Guy Gallo is twenty-eight years old, soft voiced, black haired, and handsome. He is also a good whiskey drinker. On this day, he is sitting on a crude wooden box on a path cut into the side of a hill in the village of Metepec, a dozen miles from Cuernavaca. Across the path, perched on the edge of a steep barranca, is a reconstruction of the Farolito, Lowry’s mythical cantina-whorehouse, where the Consul comes to his squalid end. The infantry of a movie location — technicians, grips, actors, drivers — seems to be everywhere; trailers jam a side road; horses whinny in an improvised corral. Behind Gallo, standing on a hill, their flat Indian faces as impassive as masks, a family of Mexicans watches.
Gallo started writing plays at Harvard, and had two produced. “I went on to the Yale School of Drama, to get a doctorate. At some point during that year, I began to think about
Gallo then went to work. He read Lowry’s novel closely, wrote several critical papers on it, made a bony structural outline. Bluhdorn then told him about a possible producer from Mexico. Could Gallo fill in the skeletal outline, for presentation to this Mexican producer? “It sort of seemed silly to write a prose treatment of a novel,” Gallo says, “so I wrote the screenplay very, very quickly, trying to give Bluhdorn something to sell.”
But then it turned out that the rights were not available, and Bluhdorn lost interest. Gallo put the script away, continued with his schoolwork at Yale, arid wrote two original screenplays. Then his name was given to Michael Fitzgerald, the son of poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, and the producer of Flannery O’Connor’s
“Fitzgerald said no, don’t send
Gallo’s screenplay was a stripped-down and simplified version of Lowry’s novel. The novel begins on the Day of the Dead in 1939, with Laruelle remembering the events of the Day of the Dead the year before, when borh the Consul and his wife were killed. In his screenplay, Gallo removes Laruelle as a character, merging some of him with Hugh, making a more cleanly structured triangle of the Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh. He gets rid of the 1939 chapter, and has all the action take place in present time, 1938.
“Basically, it was a structural decision,” Gallo says. “If you can do it in one day, how do you do ít? In one of his letters, Lowry talks about his version of