FROM THE ARCHIVE

The first gala

Asier Gil Vázquez, Ana Mejón y Rubén Romero Santos

March 17, 1987. It seemed like a typical spring day, as it was Tuesday, a workday like any other. But in the late afternoon, traffic was cut off on Madrid’s Gran Vía, between Plaza de España and Callao. Many people rolled down their car windows to ask the traffic cop on duty why they couldn’t pass and what was going on. It wasn’t a demonstration, a parade, or even a film shoot. How could the local police explain that they couldn’t pass because the first Goya Awards were being presented? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, created a few months earlier, was not on the minds of most Spaniards, let alone the awards that, from that day on, would be presented every year.

But there they were, at the then Lope de Vega cinema, at the entrance to which Spanish and Community of Madrid flags had been placed, along with television cameras and barriers so that curious onlookers could see the stars and great figures of Spanish cinema arriving. In this issue of From the Archive, we recover some fragments of that first broadcast, which was aired on Televisión Española, to contrast them with the memories of production director Sol Carnicero, one of the founders of the Academy, as recorded in the Cuaderno Tecmerin La armonía y el caos. Apuntes sobre dirección de producción con Sol Carnicero (Mejón y Romero Santos, 2022).

At this first gala, the minutes devoted to the red carpet (which was blue-gray) were preceded by a video that, from the vantage point of the present day, invites us to reflect on the original intention behind the creation of an institution such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereinafter, the Film Academy) and its Goya Awards. Today we know that, in the mid-1980s, the founders of the Film Academy looked to the model of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood and the Oscars. The opening credits of this video announce the “First Annual Awards” in a VFx style accompanied by the soundtrack of Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), which, far from paying tribute to Spanish cinema, seeks to connect with the film culture of American blockbusters and their massive audience in theaters. However, it is not Michael J. Fox or Christopher Lloyd who step out of the DeLorean, but the director, producer, and screenwriter José María González-Sinde (first president of the Academy) and actress Fiorella Faltoyano, who are in charge of explaining to viewers what the Film Academy is, the reasons for its creation, and its future prospects.

Fuente: Youtube Premios Goya

“We Spanish filmmakers, the men and women who make films, wanted to create an association that promotes, disseminates, and protects this art,” says González-Sinde in the clip. A more personal recollection of the project’s early stages points to the boost given by a group of professionals, including producer Alfredo Matas:

“[Alfredo Matas] asked me to organize a dinner with professionals from each specialty to see what we could come up with. We called Luis García Berlanga and Carlos Saura for directing; José Sacristán and Charo López for acting; Pablo González del Amo and José Luis Matesanz for editing; Manolo Matji as screenwriter; José Nieto for musical composition; Carlos Suárez for cinematography; Ramiro Gómez for set design; and, for production management, there was Tedy [Villalba] and me [Sol Carnicero]. What we did was start from the foundations of the Hollywood Academy in order to create something that functioned as similarly as possible” (Mejón and Romero Santos, 2022, p.106).

Beyond that first dinner, the next step was to keep growing. In fact, the aforementioned inaugural speech by González-Sinde alludes to the members when he points out that “yes, everyone who is here is here, but not everyone who should be here is here” and that “almost half of the 41 nominees tonight are not members of the Academy.” Sol Carnicero recalls picking up the lists of professionals from Cineguía and making calls: “Some said it was nonsense. José Luis Garci gave me a terrible telling-off because he claimed that he had thought of the idea first” (Mejón and Romero Santos, 2022, p.108). Something similar happened with a veteran like Juan Antonio Bardem, as his son Rafael recalls: “At first he resisted and did not participate in the foundation,” to which his son Miguel adds that “he considered that it was not good to create an academy without any political objective” (Gil Vázquez and Cemillán Casis, 2022, pp. 91-92). However, both Garci and Bardem presented awards that night in March 1987.

This skepticism towards the Goya Awards is evident in the number of nominees who did not attend the ceremony, such as Fernando Fernán Gómez, who received the awards for best actor and best director. In fact, in seven of the fifteen categories, the winner was absent. Nevertheless, the motley crew of people who paraded down the theater stairs was striking, ranging from institutional officials (the mayor of Madrid, Juan Barranco, and the minister of culture, Javier Solana), political representatives (Manuel Fraga Iribarne and José María Álvarez del Manzano), the president of Real Madrid (Ramón Mendoza), musicians (Sergio and Estíbaliz, Alaska, Carlos Berlanga), journalists (Alfredo Amestoy, Luis Carandell, María Escario), socialites from the Marbella jet set (Gunilla von Bismarck and Luis Ortiz) and writers (Francisco Umbral). There was also a mix of generations of Spanish cinema, with the presence of stars from earlier times, such as Rocío Dúrcal, Sara Montiel, and Marujita Díaz, who were never nominated or received an Honorary Goya. This quest to establish a dialogue between the past and present of Spanish cinema was evident in several of the pairs and trios that were formed to present awards, such as actresses Emma Penella and Ana Belén; directors Vicente Escrivá, Jaime de Armiñán, and Fernando Trueba; and actor-directors José Luis Gómez and Ana Mariscal.

Fuente: Youtube Premios Goya

Many of the attendees gathered before the ceremony for a reception in honor of King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía. At this event, González-Sinde presented the first Goya in history to the monarchs and showed the award to the cameras, which differs in some ways from the one presented today. Sol Carnicero recalls:

“Tedy [Villalba] suggested to [Miguel] Berrocal that he make a figure for the award. But it turns out that Berrocal said he didn’t know how to capture Goya. So Tedy went to a plaster shop on León Street and bought one that is the model for the statue. It was a model by Benlliure, and Berrocal copied it exactly. To add something of his own, he put a mechanism that came out of the head. He took it to his foundry in Verona, and during the filming of Barrios altos (José Luis García Berlanga, 1987) in Barcelona, he told us he had the prototype. I was traveling by plane, and I had to carry that monster through the airport: all the alarms started going off and the guards stopped me. The first ordinary citizen to see a Goya in Spain was me, and the second was a civil guard at the airport […] It weighed a ton. But it was funny, it was totally geeky because it was mechanized and a movie projector came out of its head, but it was shaped like Spain” (Mejón and Romero Santos, 2022, p.107).

Since that year, 1987, the location of the Goya Awards has changed, both within Madrid and throughout Spain. The number of categories has almost doubled, from the original 15 to the current 24. No president explains what the Academy is to the camera anymore, nor does the presenter spend the entire gala standing on one side of the stage (as Fernando Rey did), the speeches are not so brief, and no articulated mechanism comes out of Goya’s head. In addition to the nods to the past that have been maintained (such as the honorary award and the “in memoriam”), the first edition in 1987 set a precedent that would not change: Fernando Fernán Gómez and Verónica Forqué (two of the winners who were absent from that first edition) would receive three more Goyas each in subsequent years, but they never made it to the stage to collect them.

See excerpts from the first edition of the Goya Awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:

Fuente: Youtube Premios Goya

References

Gil Vázquez, Asier y Cemillán Casis, Luis (2022). El legado de un cineasta. Conversaciones con los hijos de Juan Antonio Bardem. Cuadernos Tecmerin nº 19, Instituto Universitario del Cine Español / Grupo de Investigación Tecmerin.

Mejón, Ana y Romero Santos, Rubén (2022). La armonía y el caos. Apuntes sobre dirección de producción con Sol Carnicero. Cuadernos Tecmerin nº 20, Instituto Universitario del Cine Español / Grupo de Investigación Tecmerin.

Notes

This text is developed under the Research Project “Cine y televisión en España en la era digital (2008-2022): nuevos agentes y espacios de intercambio en el panorama audiovisual”, financiado por MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/“FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa”.