On Its 75th Anniversary, Italy's Cinecittà Studio
Attempts to Recapture Its Former Glory
By L. Freeman
Rome
Alessandro De Angelis is the fourth generation of his
family to make props in the sculpture shop at Rome's legendary Cinecittà movie
studio. His 16-year-old daughter will follow him into the business — he hopes.
The De Angelis name is synonymous with quality throughout the film industry,
yet he fears that fierce international competition for Hollywood production
money, the slow decline of the Italian movie industry, and advances in
technology will eventually put artisans like him out of business. Already, the
family can no longer depend on movies alone to stay afloat — De Angelis
compensates his income by making copies of statues for museums. "Almost
nobody comes knocking on our door to learn the trade anymore," he says. De
Angelis' struggles mirror that of Cinecittà, which as it celebrates its 75th
anniversary on Saturday is a shell of its former glamorous self. Benito
Mussolini built Europe's biggest movie studio in the 1930s in pursuit of a
Fascist celluloid propaganda machine. It took 457 days to complete — far less
time than fixing many potholes in 21st century Rome — and in the six years
after its April 28, 1937, inauguration under the slogan, "Il cinema e
l'arma piu forte" ("Cinema is the strongest weapon"), it
produced some 300 films. The studio's heyday came during the 1950s and '60s
Italian economic boom when Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni made such
masterpieces as La Dolce Vita and 8½. Tax incentives also lured Hollywood
producers to Cinecittà to film sword-and-sandal epics like Ben Hur and the
romantic treacle Roman Holiday.
Today's Italian actors and directors say that's all
ancient history. Italy's film output began to decline in the 1980s before going
into a free fall in the '90s, in part, those in the industry believe, due to
the monopolization of production by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's
media empire, the Ministry of Culture and state broadcaster RAI. To make
matters worse, foreign productions also started bypassing Cinecittà's sound
stages for more affordable options in Eastern Europe. In 1997, Cinecittà was on
the verge of bankruptcy, saved only when the government sold the property to
private investors, including the owner of the luxury shoe company Tod's, Diego
Della Valle. Hundreds of movies were once made annually at Cinecittà, but last
year, just eight Italian films and six television series were shot there.
"Cinecittà should be named Telecitta. It was
mythical. Now they shoot TV shows," says Laura Morante, one of Italy's
most admired actresses. Morante, who has nearly 90 movies and television shows
to her credit, believes Italian politicians have left film and "culture in
general" by the wayside in recent years, a major reason for the studio's
downfall. For instance, she struggled for more than seven years to find Italian
investors for her directorial debut, a romantic comedy called Ciliegine (Little
Cherries), but in the end, was forced to make the film abroad. "Nobody
called me back. I think my project was stuck in bureaucracy. In the meanwhile,
the French asked me to do it," she says. She encourages frustrated talent
to follow her lead: "Go abroad. It's very difficult here."
Evidence of cultural abandonment by the Italian
government isn't too hard to find. In recent years, the government has
dramatically slashed funding for the arts as it's tried to reign in the world's
fourth-largest debt — much to the anger of directors, actors, artists, and the
public. Sandro Bondi, the former culture minister who in 2010 famously accused
Venice Film Festival jury president Quentin Tarantino of being the embodiment
"of an elitist, relativist and snobbish culture," was outraged last
year when the government cut funding for Cinecittà's state-owned archive from
29 million euros to 7.5 million euros, threatening the future of the facility.
"The funding is absolutely insufficient," he declared at the time.
The Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, meanwhile, began staging a
rather dramatic protest to the cuts this month by burning its works. The
museum, which is not dependent on public funding, will burn three paintings a
week until its entire collection is in ashes — "or the authorities stop
us," says Antonio Manfredi, the museum's art director. "For a country
that should be the avant-garde of the arts, the attention Italy gives to
culture is absolutely inadequate," he says.
Unsurprisingly, pessimism about the future of Italian
cinema is rife. Enzo Monteleone, who wrote the screenplay for the film
Mediterraneo, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars in 1991,
says the country still produces about "20 good films" each year, but
he believes the overall state of the industry is "tragic." He
complains that the domination of the film industry by the tripartite of
Berlusconi's media empire, state broadcaster Rai and the Ministry of Culture
has prevented independent filmmakers from securing funding and young filmmakers
from developing their talents. The government needs to follow France's lead and
take a serious interest in financing movies, he says. "In Europe, you can't
depend only on the private sector. Here, cinema is considered an art, not just
entertainment."
There are some bright spots on the horizon, however.
Italians are still among the best in the world at set design and construction,
which is one reason HBO decided to film its Rome series at Cinecittà in the
mid-2000s. Marco Valerio Pugini, part-owner of Panorama Films, which helped
produce Rome, says there's also been an upside to the economic crisis — the
Italian government last year decided to make permanent a three-year tax break
for foreign and domestic companies that shoot films in Italy. Pugini says such
incentives will hopefully staunch the flow of Hollywood and other foreign
productions to cheaper locales in Eastern Europe. "We have the same costs
as five or 10 years ago. But costs are slowly rising in the east. There'll
always be someplace cheaper but we have a large pool of talent," he says.
Cinecittà is also trying to revive interest in the studio
by building a 500-million-euro theme park called Cinecittà World on a
370-hectare property it owns on the Mediterranean coast. The park, which will
partly open at the end of 2013, is being designed by three-time Oscar-winning
art director Dante Ferretti and will include attractions based on Hollywood
mega-productions made at Cinecittà, like Ben Hur. The studio is also mulling a
90-million-euro investment to build a hotel, offices, and a new sound stage on
empty parts of its lot in Rome. Cinecittà's general manager, Giuseppe Basso,
believes the studio is poised for a comeback, fueled by Italian talent, the
allure of filming in Rome, and the new services offered by the studio. At the
very least, he says, the studio's dark days are behind it. "If you can
survive in this industry for 75 years, that's reason to celebrate."
