The Good, the Bad, the English & the Deutsch

OPEN IMAGE GALLERY

Good? Bad? Definitely not ugly.

"I've never seen so many men wasted so badly." -- The Man With No Name

"It was a million pounds of fun." -- Austin filmmaker Ron Deutsch

"I made the local paper!" -- Austin design shaman Marc English

The dust has settled, the six-guns have gone silent, and the sleepy Spanish township of Alméria is once again a sun-drenched seaside paradise, drowsing in the aftermath of what was, by all accounts, the most spectacular Alamo Drafthouse/Rolling Roadshow Summer Tour ever.

Alamo founders Tim and Karrie League screened Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at locations key to Leone's Dollars trilogy in and around Alméria, and the dusters and cheroots showed up from all over Europe to participate in the cinematic bloodbath-by-starlight.

Actual Austinite attendance was limited to quatro thanks to the travel involved, but local filmmaker and Chronicle pal Ron Deutsch labeled the event "fucking awesome," while Marc English, who showed up in his trademark full-on Clash-meets-Leone, gunfightin' graphics-master-mondo-muthafucka mode, managed to not only get his picture in the local paper, but also impressed the locals with his genuine Texan charisma [note the newly minted "fan" by his side].

Also making the trek to spaghetti western heaven were Nacho Vigalondo, director of Fantastic Fest fave Timecrimes and composer/filmmaker Eugenio Mira, and a battalion of glorious Limey bastards "who had only ever met online."

"The town of Alméria," Deutsch told us, "is not your typical, lush, touristy Costa Brava kind of place. They grow tomatoes there. That may be all they do, actually. But, you have to conceive that we traveled halfway across the world to go to a place that looks exactly like West Texas. We're driving around thinking, 'This looks like eastern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas. Which, of course, is why they shot all the spaghetti westerns there, you know?"

Actually, the Alamo's Rolling Roadshow event isn't the first of its kind in the region. Witness Tuco Tours, a local outfit run "by a British couple, Richard and Veronica, who met in England, fell in love, and then realized that they both shared a passion for spaghetti westerns and then moved to this coast of Spain to start this tour company."

Shades of Tim and Karrie League, no?

"Oh yeah," says Deutsch. "It's an Alamo kind of world over there, for sure."