Yates had not worked in television since the 1960s but was persuaded to try by his friend John Frankenheimer. "He said I should do some TV, that it could be fun as long as you take the same care as you do with feature films--get good actors, do something that's going to be special. It was good advice."[2]
He discovered a friend of his, John Mortimer, had just written a script of Don Quixote and offered it to Yates to read. "I did, and I really liked it," said Yates. "When my agent established no director was attached, I went to see [producer] Robert Halmi and said I'd like to make 'Quixote'."[2] By coincidence, Yates had been attached in the 1970s to direct a film version of Don Quixote, based on a screenplay by Waldo Salt, which would have starred Richard Burton in the lead and Peter O'Toole as Sancho Panza; the film was never produced.[2]
Of all the Hallmark adaptations of novels which premiered on Turner Network Television, only Don Quixote is still unavailable on a U.S. DVD. The film was made in English and released on VHS shortly after it was telecast in the U.S. and a Region 2 DVD (PAL) was released by Hallmark in 2002, there is also a dubbed-into-Spanish version distributed by Divisa Home Video (Spain), and a DVD available with English or Russian-dubbed voices, with subtitles in Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Russian.
^Don Quixote (PAL DVD - Region 2, Japan, Europe, South Africa, and the Middle East, including Egypt) (in English and German). Amazon. 2000. ASINB00DRHTYCI.
