Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda recently announced that he has purchased the film rights to a forgotten screenplay written nearly a half century ago by Gabriel García Márquez, the Guardian reported. The Nobel Prize-winning author penned the script for Frontera, a Western about an ageing gunslinger and his young sidekick, before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967 brought him international literary recognition.
De Anda first heard of the screenplay forty years ago, when he was offered the part of the younger lead, and assumed at the time that the script was written by prominent Mexican screenwriter and director Luis Alcoriza, who had originally planned to make the film. "When I finally bought the rights, about a month ago, I discovered the surprise that the story was not in fact by Alcoriza, but by Gabriel García Márquez," De Anda told Mexican newspaper Reforma. "Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western. I don't think anybody knew he had written anything like that."
Planning to play the part of the older pistolero, De Anda is considering Mexican actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna as possibilities for the youthful partner. He intends to begin filming next year.
