By Tom Lady
“¡Quiero chupar tu sangre!”
That line of dialogue is never actually spoken in 1931’s Dracula, but “I want to suck your blood!” is often attributed to the titular undead count as a way to sum up his philosophy of eternal life.
In the next installment of its annual Halloween productions at the historic United Artists Theatre on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, LA Opera (LAO) will present the long-lost Spanish-language version of the 1931 horror classic.
Presented as part of its ongoing Off Grand series, in which it strives to “expand the definition of what an opera company is, and who it's for,” LAO will feature its resident conductor, Lina González-Granados, leading the LAO Orchestra in a live-to-picture performance of a new commissioned score by Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla (The Last of Us, Brokeback Mountain).
While the film used the same sets and the same script as the Bela Lugosi-starring version, the Spanish-language version, filmed at night while the English version was filmed by day, features a Spanish-speaking cast, their performances informed by a different school of acting.
With LAO presenting the Spanish Dracula the final weekend of October (October 25-27), the Opera League will present a seminar to help shed light on the larger context of Spanish-language Hollywood productions that thrived for the first decade after the transition to talkies.
The Opera League seminar will take place on Sunday, October 20 at noon. Tickets are on sale on the League’s website, operaleague.org.
Our keynote speaker at the seminar will be Alejandra Espasande, film curator, archivist and researcher with L.A. Heritage Preservation Society.
Born in Havana, Cuba, raised in Spain and Los Angeles, Alejandra attended UCLA for her undergraduate degree (film production) and USC for her master’s in film preservation in the university’s Moving Image Archive Studies program.
With a cinephile for a mother and actors for a father and grandfather, one of Alejandra’s first big preservation wins was to get one of her grandfather’s Cuban films preserved, which in term helped bust the myth that no films were produced in Cuba before the 1959 revolution.
Her career has seen her put in seven years at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as film archivist, coordinator of public programs and membership screenings, before taking a stint at Walt Disney Studios to help with the acquisition of the Twentieth Century Fox library.
She is now based at the nonprofit Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Preservation Society (laculturalheritage.org). “I’m on a mission,” she says, “to resurrect the [trove of] nearly two hundred Spanish-speaking Hollywood productions made from the late 1920s to the late 1930s.”
BRAVO: How did your partnership with the Opera League begin?
Alejandra: I met Susana Hernández Araico, an Opera League member who is also a member of Hispanics for LA Opera (HLAO). Susana attended ¡Hablada en Español! The Legacy of Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Cinema (1929-1939), a gallery exhibition I curated this past summer at the historic Olvera Steet’s Pico House to document the relatively unknown history of these films, including George Melford’s Drácula (1931).
Highlighting the stars of these films and complemented by film screenings, the exhibition was co-presented by the L.A. Cultural Heritage Preservation Society, Instituto Cervantes of Los Angeles and El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument.
Coincidentally, LA Opera had already commissioned the score for the screening of the Spanish-language version of Dracula [for their annual Halloween production].
BRAVO: How did the Spanish-language Dracula get lost in the first place? How was it rediscovered?
Alejandra: Some people have the misconception that archives have everything of value, as a single source of truth. They assume the archives alone will take care of preserving only the important, whatever is absent was not considered good enough.
However, the reality is that archives are full of gaps, and our community can play a strong role in influencing what is given enough value to be brought into its “space of immortality.”
When a history such as that of this cinema is so unknown, and the films mostly lost, it is because neither the archive nor the community did their job. Just like the opera needs patrons to produce lavish performances, we need patrons and advocates to preserve and provide access to the few surviving films of this cinema.
The Spanish-language Dracula was almost lost because it was made in Spanish and not considered “American” enough to have value, the main reason why the majority of these old Hollywood Spanish-language films have disappeared.
Part of the film was discovered in Cuba in the 1990s, helping complete the restoration. That was when I watched it for the first time.
BRAVO: What can audiences familiar with Bela Lugosi classic expect from this Spanish version?
Alejandra: While it’s the same basic story, the interpretation is different because they had different directors with their own vision, their own voice. Then there’s the performance difference. The Spanish-speaking actors came from different backgrounds, different schools of acting.
BRAVO: How long did this last, Hollywood producing Spanish-language films?
Alejandra: About ten years, from 1929-39. L.A.’s local Spanish-language film industry had its own star system. Many of the actors had musical and opera backgrounds. That's why this ten-year period fascinates me. When I was in film school, none of this was ever mentioned.
BRAVO: About how many Spanish-language films were made during those ten years? Are any others available to the general public?
Alejandra: About one hundred-eighty Spanish-language films were produced in those ten years. About ten percent exist in archives worldwide, but only about two percent are available for the public to stream or watch on DVD.
Some of these films include the work of silent film comedians like Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy, who performed their Spanish dialogue phonetically by reading text cards placed near the camera.
As for the Spanish Dracula, you can find the best resolution version as a bonus feature of Dracula: Complete Legacy Collection, a 2017 Universal Blu-Ray release.
BRAVO: Do you have any personal favorites from this era?
Alejandra: One of my favorites is Asegures a su mujer / Insure Your Wife [1935, Fox]. The Academy [of Motion Pictures] archive did the restoration work on it, but right now you can only watch it at the archive. The same applies to El Rey de los Gitanos / King of the Gypsies [1933, Fox], a wonderful film featuring opera singer José Mojica which has been preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
This is why it’s my mission not just to resurrect the history of this lost cinema, but to make it widely available to the general public.