Person1943

Andrés Vicente Gómez

Andrés Vicente Gómez is a Spanish film producer, head of Lolafilms, with more than 100 films to his credit.

Overview

At a glance

See what is inside without reading it all.

Andrés Vicente Gómez (born 16 September 1943 in Madrid) is a Spanish film producer, head of Lolafilms, with more than 100 films to his credit.

CareerGómez is the winner of an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language film for Belle Époque.
Alleged embezzlement from Orson WellesEarly in his career, Gómez served as a producer on John Hough's 1972 production of Treasure Island, starring Orson Welles.

Andrés Vicente Gómez is a Spanish film producer, head of Lolafilms, with more than 100 films to his credit.

Career

Gómez is the winner of an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language film for Belle Époque. Together with the prizes won at festivals like Berlin, Venice, Montreal and San Sebastian, Gomez´s near annual presence at the Spanish Goya Film Awards make him the Spanish producer with most national and international awards to his name.

Many of Spain´s most successful box-office hits have been produced by Andrés Vicente Gómez, who has worked with directors such as Fernando Trueba, Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura, Bigas Luna, Vicente Aranda, Álex de la Iglesia, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Pilar Miró, Santiago Segura, Jose Luis García Sánchez, John Malkovich, and Ray Loriga, amongst others. In recognition for his work as one of the producers most contributing to cinema, in 1998 the Cannes Film Festival paid tribute to Gómez with a special homage.

As a film distributor from the early 1970s onwards, Andrés Vicente Gómez has brought an eclectic selection of international films to Spanish audiences, with classics from directors like Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Akira Kurosawa, as well as Oscar scooping titles like "The Last Emperor", "Dances With Wolves", "Driving Miss Daisy" and "Henry V". Gómez has distributed the work of numerous cult directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Bresson, Claude Chabrol, Peter Greenaway, Shoei Imamura, Krzysztof Kieslovski, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Bertrand Tavernier, as well as introducing the independent voices of directors like Hal Hartley, Neil Jordan, Paul Morrisey, Tim Robbins and Alan Rudolph.

Alleged embezzlement from Orson Welles

Early in his career, Gómez served as a producer on John Hough's 1972 production of Treasure Island, starring Orson Welles. Gómez and Welles hired houses adjacent to one another, and struck up a friendship. Welles was then trying to raise funds for a string of uncompleted films of his own, and Gómez agreed to produce his next film, F for Fake (1973). Gómez recalls, "Treasure Island and [F for] Fake consolidated my relationship with Welles and we signed a three-year agreement of mutual exclusivity through which we expressed our intention to complete all of Orson's unfinished projects. We worked together in 1972 and 1973." Projects worked on as part of this agreement included Don Quixote (filmed intermittently from 1957–72, but released), The Deep (filmed from 1967-9, but unreleased), the TV special Orson's Bag (filmed 1968-71, but never completed), Filming Othello (1978), and the project that Welles considered his major "comeback" film, The Other Side of the Wind (filmed sporadically from 1970-6, but unreleased until 2018). It was this latter project which embroiled Gómez in controversy, after he became the go-between in its complex and unorthodox funding. Barbara Leaming described the situation in her biography of Welles, based on extensive interviews with Welles:

The first of the backers Orson managed to find in Paris was a Spanish acquaintance of his from the international film community [Gómez] who enthusiastically agreed to kick in $350,000, a little less than half of what Orson and Oja had already invested. Shortly thereafter an equivalent sum was pledged by a French-based Iranian group headed by Mehdi B[o]ushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah ... Dominique Antoine, a Frenchwoman, made the deal with Orson on behalf of the Iranians ... Orson left France with the understanding that the Spanish partner would act as intermediary with the Iranians in Paris ...

But no sooner were Orson and Oja in Spain than trouble started. "We were perfectly all right as long as I was using Oja's money and mine," says Orson, "but the moment we got associates!" The Iranians appeared not to be living up to their end of the deal. Orson heard from the Spaniard who had flown in from Paris, that the Iranians had not given him the money they had promised. There were heavy rains and flooding in Spain, so Orson and Oja were basically cooped up in their hotel, where they worked on a new script together. The Spaniard returned to Paris to try again. "In a minute they're going to have it," he told Orson later. "It looks all right." In lieu of the Iranian funds, he gave them very small sums of money, which he said were part of the investment he had agreed to make. Not until afterward did Orson discover that the Iranians had indeed been giving the Spaniard the promised money, which had come from Iran in cash, and that, instead of bringing it to Spain, the sly fellow was pocketing it. Says Orson: "We just sat, month after month, while he went to Paris, received the money, and came back and told us that they wouldn't give him any money. He was very convincing to us, and very convincing with them in Paris. He kept flying back and forth extracting money from them. We didn't know them, you see. We knew him." The small sums of money he had been giving Orson as if from his own pocket actually came out of the Iranian funds. His constant reassurance to Orson that the Iranians were about to come through was calculated to keep Orson in Spain out of contact with them. On his part, Orson did not want to interfere in what he presumed were his emissary's delicate negotiations with them. It simply never occurred to him that the fellow was lying—and had never any money of his own to invest in the first place...

Source: Andrés Vicente Gómez (CC BY-SA)

We label verified structured information, user opinions, and AI-discovered relationships separately.