De Laurentiis didn't have to go that far. Starred Sordi as a young Italian who loves all things American: he tries to speak like Gary Cooper and walk like John Wayne, and he threatens suicide unless he can secure a visa to the States. Often he needed the less grandiose product the Jane FondaĪ Bergman or Fellini could stay close to home, but an ambitious producer just had to go Hollywood.
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Was less a disaster movie than a disaster. , directed by John Huston.) He then made a Napoleon film starring Rod Steiger and ignored the implications of the title ĭid smash box office, Dino figured anything big, bad and wet was surefire. For the Noah's Ark sequence, Dino hired a huge menagerie of animals, but when Bresson told him he'd be shooting only the tracks left by the animals, Dino fired him and shut down the multifilm project. , to be directed by the great French minimalist Robert Bresson.
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In the 1960s, toward the end of Hollywood's fascination with biblical epics, De Laurentiis planned a series of Old Testament drama, beginning with Situation," one associate said, "where the stakes are enormous, where he can win or lose everything." Gambling on movies wasn't so much an addiction as a religion, as natural as breathing hard on a run up a steep hill kind of like Sisyphus. He'd do it again and again, leaving fate to sort out the hits and the flops. The film tanked, but theĭidn't regret his overreaching. , directed by Hollywood stalwart King Vidor and shot at Dinocitta, the studio he had built in Rome.
, Dino hired Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda to star in the 1956 Emboldened by having crossed movie cultures with The two men never again worked together.Īrt-house hits are fine, but a big producer must make big movies. Negative to excise a long monologue he thought superfluous. , another international success though Dino filched the De Laurentiis and Fellini teamed again on In 1953, seeing the potential for worldwide appeal in Fellini's early films, he imported American actors Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart to star with Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina in More than an enabler, he was a creative businessman. , and when no one in Hollywood would have lunch with the post When Ingmar Bergman exiled himself from Sweden after a tax wrangle, he got De Laurentiis' backing for the Berlin-made This golden huckster was susceptible to the spiels of other talented dreamers he was a sucker for auteurs, from Roberto Rossellini to Sergei Bondarchuk, David Cronenberg to Sam Raimi. (See TIME's cover story on Dino De Laurentiis' (Shortly after Mangano's death, he married American producer Martha Schumacher, who survives him. They made 22 films together, and if Mangano never reached the superstar heights of Ponti's bride, Sophia Loren, she matured into an actress of erotic elegance. The star and her producer wed that year they had four children and were still married when she died 40 years later. Silvana Mangano had been an instant sensation as the dirty-dancing peasant in the 1949 And like MGM's Irving Thalberg and Dino's partner and rival Carlo Ponti, he had a movie-star wife. Short of stature, chomping on a pricey cigar, seated behind an enormous desk in a chair that elevated him above his visitors, he pursued his impulses with energy and chutzpah. He could have been an Italian cousin of the East European Jews who built the American movie empire. 10, at 91 in Beverly Hills, Calif., closed the books on a 5-ft., 4-in. But Dino never lost his drive or his nerve. (Death Wish, Conan the Barbarian, Hannibal) Won the Oscar for best foreign-language film
His dreams could cost a few lire, like the Italian comedies he made with Toto (10 films) and Alberto Sordi (22 films) or the many millions of dollars he poured into his 1976 remake of What is a salesman but a fellow with a dollar and a dream? Speaking in urgent Italian or broken English, peddling pasta for his papa or producing hundreds of films in a career that spanned nearly 70 years, Dino de Laurentiis knew that salesmanship demanded showmanship, and he had both in his blood. The gratified Aurelio recognized that his son was a born salesman." "Agostino's greatest asset which he'd use to straighten out a million different messes, in decades to come was his overwhelming skill as a communicator," wrote his biographer Tullio Kezich. "When he begins to talk, nobody will be able to make him stop." By the time he was 15, as a traveling representative for Pastaficio Moderno, his father Aurelio's food business, the kid from Naples had turned words to his advantage. "Look at it this way," she said of the lively child. His first five years, Agostino De Laurentiis didn't speak, but his mother Giuseppina showed no concern.