Big Time: la gran vida de Perico Vidal

Big Time is a biographical novel (or a narrated documentary) about Perico Vidal, one of the most important figures in Spanish cinema. Vidal debuted with Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin, worked with Mankiewicz on Suddenly, Last Summer; he met David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia and became one of his "essential" collaborators on Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter... But he was much more than all that. Perico Vidal—whom Sinatra introduced with the phrase "My friend Pedro, who saved my life in Spain"—was the kind of man who knew everyone and was at every party but never wanted to be photographed. In his Madrid penthouse—"Hostal Vidal," as Christian Marquand christened it—endless parties were held with the crème de la crème of the entertainment world. Vidal lived life to the fullest in the jazz-infused Barcelona of the fifties and the "American" Madrid of the sixties, and also spent time in Harlem, Brazil, and Cuernavaca. Big Time (Perico's life motto, which can be translated as "being fully immersed in something, to the core"), told by Perico and his daughter Alana, is the chronicle of a vibrant character and an unrepeatable era. It is also the moving tale of a beautiful love story.