Documentary Series
‘Pajares & CIA’, which premieres today on Atresplayer Premium, takes advantage of the actor’s life journey to x-ray the Spain of the transition
Andrés Pajares (Madrid, 1940) recounts that days before the Film Academy awarded him the Goya for best actor for his splendid performance in ‘¡Ay, Carmela!’ (Carlos Saura, 1990), José Luis López Vázquez was found on the street. Andresito, Andresito! The Goya is for you », he told him excitedly. “The same thing happened to you that happened to me with ‘Mi querida senorita’, Saura has taken you, with a good script, and the Goya is yours!”. That same night the actor was often asked on the radio who he thought would win the award. «Man, without a doubt, Antonio Banderas. Without a doubt, “he replied with the impetus that characterized him.
Nor did Pajares have them all with him. He competed not only with the man from Malaga for his role in ‘Átame!’ but also with Imanol Arias from ‘Alone with you’. As the night progressed, the pale and almost lost face of Almodóvar, whose film left empty despite choosing fifteen big heads – Saura’s took thirteen – confirmed that the academy was finally going to recognize the work of an actor seasoned in comedy. “It was exciting,” recalls his 81-year-old Pajares. When he went on stage, Adolfo Marsillach approached his ear and said: “You don’t know how pleased I am to give you this award.” “Thank you very much to all the members of the academy and to the ladies too,” Pajares thanked with that overwhelming comical vis and in a spicy wink that most didn’t catch until, looking at Marsillach, he blurted out: “They haven’t caught him.” What very few know is that such a complicated character, with which the actor obtained the recognition of colleagues who would not have given a penny for him in those conflicts, “was not so difficult for me,” he says with a smile.
He explains it in ‘Pajares & CIA’, a five-episode documentary series that premieres this Sunday on Atresplayer Premium, and which transcends the biopic of the actor and comedian to take an X-ray of that Spain that, after forty years of dictatorship, opened freedom and its evolution to the present day. Produced by Producciones del Barrio, its starting point is the spring of 2008, the year in which the actor was experiencing one of his worst moments in life. The problems with his ex-wife and their children had just jumped into gossip magazines and television sets – Pajares himself described his persecution as “television terrorism” – and he had been forced to suspend the show that celebrated his fifty years on the scenario due to lack of demand. Until one day he ended up arrested and released on charges of crimes of threats and injuries, after entering a law office with a gun that was later found to be false.
Andrés Pajares and Fernando Esteso, in ‘Los bingueros’.
With abundant archive material, it goes back in his steps to explain the life journey of a comedian who triumphed in nightclubs in the seventies, joined the cinema with Fernando Esteso in the eighties, became a dramatic actor in the nineties and little by little it was relegated to oblivion. Journalists such as Juan Sanguino or Pepa Blanes, filmmakers such as David Trueba, Javier Gutiérrez, Antonio Resines, María Barranco, José Sacristán, Carmen Maura or Concha Velasco and comedians such as Arévalo, Millán Salcedo or Carolina Iglesias break down not only their work in front of the cameras but also the society and culture that those television programs and movies reflected, fostering interesting dialogues about the value or not of those movies, their machismo –Pajares and Esteso radically deny it– the limits of humor or the volatility of success and fame .
A fillet of beef
The son of a waiter and an illiterate housewife, Pajares is moved when he remembers that his father, after working fourteen hours for a measly 150 pesetas, traveled through post-war Madrid to get a beef steak for his son. As a young man, the actor stole books just to get the 14 or 15 pesetas that the entrance to the theater cost. “My parents never liked that I would dedicate myself to show business,” explains the person who made his debut at the York Club in 1957. Shortly after he met the mother of his first child, Carmen Burguera. His painful death due to lung cancer was the structure on which he built his Paulino in ‘¡Ay, Carmela!’.
With the dictator’s death in 1975, the yearning for freedom and democracy ended up unleashing a wave of eroticism that would travel the entire country. “Spain has become horny,” Camilo José Cela came to describe. In that boom of miniskirts and bikinis, comedians like Pajares or Fernando Esteso filled party halls like Florida Park day in and day out.
With a keen eye for business and entertainment, director Mariano Ozores and producer José Luis Bermudez de Castro saw it clearly: What if they were brought together to star in a movie? They went with the project to Ízaro Films, a production company of the Reyzábal family – “Their premieres were formidable, there was seafood and if you worked with them you knew you were getting paid for sure,” reveals Sacristán -, owner of dozens of movie theaters and nightclubs throughout the length and breadth of the country and even Windsor Tower. That’s how ‘Los bingueros’ came about in 1979, a blockbuster that surpassed films like ‘Superman’ or ‘Land as you can’. A million spectators, of the thirty who then lived in Spain, went to see it; it cost fifteen million pesetas and raised two hundred. The Hispaniolada was born and a close collaboration between Pajares and Esteso began that gave rise to another eight films in five years -‘Los energetics’ (1979), ‘I made Roque III’ (1980), ‘Los liantes’ (1981) , ‘Los pimps’ (1981), ‘Todos al piso’ (1982), ‘Father there are only two’ (1982), ‘Shake before you use it’ (1983) and ‘La Lola takes us to the garden’ (1984 )-. Its ingredients? Nudity, comedy and current social affairs, in a formula that always starred ordinary guys with bad luck, surrounded by stunning women, and that ended up weaving an involuntary portrait of that hot Spain.
guerrilla shoots
“It was positive, we came out of a horrible dictatorship and we did impressive social work,” says Sara Mora, one of the uncovering actresses, whom the industry later cornered. “They told me to raise my little hand if I was in an uncomfortable situation. I never did it because there was absolute respect”, explains Loreta Tovar, another of the ladies who co-starred in these films.
They were guerrilla shoots, dizzying, with sequences in which, sometimes, the actors only moved their mouths because some of the lines of the script were not even written. Often the actor brought his own wardrobe. The person in charge of the set design of ‘Los bingueros’ says that he was amazed when Florinda Chico opened her closet with all the girl’s clothing that the actress had been acquiring to give life to her characters. “But don’t worry, because this is enough for me,” he told her, showing her another closet full of fur coats.
In the mid-1980s, with the opening of the X theaters and Pilar Miro’s Ley del Cine. Esteso and Pajares continued to work together, on a tour called ‘En vivo’ which they took to all the fairs in Spain in 1986 and in the play ‘The strange couple’. But in 1987 they put an end to that collaboration. «It stopped because if not, we would not have left that type of cinema and we did not want to be pigeonholed as a couple. We were different, but we adored each other as friends and he knows he has me for whatever he needs”, confesses Pajares. “He has defined me as the brother he has never had, and I as the closest friend of this profession and outside of it,” Esteso confides. For this reason, when they meet again in the documentary, the emotion is almost palpable.
‘Pajares y CIA’ is available in Atresplayer Premium.
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