The Director and Producer Who Came to Blows in the Spanish Desert

Scandals & Feuds5/5 wildness

The Director and Producer Who Came to Blows in the Spanish Desert

John Guillermin and André de Toth on El Condor / 1960s-1970s

The production of El Condor was reportedly destabilized by a bitter power struggle between director John Guillermin and producer André de Toth. Larry Cohen later said the two men did not get along partly because de Toth wanted to direct the picture himself; de Toth had taken over from René Clément on the earlier film Play Dirty and, in Cohen's account, wanted a similar opportunity on El Condor. Their disagreement allegedly escalated beyond ordinary creative arguments into a physical fistfight on the production. Cohen remembered the clash as part of a broader disappointment with the film: he felt Guillermin was not a strong director and believed Lee Van Cleef had failed to play the comic, Humphrey Bogart-inspired version of the character Jaroo that he had written. The experience was so disillusioning that Cohen later said it convinced him to direct his own scripts rather than watch other filmmakers reshape them.