Teaser/trailer of the documentary rescued from the bowels of the internet.
Documentary by La caja Negra Producciones about the Spanish cartoonist who accused Steven Spielberg of plagiarism, about which there are many references on the internet but I don't think it was ever finished.
I have not been able to find any link to news about its release or if it ever got the necessary funds to finance it. I sent an enquiry to the production company, but never received a reply. Everything seems to indicate that the documentary was either never finished or never released.
I have searched and asked everywhere I could and no one has seen it or remembers it being announced at festivals or in any other media.
Synopsis:
In October 1975 the Barcelona cartoonist Joaquín Blázquez Garcés (1946- 1986) creates, commissioned by the American publishing house "Warren Magazines","Melvin", the main character of the comic strip published the following year in issue 49 of "Vampirella", entitled "Then one foggy Christmas Eve". What a surprise for Joaquín when, seven years later, a character very similar to his own jumped onto the big screen to become one of the most important icons of the seventh art: "E.T.. The Extraterrestrial".
Now Joaquín is dead, and that gives him the necessary perspective to analyse, critically and in depth, his complex life story, linking it transversally with a fundamental period of Spanish comic strips.
If you want to go a little deeper, you can start with the interview with Blázquez on the subject in the mythical magazine Cimoc nº 41 of July 1984.
The complete 8 pages of the character (1975).
About Joaquín Blázquez (Text from the official website of the documentary)
Joaquín Blázquez Garcés was born in Barcelona on 6 October 1946. His first professional job was at the age of 13 for the "Bardon Art" agency and at 18 he produced his first series, "Buffalo Bill", in the classic landscape format of adventure notebooks.
After devoting himself to humorous comics, in 1975 he contacted the Barcelona agency "Selecciones Ilustradas" with the intention of publishing in the United States for "Warren". His first tests were accepted and he decided to work with American scripts until, in 1977, he took an active part in the magazine "Eh!", which closed after 10 issues, and returned to "Bardon" to work for the English market. He immediately contacted "Editorial Norma" where he continued to write romantic series for England. That same year, Blázquez suffers a creative crisis and falls into a nervous depression that keeps him away from the world of comics until, at the end of 1978, he agrees to do a series for Germany.
Until 1983 he published works in several countries and, when "E.T." was released, he became obsessed with claiming royalties for the creature's design. He died in 1986 without success.
In references to the documentary, several blogs mention that, among the drawings, super 8 films, personal writings and newspaper clippings that Blazquez's widow gave to Víctor Sarabia for the making of a documentary, there were also letters to Spielberg, although all sources state that he never received a reply from the director of E.T.
Blazquez would later suffer from nervous depression and die at the age of forty from a stroke, which some put down to his continued intake of drugs and alcohol.
the most I could get out of it is that the neighbour upstairs would say: "Oh, look, he's made E.T." (Joaquín Blázquez)
The documentary even had a teaser/trailer(trace in Archive).
Official website(copy in Archive) also had a blog.
A review in Sagra's House.
