceptance from a film school in Los Angeles. After selling three scripts, it seemed reasonable to me to study the discipline seriously, and in Spain there were still no schools. I had prepared the admission papers, which included sending one of those scripts, which I translated with a friend, to the selection committee. I also needed some letters of recommendation, and I remember that I asked Rafael Azcona for one of them, with whom I had lunch every Tuesday, and who wrote me some anthological lines, which proved irresistible for my acceptance.
Overcome, in June I dropped three subjects without taking them. I never finished my degree, despite my mother’s insistence that I get my degree. I still owe her for it. I also had another failure. I had finished writing my first novel, but I put it away in a folder under the title of Open all night, I was convinced that being a novelist was too much for a boy from the Madrid neighbourhood of Estrecho. I worked on a television programme in which we interviewed Alberti, because in 1992 he was going to turn 90, and with that money and what I earned from the scripts I could survive the first few months without asking my parents, who already had enough to do to make ends meet.
The previous summer I had worked in the Television section of EL PAÍS. It was thanks to a classmate whom I had not yet met, Rosana Torres, who had asked a teacher for a student who could write decently. She needed a substitute for her section and the teacher gave her my name. When they found out that I was going to Los Angeles and that the newspaper did not have a correspondent there, they gave me an audience with Rosa Mora, who was head of Culture. She thought it would be a good idea for me to send pieces and interviews. The first thing I wrote was a report on a style somewhere between musical and vital called grunge, with its epicenter in Seattle and whose prophet was called Kurt Cobain. During the year I would send them my brief interviews with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Sylvester Stallone, Andy García, Meg Ryan, Nicole Kidman, Melanie Griffith, Rob Reiner, Sidney Lumet and Michael J. Fox, who were having premieres and presentations.
I was not leaving until mid-August to Los Angeles and at the beginning of July my brother Fernando moved to film Belle Époque to Portugal. Cristina Huete, who would soon become the most important female film producer in our country, had organized everything in detail, negotiated every contract for actors and technicians, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and closed the locations and hostels in some villages forty kilometers from Lisbon. I was commissioned to take care of the images of the making of, which we recorded with some impractical machines connected by cable to a van, in a novel system that was called High Definition. I went to the shoot with my friend Luis and I remember that when we crossed the border of Portugal he lowered the window of my eighth-hand yellow R5 and began to shout: “Maribel Verdú, here I come, I love you!” And worse things.
We were assigned to the group they called the young people. Maribel Verdú, Penélope Cruz, Ariadna Gil, of course Jorge Sanz, who was the pillar of resistance of the whole building, and Gabino Diego, who came and went from Madrid, where he was recording a programme with Gurruchaga. The other group of adults was organised under the portable chair of Fernán Gómez, with whom we chatted during the breaks in filming, so every minute was nourishing. I remember that we provoked a healthy envy in him when he saw us disappear towards the night, the village festivals and the beaches at dawn. Our radius of action reached as far as Lisbon, and there was no waiter, stroller, drug addict or dock worker who did not fall in love with our young companions, who were still unknown actresses there.
My last catastrophe of the summer of 1992 was having to leave that dream shoot a week before it was due to end to travel to Los Angeles. I was already missing something that I still had at my fingertips, in the smell of a borrowed sweater, in the open archive of good times. School was in session. Los Feliz Boulevard, named after a Catalan family that had made a fortune at the beginning of the century. I wanted to have the same surname as them.
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