He was the best screenwriter and at the same time the most anonymous. I went out into the street, listened to people, got on trams, first, and then on buses. He justified his limited public life by saying that the first time he went to collect an award in Italy he had such a bad time that he got a jacket soaked in his sweat and decided not to suffer that ridicule anymore. Rafael Azcona put himself in such high profile on numerous occasions that he neither collected the Goya of Honor in 1998 nor was his death made public until he had already been cremated. And well cremated, which he would finish off, playful.
Thus, with friends, with laughter and a lot of work, Azcona produced more than a hundred scripts. Along with them, another 79 sketched, abandoned halfway or finished although not filmed. He wrote them in cafes, at home next to the television in the living room or, in recent years, on a covered terrace that he turned into his office. About twenty of these scripts form the basis of enormous films, of which here are ten.
'The Little Apartment' (1958), by Marco Ferreri. Based on Azcona's novel of the same name, his footsteps crossed those of Marco Ferreri, because the Italian came to Spain, after directing liquor advertisements, as the representative of Totalscope lenses, the Italian version of Cinemascope, in 1956. He met Azcona, who was working on The Codorniz, and read his novel. The Italian, who opted for that story to make his debut as a director, assured: "He sees things like I do and sees them with a formula that is the same formula with which I see them. It is a visual affinity, and also a spiritual one." The story resonates intensely today: Rodolfo and Petrita have been dating for 12 years, but they cannot get married until they manage to find an apartment. And there is no way. Rodolfo lives as a renter from Doña Martina, an old woman who is about to die, and the landlord wants the apartment to be free to demolish the building. Then they recommend to Rodolfo that he marry the old woman and thus inherit the rent. The apartment passed the censorship because it actually stars a series of mean characters and because the misery portrayed was real.
'Plácido' (1961), by Luis García Berlanga. Berlanga and Azcona had already collaborated on a television pilot, in a chapter of the collective film The Four Truths, and Berlanga had also tried to prepare the adaptation of The Dead Are Not Touched, Nene, another novel by Azcona. Finally, they achieved, rescuing ideas from previous scripts and linking the script to current Spanish events with the real campaign Siete a poor man at his table, which Berlanga hated, a ruthless portrait of charity as a farce. Azcona joined the script when it was already outlined; and it is he who adds all the aroma of Italian neorealism and opens the narrative to choralism. Plácido is the best film in history about Christmas, in addition to delving into other themes, as Víctor Erice pointed out: "The final objective of the film is to show the lack of communication between people. For me, Berlanga is fundamentally a romantic." And Azcona.
'The Executioner' (1963), by Luis García Berlanga. The film with which Azcona and Berlanga stretched the limits of censorship. A curiosity about this Spanish-Italian co-production: in the final report, the censors object to 15 of the 30 sequences. They did not realize the bomb that the film was hiding. Berlanga brought the original idea from a lawyer friend who attended an execution in which the executioner was more affected than the condemned woman, Pilar Frades, The Poisoner of Valencia. “Black humor is from Azcona,” said José María García Escudero, general director of cinematography, who preferred Calabuch's Berlanga. Like Franco's censorship, because in the end they made 17 cuts, today almost all of them recovered.
'Natural size' (1974), by Luis García Berlanga. Azcona was already collaborating with Carlos Saura and had released one of his great follies, La gran comilona, with Marco Ferreri again, before he and Berlanga recovered Michel Piccoli from a previous failed project. The idea also comes from another unfilmed script, To my dear mother, on her saint's day. Berlanga was inspired by the French artist Pierre Molinier, and said: "A study on the total objectification of women and sex, and how objectification can arise. Rafael wants to take it further." The protagonist is a dentist who buys a Japanese realistic doll, and because of their relationship he ends up breaking with the outside world. Due to its budget, the doll alone cost 7 million pesetas (42,070 euros), it ended up being a co-production with France. Buñuel left out a pass, because he considered it “a dirty thing,” which surprised Berlanga, who always defended that they fled from any eroticism.
'The national shotgun' (1978), by Luis García Berlanga. When Size Natural premiered in Madrid in 1977, three years later than in France, Berlanga and Azcona had already written The National Shotgun. The initial idea was planted, unintentionally, by Manuel Fraga. On February 1, 1964, the then Minister of Information and Tourism, while out hunting for partridges, accidentally shot Carmen Franco, Franco's daughter, who was nearby; The pellets ended up in Carmencita's ass. Although the two scriptwriters did not dare to put it in the script, they finally wrote without fear of censorship, and marked a satire on late Francoism, the ruined nobility and the technocrats of Opus Dei, who wanted to inject pseudo-modernity and capitalism into the dictatorship. “For me it is just a reflection on the corruption of power,” said the director. Its success turned it into a trilogy.
'A man called Autumn Flower' (1978), by Pedro Olea. In 1972, the playwright José María Rodríguez Méndez wrote a play about a lawyer from the Catalan bourgeoisie, who at night is a drag queen in the Chinatown and who in the Barcelona of the 1920s prepares an attack against Primo de Rivera along with her anarchist boyfriend. Franco's censorship banned it (in fact, it was not released until 1982), and Pedro Olea and Azcona removed it from a certain Astracanada to construct this portrait of homosexuality with enormous respect. It stars José Sacristán, who released this drama and The Deputy in a row.
'The heifer' (1981), by Luis García Berlanga. For four decades, since 1947, Berlanga faced in various versions the story of a republican commando who sneaks into enemy lines in a town taken over by Francoist troops to steal their calf, the great attraction of the patron saint festivities, with the subsequent intention of eating it. The script changed its title, although curiously the ending, very close to a parable, was kept. It is the most Berlanguian film of those co-written with Azcona, and one of his most complicated shoots (although one with the highest budget) due to the heat and the clash between the director and the actors. Berlanga said: "I had always dreamed that if one day I could make The Heifer, it would be a call for reconciliation between those who had no choice but to participate in the war. But it is not a pompous demand, but rather two spits that mix in the same wasteland."
'The animated forest' (1987), by José Luis Cuerda. The first Goya award that Rafael Azcona won. The script adapts the novel by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, which takes place in a fraga, a Galician forest, where magic is mixed with a Spain in which disinherited people and gentlemen cohabit. Ángel Fernández-Santos wrote: "Its author, Rafael Azcona, has achieved a single, solid narrative, organized with unsurpassed precision and lightness from the vast and varied set of stories that, with aromas of legend, Fernández Flórez weaves between the lights and shadows of the Cecebre grove. Only a film writer with an extraordinary capacity for synthesis can do such a feat." By the way, the block libretto scheme would be repeated in Belle Époque.
‘Oh, Carmela!’ (1990), by Carlos Saura. Second Goya award for Azcona, who would end up winning six competitive awards and another honorary one. Although it adapts the play of the same name by José Sanchis Sinisterra, there are traces of that idea, that of musicians forced to play songs and anthems from both sides to survive, in one of the versions of La vaquilla, the one from 1960, very sweetened to bypass censorship. In 1986, producer Andrés Vicente Gómez asked Carlos Saura to go see the performance and, upon leaving the performance, he accepted the assignment with one condition: that Rafael Azcona be in his writing.
