Jesús Franco
Jesús Franco Manera was a Spanish filmmaker, composer, and actor, known as a prolific director of stylish exploitation and B-movies. In a career that spanned from the early 1960s to the 2010s, he wrote, directed, produced, acted, and scored over 200 feature films, working both in his native Spain and abroad.
Biography
Of Cuban and Mexican parentage, Franco was born in Madrid and studied at the city's Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas and the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris. He began his career in 1954 as an assistant director in the Spanish film industry, performing many tasks including composing music for some of the films as well as co-writing a number of the screenplays. He assisted a number of directors such as Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, León Klimovsky and Juan Antonio Bardem. After working on more than 20 films, he decided to get into directing films in 1959, making a few musicals and a crime drama called Red Lips.In 1960, Franco took Marius Lesoeur and Sergio Newman, two producer friends, to a cinema to see the newly released Hammer horror film The Brides of Dracula and the three men decided to get into the horror film business. His career took off in 1961 with The Awful Dr. Orloff, which received wide distribution in the United States and the UK. Franco wrote and directed Orloff, and even supplied some of the music for the film. In the mid-1960s, he went on to direct two other horror films, then proceeded to turn out a number of James Bond-like spy thrillers and softcore sex films based on the works of the Marquis de Sade.
Although he had some American box office success with Succubus, 99 Women and two 1970 Christopher Lee films – The Bloody Judge and Count Dracula – he never achieved wide commercial success. Many of his films were only distributed in Europe, and most of them were never dubbed into English. After discovering Soledad Miranda, Franco moved from Spain to France in 1969 so that he could make more violent and erotic films free of the strict censorship in Spain, and it was at this point that his career began to go downhill commercially as he turned to low-budget filmmaking with an accent on adult material. Soledad Miranda starred in a series of six erotic thrillers for Franco, all made within a one-year period, after which she was killed in a tragic automobile accident in Portugal in 1970, just as her career was taking off.
A year or two after Soledad Miranda died, a grieving Franco discovered a new leading lady in actress Lina Romay. At the time, the teenage Romay was married to a young actor/photographer named Ramon Ardid, but as she and Franco became more involved in their film projects together over the years, her marriage to Ramon ended in divorce around 1975.
Franco was married at the time to Nicole Guettard, Ms. Guettard being gradually replaced in Franco's life by Lina Romay.
Franco and Lina Romay worked together for 40 years, and lived together from 1980 onward, although they were only officially married on 25 April 2008. Until her death in 2012, Romay was his most regular actress, as well as his life companion and muse. Although Romay was listed in the credits of several films as a co-director, actor Antonio Mayans stated in a recent interview that Franco used to credit her in that manner for business reasons, although she never actually co-directed any of their films together.
Although he produced a number of relatively successful horror films in the early 1970s, many people in the industry considered him a porn director due to the huge number of X-rated adult films he began turning out. Franco returned to low-budget horror in a brief comeback period from 1980–1983, but after 1983, his career took a second downturn as he returned to making mostly pornographic films, most of which left nothing to the imagination.
In his later years, he did, however, get the opportunity to turn out two rather big-budget horror films – Faceless and Killer Barbys – both of which showed what great work he could still do when his projects were adequately funded. The entirety of his work after 1996 was direct-to-video films of very low quality, none of which were distributed theatrically. Romay died of cancer in 2012 at age 57, after which Franco died in April, 2013 from natural causes, at age 82.
Franco sometimes worked under various pseudonyms, including David Khune and Frank Hollmann. A fan of jazz music, many of his pseudonyms were taken from jazz musicians such as Clifford Brown and James P. Johnson.
Franco's themes often revolved around lesbian vampires, women in prison, surgical horror, sadomasochism, zombies and sexploitation. He worked in other exploitation film genres, such as cannibal films, spy films, giallo, crime films, science fiction, jungle adventure, Oriental menace, exorcist films, war movies, historical dramas and nunsploitation. His sex movies often contained long, uninterrupted shots of nude women writhing around on beds. Most of his hardcore films starred his lifelong companion Lina Romay, who admitted in interviews to being an exhibitionist.
Franco was known for his use of a hand-held camera and zoom shots, which he felt lent realism to his films. He also was not averse to filming several movies at the same time, knocking together a second feature on the unsuspecting producer's dime. Many of his actors only found out years after the fact that Franco had actually starred them in films for which they had never even been paid.
His main claim to fame, however, is that he managed to write and direct around 160 motion pictures in his lifetime, encompassing a wide swath of different genres, with practically no financial backing available to him..
Franco attracted a circle of bizarre but loyal actors and technicians who moved with him over the years from project to project. Many of his actors were over-the-hill performers in the twilight of their careers, many of his actresses shameless exhibitionists. He frequently worked with genre actors Howard Vernon, Paul Müller, Christopher Lee, Jack Taylor, Ewa Strömberg, Soledad Miranda, Maria Rohm, Monica Swinn, William Berger, Dennis Price, Alice Arno, Montserrat Prous, Alberto Dalbes, Antonio Mayans, Britt Nichols, Pamela Stanford, Kali Hansa and Klaus Kinski, all of whom are well known to cult film collectors.
''Zombie Lake'' vs. ''Oasis of the Zombies''
Franco was supposed to write and direct a film for Eurocine Productions in 1980 called Lake of the Living Dead but after submitting the basic plot summary, he had a falling out with the producers, Marius and Daniel Lesoeur, over the ridiculously low budget he was allotted, and the producers immediately hired French horror film director Jean Rollin to direct it. Many fans regard this as a Franco film, although Franco only contributed the basic plot points. Rollin later said in interviews he only did the film as a favor for the Lesoeurs, and that if he had known "how bad" the script was, he would not have done it. He later deleted it from his filmography.The Lesoeurs later had Rollin shoot new zombie footage in 1981 to be added to Franco's A Virgin Among the Living Dead for its 1981 re-release. Recently, Franco purists insisted that Virgin be released in its former unadulterated form on DVD, as the added Jean Rollin footage greatly slowed down the pace of the film and was really only filler material.
Franco later directed another film for the Lesouers called Oasis of the Zombies in 1981, which had a plot very similar to Zombie Lake. Franco simultaneously shot a variant version of Oasis of the Zombies starring Lina Romay and his "regulars" which was apparently released only in Spain, under the title La Tumba de los Muertos Vivientes.