When Fraga became the stage for Spaghetti westerns [part 3 of 8]

 Between the years 1965 and 1972, two Catalan production companies made about seventy films of the spaghetti western genre in the West Bank. We’ll tell you about it.

Sapiens

Salvador Giné (text) / Àngel Comas (advice)

Grants and inflated budgets: a safe business

Dominated by these two production companies, the westerns filmed in our country were productions intended for the double program, common at that time in neighborhood and village cinemas, in which two films were shown in the same session. Both Balcázar and Iquino were aware of these obvious limitations (they could not compete on equal terms with the Americans or Italians).

osep M. Forn, director of 'La piel quemada' or more recently 'Companys, procés a Catalunya', remembers very well how in 1962 Iquino defined the type of films to which they should be limited: "There are shoe factories and espadrille factories - I told him - and we make espadrilles." Àngel Comas, author of Ignacio F. Iquino. Hombre de cine', he points out further: "Neither Balcázar nor Iquino nor any other producer had the slightest interest in making a glamorous premiere of the film".

The artistic and technical pretensions got in the way. Movies were to make money and that's it. They made sure of it on the one hand by obtaining state subsidies and, on the other, by inflating the budget paid by the co-producers, usually Italian (who at the same time received subsidies from their country. With all the income they overpaid the production costs It was, therefore, a safe business.