Prologue: Movie Ruins
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Prologue Movie Ruins On a March morning in 2011, I met Italian cinematographer Sergio Salvati in front of Cinecittà studios on the outskirts of Rome. He had agreed to take me to the fabled Roman lot so that I could gain access to the Istituto Luce archive to view old Italian newsreels. I had meet Salvati several days before, down the road at the national fi lm school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografi a. I had been doing research at the school’s library, hunting for any kind of material related to Hollywood’s postwar productions in Italy. I knew him from his work on Lucio Fulci’s gory zombie movies and lurid thrillers. I soon learned that he was also a teacher at the Centro Sperimentale and the former head of the Italian Association of Cinematographers. A man of warmth and generosity, he was an excellent guide for my research aims. Salvati helped me check in at the studio’s front entrance and introduced me to the staff of the Luce archive. He then left me to spend the rest of the morning watching newsreels, such as La Settimana Incom, which reported on the “Hollywood on the Tiber” phenomenon with segments on the arrival of Hollywood stars and directors at Rome’s Ciampino Airport. As is com- mon in archival work, the footage was interesting, but it wasn’t a gold mine. Aft er a few hours, I fi nished and left the Luce offi ces only to fi nd myself on the grounds of Cinecittà without an escort. I expected to be ushered out of the studio, but the place was deserted. Th e urge to wander around alone was impossible to resist. Aft er all, here was a studio that fi gured prominently in my research project and movie imagination. Established in 1937 by Benito Mussolini, Cinecittà would become the center of Italian studio production. During World War II, however, it was a target of Allied bombing and housed occupying German soldiers. Th e facil- ity served as a refugee camp immediately aft er the war, but soon, fi lmmaking xiii figure 1. A dilapidated set from the Gangs of New York (2002) production stands next to Cinecittà’s water tank. (Photo by author, Rome, March 21, 2011) activities resumed. Hollywood began undertaking productions at the studio in order to invest lire earnings that had been frozen by the Italian govern- ment, which intended to force US fi lm companies to invest locally rather than repatriate this money. MGM used these frozen funds to help rebuild the lot’s damaged structures so that it could produce its big-budget epic Quo Vadis (1951) there.1 For much of the 1950s and into the 1960s, Cinecittà was home to countless Hollywood fi lm shoots and an Italian production boom of genre pictures and movies by auteurs like Federico Fellini, whose work turned me on to the creative promise of cinema when I was a teenager. As I made my way through Cinecittà, I came across artifacts of its legen- dary past. In a corner of the studio lot were the decaying remains of the towering statues from the Circus Maximus scenes in Ben-Hur (1959). I passed by Stage 5, the jumbo soundstage where Fellini conjured his dreamlike visions. In another section of the studio was the oversize Venusia half-head from Fellini’s Casanova (1976), lying on the ground as if emerging from the earth. Th ere were more recent relics, too. Against the back end of the lot, surrounding the studio’s empty water tank, were the remains of the sets for xiv • Prologue Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002, fi g. 1). About a decade old, the crumbling buildings of “Five Points” New York looked like a ghost town. Even stranger were the remaining sets for the television series Rome (2005–7). Located about six miles from the real ruins of the Roman Forum, the fading TV fabrication of ancient Rome seemed uncanny. As with many of the post- war Hollywood productions I was studying, the producers of Gangs of New York and Rome opted to fi lm in Cinecittà to take advantage of economic inducements and the Italians’ celebrated set-building skills. More than just evidence of Cinecittà’s fi lm shoots over the years, these movie ruins represented a hidden cinema history that I was trying to exca- vate.2 Walking the desolate back lot that day, I was witness to the tangible remains of the interplay of postwar international politics, economics, and fi lmmaking practices that drove Hollywood to make movies around the world, in places like Cinecittà. Back in Los Angeles, my home at the time, there were casualties of this move. A fi lm workforce had faced uncertain job opportunities partly due to the global production strategies of the US motion picture industry.3 Th is tangled history of postwar Hollywood, foreign fi lm industries, and changing production practices is the subject of this book. Th e excavation of these haunting movie ruins is its goal. Movie Ruins • xv .