Series Crew

I've given the two princial crew their own pages because their bios were getting a little long to include here:

Writer-Director Victor Luis Chavez's biography can be found here.

Executive Producer Guido K. Schultz's biography can be found here.

There is a lot about the Ivory Bastards that was way ahead of its time, and I’m not just talking about the storylines. The show was a masterpiece of visual and aural storytelling that Victor Luis Chavez was only partly responsible for.

Ivory Bastards was a show done on the cheap and it definitely showed. The crew was hired primarily for their cheapness. Much of the production crew were unreliable drunks and drug addicts (you think those camera angles were “creative expression”?).

However, most all of the post-production crew were hired straight out of film school and were ready to make an impact in the industry. Unfettered by any direct oversight but challenged by high expectations, these crew members were given a creative freedom that would launch them into successful careers.

I was forwarded the following articles from some fans from Mexico who know of this site and pass some neat stuff to me that I would never get a chance to discover on my own. The following are snippets from larger articles from different film trade magazines where some of the more successful crew members had been interviewed for some of their later projects. I have only included the sections dealing with the Ivory Bastards and the translations are not my own.

Famie Anteo was the Music Director for Ivory Bastards. She was a 1971 graduate of Conservatorio Nacional de Musica, a very prestigious music school somewhere in Mexico. She went on to great success as a film composer and in 1998 she was interviewed by the conservatory’s alumni magazine. At the time of the interview she had just released a CD of selections of her film scores.

CNM: Where did you go immediately after graduation?

FA: Well, right after leaving the conservatory I went to work composing my first cycle for piano and cello, but I needed to make some money in the meantime. This was the early seventies and the classical music scene was seeing a terrible decline in patronage. I was about to leave for Spain in hopes of finding some work with a friend of mine from the conservatory who was sitting first violin for the orchestra in Valencia. I needed money for the plane ticket and I saw a sign in my laundromat advertising for a piano player. I thought it would be for a band or for tutoring, and I tore off the phone number and called it. As it turns out, it was for a television show.

CNM: What was the show?

FA: Did you ever hear of a children’s show called “Ivory Bastards”?

CNM: You’re kidding.

FA: No. I worked on “Ivory Bastards”. For four years. Four long, long years.

CNM: Why on earth did you work on that show? I mean…

FA: Well, it was work, wasn’t it? Mexico was in a recession. I had no idea if my years of study would actually be put to any good use. Here was an opportunity to make some money, learn something – film scoring – that could provide me some good experience, and to work with some cutting edge technology that even the conservatory didn’t have at the time.

CNM: Like what?

FA: Oh, my God. They had the most beautiful brand new state of the art synthesizer, the Korg PS 3100 polyphonic analog synthesizer. It was a gorgeous piece of equipment for its time. I don’t know how we got it. During my second week of work at the studios, I met Victor Chavez, the writer and director of the show, for the very first time. I had my head down, writing, when I look up and there he is. He scared the life out of me! He had a bloody nose and he was sweating, I didn’t know what to think!
He said that he had something for me and he points to a wooden crate sitting on a dolly in the corner. The crate had two things printed on it: “Cartajena, Colombia” and “Confiscated: Police Evidence”. He tore it open with a crowbar and inside was the synthesizer. He said that I could never speak of this, then he grabbed me, gave me an incredibly passionate kiss, and ran off.

CNM: You’re kidding me. What was it like to work with him?

FA: A brilliant man. A tortured man. You could never tell if his vision was destroying him, or if he was destroying his vision. Of course, he was terrible.

CNM: What?

FA: I didn’t let that son of a bitch near me ever again after that first day. We communicated by sliding notes to each other under the door and I always kept a small pistol with me. I really don’t feel like talking about any of that. Ask me something else.

Alberto Munoz was the production designer for the last three seasons of the show, brought in during the show’s retooling. He was in charge of all of the sets as well as all of the props used during the show. The following excerpt is from a 2001 interview with Diario Americano Latino De la Película, a film magazine. At the time Munoz was nominated for a Goya (Spain’s Academy Award) for Best Art Direction for “Cambiar las Reglas”, which I can’t find on video for the life of me. This interview only barely references IB.

Magazine: I understand you got your start in children’s programming.

AM: That’s right, that’s right. While I was still in film school I started working for the Sunday Morning kid’s show “Chiquititas”(Little Angels) working as an assistant to the set designer and to the Telefé prop department overall. It was a lot of fun and just about everything that I learned about working fast and on a budget I learned during those years.
After two years of that, I left Argentina and went to Mexico City and worked there for a little while longer in television, then I got my first film assignment as a set constructor on “Tusk” working for Jodorowsky.

Magazine: Before that, didn’t you work on the show “Ivory Bastards”?

AM: Wow. Do you really want me to end this interview right now?

Carlos Jara and Sergio Belaunzaran were responsible for the cutting-edge special effects on Ivory Bastards. Both were brought on board when Chavez took the show into a sci-fi direction. Their work on the show was singular for its time, given the technology available and the budget. The team has stayed together for over thirty years, and they have gone on to do contract work for dozens of major-budget Mexican releases, including the amazing “Cronos” for filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. The following excerpt is from an interview done by a Mexican film blog back in 2004.

Salpicadura (Splatter): How did the two of you meet?

Carlos: We both met when we were hired to work on Ivory Bastards back in 1972. We both just came out of film school and we were both hired within a week of graduation to work on the show.

Sergio: Which was insane. We had absolutely no practical experience, at least nothing professional, and we are hired to do this show, which was just in the process of being refashioned into this futuristic wrestler thing. We had less than nine weeks to create all of these special effects before the first three episodes were to be shipped to the syndicators.

Carlos: We lived in the studio. We moved a bed that was in the prop department into our production studio and we both slept there overnight. I can tell you specifically that I slept at my own place for only two evenings when I worked that first two months. My landlady sold my furniture.

Sergio: Man, I’m telling you, the first year on that show was beyond belief. We had no idea what we were doing. We did a lot of work with models and matte paintings, techniques that were old and outdated even by the standards of the early seventies. And it showed. God, the first season’s shows were absolute trash, at least as far as we thought, as far as our effects were concerned.

Splatter: Were you ever almost fired?

Sergio: We thought we would be. I was ready to just chalk it up as experience and move on to something else. But the director absolutely loved our work. He said that it was exactly what he was looking for. I remember that when we finally finished posting the first episode of season 2, he came running into our studio. He had just finished watching the completed work and I guess he loved it!

Carlos: Oh my God, he was freaking out and jumping up and down yelling, “Beautiful! Beautiful! Finally! Someone who gets it! The coarseness! The ugliness! Perfect! Perfect!” He’s jumping up and down, he’s shaking our hands over and over, patting us on the back. He hung around for the rest of the day, asking how we achieved certain things, how we did this, how we did that – the guy wouldn’t leave!

Sergio: He bought us lunch, had it delivered and just told us all about what he saw as his overall vision for the future of the show. He already had all this stuff worked out, storylines that would have taken years to produce. But he had it all, already in his head, complete dialogue, scenes already storyboarded in his head. He was telling us what he wanted to see from us for shows that wouldn’t be shot for years, if we ever lasted that long, which we didn’t. He was intense. You’re aware of Victor Luis Chavez, right?

Splatter: Of course. He was killed, wasn’t he?

Carlos: That’s right. He was. But I hadn’t seen him for years by then. He was always calling us up to go back and work for him, but we never did. It would have been a huge step back for us at that point.

Sergio: Victor would not leave us alone. I think that because the work we did was the job closest to pure fantasy and visualization, we were the ones closest to the kind of work he preferred, his surreal artwork and performance pieces and stuff. He was always barging in and hanging around, seeing what we were up to, even working out scenes to correspond to the kind of effects we were able to pull off. (to Carlos) Remember the exploding sow?

Carlos: (laughing) Oh, wow! The exploding sow, I nearly forgot! Man that was something.

Splatter: What was that? I never really saw the show. I’ve only read or heard about it or saw stills from the show in old magazines.

Carlos: Yeah, you would be too young to have seen that. And besides, the exploding sow never made it to air anyhow.

Sergio: The exploding sow was from the end of season three. What it was, was that we had been talking about how my uncle used to do some hunting and about the different trophies he had acquired, and Victor Luis started talking about his work as a butcher when he was a kid. Anyhow, one thing leads to another and he decides that he wants the climax of this scene to be where this sow blows up. It had to do something with like El Cojo Mente was being interrogated, and the bad guys had stolen his prize pet sow and they both got hooked up to this lie detector contraption. Every time Cojo told a lie, the machine would force-feed this sow a bunch of food.

Carlos: The thing was that they had actually stolen the wrong sow, and this pig that was hooked up to the machine actually meant nothing to Cojo. So to turn the tables Cojo started answering all of their interrogation with these huge lies, real whoppers, and the sow kept getting fed all this food until finally it explodes, guts everywhere. So then Cojo went into a rage, broke loose and started killing everybody. It was a lot of fun to create and to shoot, but of course, it never made it past the censors.

Splatter: Wow! It sounds as though it was a lot of fun to work for Chavez.

Sergio: Oh, no. He was a terrible person.

Carlos: Oh, he was terrible.