The peajista who with his scripts conquered Netflix and HBO

Nahuel Gallotta

07/28/2020 - 13:01

• Clarín.com
• Live

Sometimes the lives of screenwriters also seem like a script. Marcos Osorio Vidal was 30 years old and had been working at a toll for five years, but he also wrote as a hobby. On any given morning, a cabinmate who was a fan of his stories and novels surprised him with an urgent call: “Dude, bring your script! I have Máximo Cosetti here ”. Here was the Monte Grande Toll (Ezeiza - Cañuelas Highway). Marcos approached. He did not have it on him, but he did have a speech: that he was in his first year of the race, that he had sold scripts to Final Time and World of Sensations , and most importantly: that he had a proposal for The Simulators .

Maximo Cosetti was, in reality, the character played by actor Diego Peretti in the award-winning series by Damián Szifron. Marcos had written a script based on a question asked by Federico D'Elía, who in fiction was Mario Santos. "What would you ask The Simulators ?" They asked him. And his answer was: "Scripts". Then Marcos began to write.

It was 2003. Peretti was on his way to the recording of the last chapter of the first season. I was lost; At the toll, he asked for help and the cashier lied: he replied that he did not know how to guide him, but asked him to wait for him to the side, that one of his colleagues would approach him and solve the problem. And he went to look for Marcos. When the latter arrived, he appeared before the actor as a toll attendant and lent him a phone so that he could call the production and ask to be picked up. All his companions watched the scene. But Marcos, nervous, did not dare to speak of "the other" .

Marcos Osorio Vidal in the Torres de Madero, his place in the world. / / Constance Niscovolos

"Come on, boludo! Animate", they encouraged him on the internal phone. Not even with all that push, he couldn't make up his mind. Peretti, to top it all, did not give him the slightest foot to get away. Until he perked up. This episode in the life of Marcos Osorio Vidal had a happy ending: within a few weeks he had already joined the writing team of Los Simuladores .

Today, sixteen years after that scene, one of the series he wrote is on Netflix ( Apache: the life of Carlos Tevez , which was, together with La Casa de Papel , the series most viewed by Argentines in 2019). Another, El Tigre Verón , was in the prime time of El Trece and is already working on the second season. He also writes the third in a HBO series ( The Bronze Garden ) and will soon travel to Mexico for an international production. With Dynamo, a production company with locations in Bogotá, Mexico, New York and Madrid, he is preparing a comedy. And another of his projects is a biopic about Pepe Mujica, the former Uruguayan president. But his story, which could be a script, had started long before.

I knew that the toll was a very good job, but transitory. He wrote a lot, with the motivation of a worker who believes that one day he will be able to live on his stories.

Scene from Apache, the Netflix series about Tevez. One of Osorio Vidal's works.

The thousand and one jobs

The Osorio Vidal moved from Uruguay to La Matanza when Marcos was one year old. He did primary school in public schools in the area and found his first "world", as it is said in the slang of the scripts, under the first department of the family. It was - is - a few meters from General Paz and Ricchieri, and within the complex known as the Torres de Madero.

The arrival of drugs in the neighborhood would divide that first group of friends. Some ended up past, "putting pipe" to consume. Marcos, who as a little boy watched movies with his dad, signed up for the CBC Graphic Design. Then he enrolled in Journalism, in Lomas de Zamora.

“I was aiming for creativity. I was nothing to study Advertising ”, she remembers in a tour of the Towers where she lived her adolescence and youth.

The drawing hobby led him to try the comic, but as a way of narrating the ideas he had in his head. While pacing from career to career, he worked as a taxi driver, remisero, data entry, cadet, grocer . Until the toll booth came out, which, for a twenty-year-old from a few blocks in La Matanza, was glory. In other words: a blank job, well paid, a few hours a day and close to home.

“I knew it was a very good job, but temporary. He wrote a lot, with the motivation of a worker, of the one who believes that one day he will be able to live on his stories, ”he says. I had faith in myself. I knew it would work. It is an energy that comes with me, an attitude towards life, not only in writing. ”

The turning point of the script of his life would come one morning at the toll booth. Reading the newspaper he found the publicity of a script course. He called, asked, listened, and signed up. The final practical work was, of course, writing a script. He finished it with a partner, Claudia Morales . They sent it. After a month they gave them the news: the production of Tiempo Final , the Telefe series, wanted it. He collected, more or less, what Marcos earned in a month at the toll.

The second stage of the course took place at the home of the teacher, Jorge Maestro . Always with Claudia Morales, he wrote another script and presented it in Mundo de feelings . The answer was the same: they bought it.

The third script, now without Morales, was for Los Simuladores . Months later, he waived the toll.

Bronze Garden (HBO), with Joaquín Furriel. Osorio Vidal is already writing the third season.

Theory and practice

Osorio Vidal talks about "worlds". In the logic of that concept, his would be Villa Madero, the careers he attended, the toll and his colleagues, the rock band he formed with his journalism colleagues, the time he lived in Laferrere, the delicatessen he had and attended in Isidro Casanova, the passengers he took in the taxi and the remis, the times he fell in love, his friends, backpacking trips to Europe. “The world you have is key. It's all you have when thinking about a story, "he says.

"It is one of the problems that new writers may have: they are young and they have no world," he adds. On top of that, our profession is very lonely. When they invite me to talk with students, I recommend going out. Going to bars, traveling by public transport, listening to other people's conversations. Let them start writing about what they know ; there is always someone who has something to tell. Your life creates a world for you. If you don't have it, what original story are you going to tell? You're only going to make copies of others. And then, at least what I do, is to overturn that in what I write. The viewer is hooked because he sees it as possible, as if the series were dealing with a problem of his or a son. "

His work, he says, is somewhat invisible to viewers, who remember directors and actors, but never those who write. And it is also a full time task: “One never disconnects. The head works 24 hours . Over there an idea comes to you and you turn on the computer at midnight. And my wife says to me: 'What are you doing?' The whole process is a job. What I enjoy is the result ”. And she adds that she only forgets everything at the barbecue with friends or while playing the PlayStation.

In order to find a break, before the pandemic he had signed up for swimming. To swim, relax and not think about your trade . The problem was that in the 120 feature films he came to do, ideas came to mind: conflicts, resolutions, questions of each character. "I was coming out of the water and I wanted to sit down and write," he says, a little serious and a little laughing.

“Being locked up limits my inspiration. And I don't mean going out to bars. I have active, not passive, moments of introspection. Swimming is a time of creativity. I figure things out of the scripts while I swim. Today, since I have no choice but to stay at home, my job saves me, ”she says from her isolation.

Writing marginal world series is very difficult if you don't have something from that universe. When I went to Fuerte Apache for Tevez, I remembered my life in Torres de Madero.

El Tigre Verón (El Trece), one of the series written by Osorio Vidal.

Another key: investigate

All that life full of experiences and people with all kinds of personalities helped him make up for not seeing so much cinema or belonging to an intellectual environment. Therefore, as many times as he can, he tries to complement himself with another screenwriter with antagonistic characteristics. Because the "world" often does not reach.

In those cases, what he does is investigate as if he were a journalist. For example, for El Tigre Verón , the fiction starring Julio Chávez, visited refrigerators and spoke with trade unionists and union officials.

In the Tevez series , he interviewed the Boca crackman and his brother, walked Fuerte Apache and read old police news about the neighborhood gangs. Now he is having talks with Fat Courage with a view to a series about this mythical thief of flow trucks.

And in late October, if the pandemic allows it, he will travel to the border between Mexico and the United States to tour a territory that he will have to describe in another project .

In their search for data, they also often call psychologists, plane pilots, or well-known mechanics. And if he doesn't know any, he looks for them, introduces himself and asks them.

"I understand that if you inquire or interview the character you have to write about, you can do something interesting," he says. “But I feel that, more than anything in the series of marginal worlds or particular characters, it is very difficult to write them if you don't have something from that universe. What you write should touch something of yours, something of your own, that has happened to you. When I went to Fuerte Apache I remembered my life in Torres de Madero : the characters, the paddock, the kiosk and warehouses that sold everything. ”

-And what would you most like to do as a screenwriter?

- I believe that a very South American series, well of the conurbano, that could be the one of the kids of the Torres de Madero. Or a comedy. I am wanting to change gender. As a spectator, what I like to watch the most are police officers. And what I like to write the most is comedy. Anyway, everything leads me to the police. It is what works best for me. But beyond the genre, I would like it to be with the resources that European screenwriters have. From the economic point of view, they have the luxury of writing a single project at a time, and the producers put everything necessary so that the script can be filmed. There is a budget and it shows. We have a lot of creative talent here. The few series we do, in the end, travel abroad. I think we have the capacity and a little more ... how to say it ... Hunger! It is understood?