Our Glorious Executive Producer
17 September 2006. Inspired by dictation.
It's 30 years since the referendum that took Spain from dictatorship to democracy, and what better way to celebrate than by inviting Franco's granddaughter to take part in the local version of Strictly Come Dancing?
Just like most other scary dictators you could think of (though you never get to see their real penises), her granddaddy is indeed listed in the IMDB, but is one of only four who was ever actively involved in the film-making process, rather than merely credited as "Himself (watching a military parade)" or "Himself (in coffin)".
The General's co-written classic of sorts was called Raza (Race). FF wrote the original novel (under a humble pseudonym that fooled no-one), about a soldier who quits the Republican side to fight for God, truth and justice, and is thought to have done some work on the film script too. He never visited the set during filming, but that didn't stop it from winning the first ever Spanish national film award. Odd, that.
The other three dictators, by the way, are the ronely Kim Jong-Il, who gets an "executive producer" credit for kidnapping the South Korean director to make a weird Godzilla-style film (I always wondered what exec producers did); Idi Amin, who wrote the accordian music for an unexpectedly truthful documentary about his life, and Fidel Castro, who in his time in exile in the USA, apparently appeared as an extra in a few romantic comedies starring Lucille Ball.
I think there's a cracking film to be made from all that. Anyone got the number of Alexander Lukashenko's agent?