Mario Vargas Llosa

In 1975, Mario Vargas Llosa showed up in the Dominican Republic with a megaphone in hand to direct the film adaptation of his own novel. He believed coordinating crew, extras and military trucks would be as manageable as arranging adjectives on a blank page. He got it completely wrong.

The film version of Pantaleón and the Visitors, co-directed with Spanish filmmaker José María Gutiérrez Santos, became one of the most notorious flops of Latin American cinema of that decade. The Dominican government's censors banned the film almost immediately, and the reels were left abandoned in port warehouses for years.

The novelist learned his lesson the hard way, with unpaid bills.

Because the Arequipa-born author's relationship with the big screen was never easy. Before becoming a director, he had already seen how the Mexican film industry trimmed his literary storylines in minor adaptations. So he chose to retreat to the typewriter and let others take on the grind of celluloid.

Francisco Lombardi's Military Courtyard

A fellow countryman had to come along ten years later to set things right. In 1985, filmmaker Francisco Lombardi released The City and the Dogs, capturing the suffocation of the Leoncio Prado military academy with a dryness that stunned Lima's critics.

The Peruvian army leadership accused the film of being anti-patriotic and burned copies of the novel in front of the cadets in the parade ground. But box office demand packed theaters in Lima, and the film won the Best Director award at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

That public book burning ended up working as the best possible advertising campaign.

And Lombardi repeated the formula in 1999 with a second version of Pantaleón and the Visitors. With Salvador del Solar and Angie Cepeda leading the cast, the film drew more than two million moviegoers at the local box office and buried for good the memory of the original disaster the author had shot in the Caribbean.

Spotlights, Stages and Sealed Archives

At the turn of the century, the writer preferred to take to the stage as an amateur actor. In 2008, he starred alongside Aitana Sánchez-Gijón in the theater production The Thousand and One Nights, touring Spanish stages with a stiff stage presence that drew more curiosity than enthusiasm from drama critics.

Two years later, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 for a body of work marked by its dissection of power. His cousin Luis Llosa had already brought that territory to the big screen in 2005 with The Feast of the Goat, starring Isabella Rossellini and Tomas Milian in a €10 million Spanish-British co-production.

In October 2023, he published the novel Dedicated to My Silence and confirmed his definitive farewell to narrative fiction. He left three film treatments commissioned in the 1970s by the Mexican production company Conacine locked away in drawers, shelved with a development cost set at ten thousand dollars per canceled screenplay.