Teatro Echegaray hosted the directors José Cabanach and Juan Antonio Tirado on Monday for the premiere of the Samuel: Hollywood vs Hollywood documentary, which was also attended by the composer Jerónimo Maesso and the daughter of Samuel Bronston himself, Andrea Bronston, who also appears in the documentary.

Pilar Monsell introduced the film and the protagonists of the evening, who shared anecdotes and trivia about the project with the Echegaray audience. Juan Antonio Tirado, co-producer, co-director and co-writer of the film along with Cabanach, wanted to begin by thanking all the people who contributed to the documentary with their archives or conversations; a documentation that involved some seventy interviews, although in the end, only forty appear in the film.

Bronston shot numerous films through his company Samuel Bronston Productions, many of them period films with great Hollywood stars, and contributed decisively to the launching of Spain as a Hollywood filming location, choosing our country for many of his shootings. Spain was the setting, among other film classics, for titles such as King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

'The first thing we did was to track down the family. It was funny because Andrea Bronston lives in Las Rozas, like me, so I got her phone number through mutual friends and called her to say: I’m going to make a film about your father. She laughed and didn’t believe me', said Tirado.  However, Andrea agreed to meet the filmmaker and then understood how serious he was: 'I met him, they told me what they wanted to do, I saw all the documentation Juan Antonio had about my father, and I knew they were going to do something different. I’ve learned a lot about my father from them because they know more about him than I do', said the actress and daughter of Samuel Bronston. 

As part of the documentation, once she agreed to collaborate on the film, they flew to the United States to meet up with her other siblings, with whom she had little contact. Bill, Philip Kira and Michael (Andrea’s brother on her mother’s side) joined the documentary and completed the team.

Talking about how the project started oiut, Tirado recalls that it was never his idea to take on the project alone: 'I’m a journalist and I couldn’t get involved in a film project on my own. I contacted José Cabanach and his reaction was the same as Andrea’s: he laughed and didn’t believe me'.

José Cabanach has extensive experience in the world of documentaries and has filmed, as scriptwriter and director, for National Geographic, Fox and Turner. Cabanach also spoke at the presentation of the film: 'We all know of Bronston’s story, but thanks to the documentary we really discovered the whole story. The film collects small, personal stories, and each of these people make up the story of a producer who changed the technical world of cinema'.

Tirado admitted that José was the best person to accompany him on this adventure and, in this search for all of the best, he contacted the composer Jerónimo Maesso. 'Jerónimo comes from the world of dance, has worked with Víctor Ullate and Nacho Duate, and a great improviser and a true master. He has made the best soundtrack we could possibly have'.

Maesso confessed that setting the documentary to music had been a fairly easy task for such a large-scale project, and that it is a work full of wonderful moments and details that give you goose bumps.

After the presentation, the 109-minute documentary was screened, which could not have come at a better time, on the 30th anniversary of the producer’s death (12 January 1994) and the 60th anniversary of his film The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).