'Welcome’ sound of guns

Press, 28 November 1984, Page 44

'Welcome’ sound of guns

By

Brian Mooney

of Reuters Almeria, Spain, The sound of gunfire echoing across the desert is music to the ears of a

Spanish businessman Paco Arduras.

American cowboys are back in his town near Almeria after a long absence, shouting it out again on a set where rival film companies used to fight one another for camera space. “When you own a Wild Western town you dream of gunfire,” Mr Arduras told Reuters.

His town, complete with Mexican quarter and an Indian camp, was the scene of “Once Upon a Time in the West” and many of the great Westerns of the 1960 s and 70s. It was built for a Sergio Leone production. But when the vogue for Westerns made in Spain’s south-eastern Arizona-like desert collapsed, Mr Arduras’s set became a virtual ghost town. New life was breathed into it, though, when the producers of a new SpanishAmerican comic Western entitled “Rustlers’ Rhapsody” moved in to rebuild it before shooting began in October.

“Rustlers’ Rhapsody” is directed and written by Hugh Wilson who says he was set loose to indulge his fantasies on a Western after the success of his box-office hit “Police Academy”,

which has grossed $lOO million.

His $6.5 million film is an extravagant recreation of the great Westerns with one main difference — it’s a complete spoof, a parody of the real thing from beginning to end.

“This film will remind people quite what fun it was to make Westerns. We came to Spain to make a serious send-up of the Western and after a couple of days we discovered we were having a whale of a time,” said Mr Wilson.

He aims to recapture the best of B-movie Westerns, the drama of the vintage Roy Rogers, Lone Ranger and Durango Kid films, add a touch of classic “spaghetti western” Leone and lay it on with humour.

The characters among a cast of 120 Americans, Spaniards and Britons, range from a good guy who loses his nerve to a gay cattle baron who doesn’t know how to get tough. The actors, including the Americans Tom Berenger, Sela Ward, G. W. Bailey and Andy Griffith, Britain’s James Carter and Spain’s Fernando Rey all seem to revel in being in a Western. “I don't have to worry about Hamlet any more. I

can now die content after being shot dead in a Western,” Carter said.

The production team selected Spain largely because it would have cost about twice as much to film in the United States. The Almeria desert, which in its heyday was used as the backdrop for several hundred Westerns, provides an authentic cowboy setting with the advantage of near-perfect weather. Called the “mirror of the sea" by its ancient Arab conquerors, Almeria claims to have only 16 cloudy days a year. In its boom days, it boasted, a constant flow of film stars.

“There were often up to five or six Westerns being shot at any one time. The crews were lining up to get on the set,” Mr Arduras recalls.

He runs a business supplying horses and carriages for film-makers and says he bought the Western town as a whim.

“It was a case of pure romanticism,” he says. “I couldn’t resist but, of course, I’m not making any money out of it. I’m holding out for another Western boom.”