The following note was published in O Estado de S.P newspaper in last December: “Brazilian playwright takes to screen the story of the mega tower that didn’t get off the ground”. I’m not kidding: three days before the launch of my book, O Condomínio Absoluto (or The Ultimate Skyscraper) in São Paulo (02/12/2009), a huge article announced Tempos Modernos, a new Brazilian soap opera inspired on São Paulo Tower by the former guru Yogi Maharishi – exactly as in The Ultimate Skyscraper!!! (See the post “The Ultimate Skyscraper” above). Tempos Modernos started on January and actually it is as bad as any other Brazilian soap opera. Protagonists: Antônio Fagundes, Fernanda Vasconcelos, Vivianne Pasmanter, Guilherme Weber etc.. Plot: Leal Cordeiro, played by Antônio Fagundes, is a crazy businessman who wants to build the highest building in Latin America.
Bosco creates mythical São Paulo on television (O Estado de São Paulo newspaper, November 29, 2009)
Rodrigo Brancatelli
(…) According to playwright Bosco Brasil, a report published in O Estado de São Paulo on May 13, 1999, surpassed expectations of even the most experienced paulistano in all sorts of absurdities. In a nutshell: “Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi invests US$ 1,65 billion in the building of a 494 metre high building with 103 floors in the centre of São Paulo”. The mega-investment, named the Maharishi Tower of Peace, would have 1.3 million square metres of shops, a convention centre, a mall, offices, hotels, a residential centre, universities, restaurants and a theatre. The project included a transport system with buses, trains, an underground station, a heliport and a monorail, which was used to reach the several parking lots and the main tower. The piece of news forecasted: “According to the schedule, the cornerstone will be launched at the beginning of 2000”.
The tallest building in the world would be built at Pátio do Pari in downtown São Paulo, but it never got off the ground. Bosco Brasil could not take his mind off the project. At that time, he was conquering the inhospitable Praça Roosevelt with his troupe after winning the Shell and the Molière Awards for best playwright for Budro (…). Ready to launch his first completely authorial soap opera that would be the next to be broadcasted at 7 pm on TV Globo, there was nothing better than appealing to the almost fictional facts of the Maharishi Tower of Peace to describe the most absurd changes São Paulo has been through this millennium.
“The funny thing is that every time I mentioned at Globo to write the story of a giant building with hundreds of floors in the centre of São Paulo, I was told that I was exaggerating. But that was absolutely true. It had really been proposed. It was something so wacky that simply had to turn into a soap opera.”
Tempos Modernos (…) shows a smart building in the centre of São Paulo named ‘Titan I’. The building is full of cameras and sensors monitored by a computer of the same strain of Hal 9000 from Stanley Kubricks’s 2001, A Space Odyssey.
