A long-lost screenplay written 40 years ago by a struggling author named Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about to get the feature film treatment.

Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda says he has just acquired the rights to the long-forgotten screenplay and plans to start filming next year. Titled Frontera, the film was written before the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude turned Garcia Marquez into an international literary star known to most of the continent simply as Gabo.

“Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western. I don’t think anybody knew he had written anything like that,” De Anda told Mexican newspaper Reforma. De Anda says he first heard of Frontera as a young actor about 40 years ago when he was offered the part of the younger hitman. He assumed the screenplay had been written by Alcoriza, one of the giants of Mexico’s cinematic golden age.

“When I finally bought the rights, about a month ago, I discovered the surprise that the story was not in fact by Alcoriza, but by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” De Anda said. He now plans to play the older partner, and is considering pursuing Mexican stars Gael Garcia Bernal or Diego Luna for the role of the upstart.

It will be interesting to see how the screenplay translates to the screen. We feel fairly sure that the Nobel Prize winner is going to be pretty surprised to see his old screenplay finally made into a movie.

Posted on 2008-07-16

SANTIAGO (AFP) – - A series of unpublished poems by Chile’s late Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel prize for literature, are shedding light on his last romance with his wife’s niece more than 40 years his junior, a collector said.

The 14 poems were found in a book titled “Black Island Album,” named after the house in central Chile which Neruda, his third and last wife Matilde Urrutia and her niece Alicia Urrutia shared, according to Nurieldin Hermosilla.

The lawyer and Neruda collector said he bought the book recently from a book dealer, who in turn had acquired it from an anonymous seller.

The poems are handwritten in Neruda’s traditional green ink and are “a direct and definitive confirmation from the poet’s own pen of his love for Alicia,” Hermosilla said.

He said Alicia Urrutia decided to go public with the poems after years of keeping silent about her affair.

“I think she decided to confirm her love with Neruda and put this book on sale to lend herself some legitimacy and put an end to the myth” and speculation, the lawyer said.

Neruda, who died at 69 in 1973, just 12 days after dictator Augusto Pinochet’s coup, is famous for his love poems as well as his “Canto General” — an epic poem about South America’s history and its people.

But he also was a senior member of the Chilean central committee of the Communist Party and his work was banned during Pinochet’s 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

At different periods of his life, Neruda was a political exile, a senator, an ambassador and in 1970 a presidential candidate for the Communist Party.

Neruda’s real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. His pen name was inspired by Czech writer Jan Neruda.