TOLEDO, Spain Carmen Machi (Piggy, 30 Coins), one of the foremost performers of her generation in Spain, is attached to play legendary Barcelona agent Carmen Balcells, prime architect of the Latin American Boom and a key figure in the break out of Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to worldwide renown.
Chiles Invercine, producer of News of a Kidnapping which swept Aprils Platino Awards, is teaming with Spains Abacus, Pausoka and Grupo Lavinia to develop and produce Boom Agency (La Agencia del Boom) which turns on Balcells extraordinary life, achievement and personality. The deal was confirmed toVarietyat Conecta Fiction.
The series also turns on Balcells worst nightmare, the rupture of the deep friendship between her star writers, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garca-Marquez, whose rift broke the back of the Boom.
Spains Oscar Pedraza, co-director of HBO Espaas Patria, is attached to direct. Colombians Vernica Triana (News of a Kidnapping) and Alvaro Perea (Cuando Colombia se volvi Macondo) are penning the scripts. Invercines Matias and Macarena Cardone, Abacus Marc Roma, Pausokas Xabi Zabaleta and Grupo Lavinias Ruben Mayoral serve as executive producers.
This co-production is a great strategic alliance with an incredible synergy in all the creative processes where we have mixed talent from different countries which has strengthened the story and made it more attractive when looking for finance, and creating different business models, while choosing the best strategy, said Macarena Cardone.
A legend in literary circles, Balcells is relatively unknown to the general public. She established the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency in 1956 at the age of 25 in a fusty Spain still under the arcane rule of Francisco Francos dictatorship but rocked by tourism, then the Beatles and Cubas Revolution.
She had everything against her. She was born in a village, rather than into Barcelonas elite. She championed Latin American writers when Barcelona looked up to France. Most of all, she was a woman. Your problem, Carmen, Jos Manuel Lara, head of Planeta, Spains biggest publishing house, once told her in public, is that you dont fuck. Balcells burst into tears.
Carmen Balcells is a young woman who attempts to find her way in a machista and intellectual society of the time, to show that shes capable of giving world fame to writers such as Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Boom Agencys logline runs.
So this means breaking a few rules on the way, sacrificing her family life and becoming a kind of omniscient God who attempts to control everything, it went on.
Balcells luck was to champion writers who were revolutionizing Latin American literature, abandoning its stolid social realism for a belated but thorough-going modernism, heavily influenced by William Faulkner, multiplying character voices, shuttling from different time-periods in novels sluiced by anti-authority politics, slang, corrosive common language and the libertinism of the 60s.
Xabi Zabaleta, Macarena Cardone, Matias Cardone Courtesy of Invercine Producciones One example: At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up? Santiago Zavala, the co-protagonist of Mario Vargas-Llosas Conversation in the Cathedral, asks in its second sentence.
The series may draw on something of this style. The idea is to mix many time periods dynamically, moving from past to present in a highly visual, fast-paced way with an acid humor, so that those who lived at that time will be moved and new generations will want to know more, Pedraza said.
Balcells also put through her own revolution, abandoning all-rights longterm contracts with Spanish publishers to split up specific rights, crucially keeping back translation deals which she then sold for sometimes lucrative sums.
The worldwide fame of Gabriel Garca Mrquez is based on the flamboyant magical realism of 100 Years of Solitude. But it also owed much to the commercial aggression of Balcells, which, for example, allowed a young Vargas Llosa to dedicate himself totally to writing.
Vargas Llosa, Garca Mrquez, Donoso, Vzquez Montalbn. Spanish-language literatures Golden Age cannot be understood without the incredible contribution of Carmen Balcells, a woman ahead of her time who was visionary and passionate. As producers we believe the story is well-worth telling: the lives of its protagonists are on a par with their fantastic work, said Zabaleta.
To be able to control their careers, Balcells offered to put Vargas Llosa and Garca Mrquez on monthly stipends if they relocated to Barcelona. Both did.
This is an organic co-production between Latin America and Spain, which unspools in the 70s in Barcelona which is where the Latin American Boom took place, Matas Cardone added.