Boris Izaguirre

Before taking off his clothes in front of the late-night cameras, Boris Izaguirre spent twelve hours a day typing soap opera dialogue. His father, the essayist Rodolfo Izaguirre, ran the National Cinematheque of Venezuela. That is why he grew up devouring film prints of European cinema while late-1970s Caracas buzzed outside. That mix of film archives and popular melodrama ended up defining his craft.

At just twenty-one, he co-wrote the scripts for La dama de rosa with José Ignacio Cabrujas. The telenovela stopped audiences cold and hit more than sixty audience share points across Spanish afternoon time slots. Writing daily serials teaches a military-style discipline of delivery and cutting that no screenwriting school can replicate.

In 1992, he bought a one-way ticket and landed in Santiago de Compostela. The Galician industry had no room for his projects. So he soon packed his bags for Madrid, where he worked as an uncredited scriptwriter on programs such as Inocente, inocente and the daily serial El súper.

The Midnight Monster

Javier Sardà's call in the late 1990s ended the typist's anonymity. Crónicas Marcianas ran without safety brakes, and the Venezuelan decided to build a wild, baroque, deliberately provocative persona to blow up the conventions of mainstream television.

That televised vaudeville threatened to devour the craftsman of the written word.

But Izaguirre used his notoriety to fund his literary passion. He wrote essays on image and consumerism in volumes such as Morir de glamour in 2000 and El armario secreto de Hitchcock in 2005, in which he dissected the British director's framing with the eye of a seasoned editor.

In 2007, he was a finalist for the Planeta Prize with his novel Villa Diamante, a family drama set during Marcos Pérez Jiménez's dictatorship that sold more than 300,000 copies in bookstores. Critics had to admit that this studio celebrity had a firm grip on narrative rhythm.

And the move paid off perfectly.

Back to the editing table

The studio was no longer enough.

With the cancellation of Channel nº 4 in 2008 after three seasons on air, the author cut back on his live appearances. He preferred the analytical column in El País to the noise of daytime formats.

In 2018, he published Tiempo de tormentas, an autobiographical account in which he laid bare the aftereffects of his childhood dyslexia and the hostility he faced in Caracas. The book stripped away the artifice of his public persona to show the inner workings of a writer driven by a pure need for inner order.

His return to scriptwriting for screen took shape in 2022 with Bosé, a biographical series he wrote with Ángeles González-Sinde and Chus Gutiérrez for Paramount+. The production condensed four decades of music history into a budget of more than ten million euros.

In 2023, he hosted the magazine show Más vale sábado on La Sexta, but the program averaged just a 4% audience share during its run.

For the miniseries Call me Bibi, set to premiere in 2026, the production company scheduled an eight-week shoot on location in Madrid and Barcelona.