Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

Hollywood Sequel 189bing capital, Hollywood was finished, since it was being done inevery country where the film was to be shown.During this third sojourn in L.A., I often saw Ren6 Clair andErich von Stroheim, whom I liked enormously. Resigned to the factthat I'd never make another movie of my own, I nonetheless stillhad the habit of jotting down ideas-for example, the lost little girlwhose parents search for her everywhere and can't find her, while allthe while she's actually right beside them (a situation I used in ThePhantom of Liberty), or a movie with characters who act exactly likeinsects: a bee, a spider, and so on. One day while I was out driving,I discovered the enormous two-mile-long Los Angeles garbage dump,with everything from orange peels to grand pianos to whole houses.Smoke from the fires rose here and there; and at the bottom of thepit, on a small piece of land raised slightly from the piles of garbage,stood a couple of tiny houses inhabited by real people. Once I saw ayoung girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, emerge from one of thehouses, and I fantasized her involved in a love affair in this infernaldecor. Man Ray and I wanted to make a film about it, but we couldn'traise the money.Instead, I worked with Rubia Barcia, a Spanish writer, on ascreenplay for a mystery called The Midnzgbt Bride, about a younggirl who dies and then reappears. It was a perfectly rational story,since everything is explained at the end, but here too we couldn'tget it produced.I also tried working for Robert Florey, who was making The Beastwith Five Fingers, starring Peter Lorre. At his suggestion, I thoughtup a scene that shows the beast, a living hand, moving through alibrary. Lorre and Florey liked it, but the producer absolutely refusedto use it. When I saw the film later in Mexico, there was my scenein all its original purity. I was on the verge of suing them whensomeone warned me that Warner Brothers had sixty-four lawyers inNew York alone. Needless to say, I dropped the whole idea.It seemed as if I'd really touched bottom, until I ran into DeniseTual, whom I'd known in Paris when she was married to Pierre