The 'De Santis Case': Screenwriting, Political Boycott and Archival Research

JOSC 5 (1) pp. 101–123 Intellect Limited 2014

Paolo Russo Oxford Brookes University

The ‘De Santis case’: Screenwriting, political boycott and archival research

Abstract Keywords In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s writer-director Giuseppe De Santis Giuseppe De Santis was the most successful Italian film-maker worldwide, thanks to box-office hits like writer-director the Oscar-nominated Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (1949). However, endless rows with archives producers, distributors and censorship soon forced him into professional exile until unfinished projects his creative voice was completely silenced. Over the years De Santis denounced a political boycott systematic boycott against him because of his social and political commitment. All censorship scripts needed the central government film office approval; this system enforced a form of pre-emptive censorship by controlling the writing and packaging process. This article unveils the findings of comprehensive research conducted at the De Santis Fund in Rome. While De Santis’s official filmography lists only one title in the last 33 years of his life, his archive contains dozens of treatments and full scripts (and the film-maker’s correspondence) adding up to a total of almost 50 projects that were never made. The materials analysed here not only allow a thorough re-write of De Santis’s career, but also shed light on the intricate relations between politics and the Italian film industry in the post-war years.

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1. With the notable When I am dead I’d like to be remembered not only for the films I made exception of Antonio Vitti’s volume (1996), but also for all the countless projects I was kept from doing. De Santis’s cinema (Giuseppe De Santis in Castaldini 1995: 5) remains vastly unexplored outside of Italy. This also explains why most of the references used for this Introduction article are in Italian. This article is based on research I have conducted at the Fondo De Santis (hence- 2. An interesting forth, De Santis Fund). The Fund includes the film-maker’s personal archives website in the form of an ongoing survey currently housed at the Chiarini Library at the CSC-Centro Sperimentale di on unproduced Cinematografia in Cinecittà, Rome. While my initial aim is to investigate and film projects is: ‘Unproduced and re-evaluate the career of a film-maker whose forced inactivity confined him to Unfinished Films: An a lifetime of scriptwriting, I also intend to show how archival research and the Ongoing Film Comment study of unfinished screenplays and other manuscripts can shed light on and project’. Available at: http://www. help to understand the intricate relations between politics and the film industry filmcomment.com/ thus balancing between the historical, the industrial/institutional and, at least in article/unproduced- part, the conceptual research trajectories outlined by Maras (2011). and-unfinished-films-a- ongoing-film-comment- Giuseppe De Santis is one of the most neglected writer-directors by schol- project. Accessed ars of the golden age of Italian post-World War II cinema, especially outside 25 February 2013. Italy.1 In his films, he made systematic use of a new, glamourized star system 3. Vitti’s extensive volume that launched, among others, Silvana Mangano, Lucia Bosè and Raf Vallone; (2006) in particular includes transcripts his narratives were articulated around socially committed themes through a of De Santis’s lectures typical rendition of classical Hollywood genres (western, melodrama, musi- and conferences in the cal). By 1959, all of De Santis’s films had been distributed worldwide (in both USA in the early 1990s and other articles, western and eastern bloc countries): he was nominated twice to an Academy interviews and essays. Award: Riso amaro/Bitter Rice for Best Writing in 1951, and Cesta duga godinu Only one chapter dana/The Year Long Road for Best Foreign Language Film in 1959. He won a though addresses some of the issues related to Golden Globe (The Year Long Road), and a Silver Ribbon (Best Director for De Santis’s career but Caccia tragica/The Tragic Pursuit (1946) in 1947), and was nominated for a limited to just a few of the projects housed in Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Festival (again for The Tragic Pursuit). the Fund. Despite his huge success and popularity both in Italy and abroad, after one last large-scale production in the Soviet Union (Italiani brava gente/Attack and Retreat, 1964) De Santis only managed to make one minor film in 1972 and none in the last 25 years of his life. The history of cinema is paved with unfinished or even doomed projects – Luchino Visconti’s and Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter’s attempted adaptations of Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu, Fellini’s The Voyage of G. Mastorna, Alain Resnais’ The Adventures of Harry Dickson, Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind and Don Quixote, Kubrick’s Napoleon and A.I., to name just a few.2 However, with the notable exception of Welles, these were all individual cases in otherwise long and successful careers. For De Santis, no longer being able to make films became a permanent status. By the time a few scholarly publications first tackled the issue at the turn of the 1980s his forcibly interrupted career had already been branded ‘the De Santis case’ (Farassino 1978; Camerino 1982; Parisi 1983). De Santis’s death in 1997 revived the interest in the film-maker’s work but only a few scholars focused their attention on some of the unfinished projects (Toffetti 1996; Grossi and Spagnoletti 1997; Farassino 2002; Vitti 2006).3 None attempts a thorough examination of all the scripts and documents available in the Fund; none attempts a really systematic collation between primary and secondary sources in order to investigate the reasons behind ‘the De Santis case’ in a comprehensive way, which is what I purport to do in this article.

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4. It must be noted that the distinction between short and full or draft treatment is easily blurred in De Santis’s case as most of his short treatments are very detailed with a strong narrative structure already outlined by scenes. 5. Additional secondary sources mention 15 further projects. Because no related primary material or corroborating evidence was found, they are not included in this study.

Figure 1: Press release by the International Film Committee of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announcing The Year Long Road (1957) among the Golden Globe winners (listed at number 3, incorrectly titled as The Road a Year Long) (1959; courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

A tally of just the unfinished projects reveals that the collection of the De Santis Fund comprises 102 mostly typewritten manuscripts dating as far back as 1943. Of these:

• Four are brief outlines in the form of collected notes (three projects) • 39 are short treatments or story synopsis (twenty projects) • 27 are full/long treatments (twelve projects)4 • 32 are full screenplay drafts (ten projects)

A good number of these manuscripts include handwritten annotations, amendments, revisions, hand-drawn camera setups and, only a few, esti- mated budgets. They refer to a total of 29 different projects, all originated by De Santis mostly as feature films or, in a few instances starting from the 1970s, television movies and serials. At least ten went through complete development and quite a few reached a significant stage of pre-production. The Fund also includes De Santis’s correspondence (from 1936 to 1996), provid- ing information about twenty more titles, not originated by, but proposed to or involving De Santis, mainly outside Italy. Overall, the archive shows that De Santis worked on, or was involved at various stages in the development of 49 unfinished or potential projects.5

The market argument vs the political boycott argument The reasons usually advocated in relation to the ‘case’ can be summed up by two antithetical positions: De Santis being unable to keep up and to conform with the mechanisms and the demand of a fast evolving film market; or, De Santis being the targeted victim of a methodical political boycott.

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6. All De Santis’s films Emphasizing the market argument, scholars like Rossi (1982: 67), Parisi released between 1949 (Bitter Rice) and (1983: 184) and Zagarrio (2002a: 36, 2002b: 49) point out that De Santis kept 1956 (Men and Wolves) insisting on the same subjects and characters – i.e. marginalized groups and totalled between 270 the working class through socially committed themes – while, more and and 405 million ITL (roughly the equivalent more, the emerging modernist cinema depicted the aspirations and the angst of nowadays 8.5-13 of Italy’s middle class during the post-war controversial Economic Miracle million Euros) at the years. De Santis was initially very critical of this cinema of ‘subjectivity’ and domestic box-office only. modern alienation that, in his own opinion, had betrayed the original spirit of Neorealism by shifting its focus from the lower classes to the world of the bourgeoisie, as was typical of the pre-war films he so stingingly flayed as a critic (De Santis 1951: 109–12; 1962: 30; Farassino 1984: 60). With hind- sight, De Santis also conceded in some interviews that he somehow failed to acknowledge the need to update his storytelling by enriching his characters with more psychological introspection (Zanelli 1982: 90–91; Costa 1982: 65). While generally speaking this could make sense to a certain extent, such an argument starts ceding ground as soon as one looks for evidence that from the late 1950s onwards audiences found films with socially committed themes no longer appealing. In fact, a whole new generation of film-makers – including Francesco Rosi, Elio Petri, Damiano Damiani, Florestano Vancini, Francesco Maselli, the Taviani brothers, Gillo Pontecorvo and even Bernardo Bertolucci, just to name the best known – achieved national and international recognition by inaugurating the most fortunate season of the so-called political cinema in the same years as De Santis’s career came to a standstill (i.e. from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s). Moreover, the box-office argument looks flawed because, as mentioned, De Santis was simply one of the most commercially successful film-makers in Italy and abroad (Argentieri 1982: 10).6 De Santis always made a case that he was the target of political scape- goating because he was such a popular and outspoken member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) (De Santis 1984a: 137). Nonetheless, he always related his personal situation to a much wider context involving Italian cinema as a whole. In various interviews, articles and conferences De Santis kept denouncing what he considered a clear political will, a precise strategy or plan to ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ or ‘slay’ Neorealism, as a way of getting rid of all those inconvenient film-makers who, like himself, persisted in not coming to terms with the new, wider political and historical context (De Santis 1981, 1984a: 135–37). In retrospectively tracing the origins of the endemic crisis into which Italian cinema had plunged by the 1980s, De Santis laid the blame directly on the several Christian Democrat governments’ ‘attacks against Neorealism that were, in fact, attacks against democracy itself’ from the late 1950s onwards (Martini 1981: 11; De Santis 1984b: 40). De Santis’s accusations are not merely assertions. As a matter of fact, the 1950s in Italy were a time of more and more repressive government policies and exasperated clericalism against anything left wing. Also, after Italy joined the NATO alliance at the height of the Cold War, these rapid changes caught the Left generally unprepared to promote a truly progressive social and cultural policy before and after the disillusionment following the key events of 1956 in Poland and Hungary. However, De Santis’s comments fail to seek much deeper roots in the context of the Italian film industry in which he operates. At the end of World War II in 1945, the Allied Army, the United States in particular, quickly set up a Film Board that obtained the abrogation of all and any laws regarding cinema in just a few months. These included the tax on mandatory dubbing of foreign films and the state monopoly on film imports that caused the de facto

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disappearance of American films from the Italian market since 1938/1939. 7. Also thanks to the conspicuous backlog As a result, American majors re-opened their branches in the country and from previous years, Italian theatres got literally flooded with Hollywood titles once again.7 The between 1945 and 1950 new anti-prohibitionist measures also included the abrogation of the laws the average annual number of US films on censorship – which explains why so many films (both neorealist or more distributed in Italy commercial ones) that portrayed the country’s dramatic conditions in the is about 600 out of a post-war era enjoyed a substantial lack of control, until at least the first half of total of 800, of which only 50-60 are Italian 1947. It took Italy a year to become a Republic (June 1946) and two more to productions. have its first Parliament elected by universal suffrage (April 1948). Meanwhile 8. Legge no. 448/49 and everything, including a heavily stricken film industry, had to be rebuilt and Legge no. 958/49. These reorganized. A Central Government Office for cinema was established, whose new laws were harshly criticized because of immediate preoccupation was the substantial re-enactment of the laws on their similarity with the censorship promulgated under the Fascist regime. It was not until late in 1949 previous ‘Legge Alfieri’, that the new bills on cinema were promulgated.8 The new laws came into in force during the Fascist regime. force on 1 January 1950 and established two main policies: 9. Which is also why it is so difficult, if not 1. Public funds would be used for financial backing of new productions impossible, to prove based on previous box office results. (Of course, such a system encour- anything nowadays aged producers to opt for escapist and more commercial products, thus when researching Italian film archives of also meeting the increasing demand for this type of films). the time. 2. Most importantly, in order to be screened in theatres or be given funds, 10. In the post-war era Lux all projects needed to obtain formal authorization from the Central Office and Titanus were the following submission of the script. two biggest production companies in Italy. The significant caveat of the second proviso is that the new law allowed producers the option to ‘unofficially’ submit a script draft to the Central Office, prior to the formal authorization process even getting started, in order to obtain ‘informal advice’. In De Santis’s words, the Central Office employed some ‘vile officers, such as De Pirro and Scicluna Sorge just to name a couple, whose task was to put off producers from making any film they considered inconvenient’ (Masi 1982: 12–13). The implications of such a mechanism are easy to understand. On the one hand, producers started practicing a true form of pre-emptive self-censorship; on the other, the Central Office could thus control the whole film sector and reject anything without even having to produce any formal documentation.9 In the light of the commercial success enjoyed by his films, one could assume that De Santis did not have to worry too much about the financial terms of the new laws. De Santis himself was misled by this very assumption and by his own self-assuredness: ‘I believed that the huge commercial success of my films, especially after Bitter Rice became such an international hit, put me in a such a strong position that they [the producers] would cave in to any request I would come up with’ (Masi 1982: 5). Unfortunately, it was ‘informal’, unofficial pre-emptive censorship that became the rule for him. And because in the first place he was a writer who wanted to shoot his own stories, one can infer how this particular context has affected his career.

Reconstruction of a career: Rise and fall (1946–1956) De Santis’s first feature film as writer-director was The Tragic Pursuit, produced independently by a cooperative. Its commercial success and the awards won at festivals, despite initial problems with distribution, earned De Santis a contract with Lux Film.10 The deal signed with Lux initially provided for two

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11. No evidence found at big budget feature films and a renewal clause for a third one. In the early the De Santis Fund shows any further months of 1948, while prepping for the shooting of the first of these projects development of this (Bitter Rice) was well under way, De Santis was already developing ideas for idea, although the the second one. In a letter to a producer, he suggests that, since the terms of producer contacted by De Santis (i.e. Arrigo his agreement with Lux allow him to choose the subject matter, he would Colombo) would like to shoot a film on the controversial case of Sacco and Vanzetti (De Santis actually produce 1948).11 Eventually, De Santis went on making Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi/No Peace Giuliano Montaldo’s Sacco e Vanzetti/Sacco Under the Olive Tree in 1949. The final cut was all done and ready for release, and Vanzetti in 1971. scheduled in early 1950, only a few weeks after the new laws on cinema had become effective, but the Central Office would only authorize the release on condition that the last four words were cut. In the final shot of the movie, in a few voice-over lines, Francesco Domenici – the protagonist of the story, played by Raf Vallone – sums up his fight for a better justice. Ironically, the last four words are ‘even against the law’. As Lux Films complies with the request, De Santis goes out of his way to warn producer Riccardo Gualino not to use his name either in the credits or during the promotion of the film. Otherwise, he would request a parliamentary enquiry, inform the guild of directors and send an open letter to the newspapers. De Santis’s hard-headed attitude was not without consequences; the film was eventually released anyway in October 1950, the four words cut. Even earlier, however, in May 1950 Lux Films terminated their contract with De Santis instead of renewing it for the making of the planned third movie even though, among other proposals, De Santis had already written a full screenplay draft entitled Nostro pane quotidiano/Our Daily Bread (1950– 1952) (also titled Quando matura il grano/When the Wheat Ripens), inspired by the recent peasants’ revolts in Southern Italy (Parisi 1983: 111). A rather supportive letter addressed to De Santis from Damiano Damiani in May 1950 both confirms the separation from Lux Films and envisages financial backing from abroad with the possibility of starting shooting in a matter of weeks (Damiani 1950). Even though Damiani’s prediction was clearly too optimis- tic, the involvement of foreign financiers was confirmed by a telegram from Paris stating that a (second) payment into an Italian bank account had been made for this specific project (Landau 1950). This allowed De Santis to scout the locations in Southern Italy, complete development by revising the screenplay (re-titled Noi che facciamo crescere il grano/We, the Wheat Farmers) with the help of writer Corrado Alvaro among others, and start pre-production (Tosi 1953: 16). In April 1951, during a conference held at the Gabinetto Viesseux in Florence, De Santis announces that the shooting of Our Daily Bread would begin soon. In the following months, the PCI and the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (or CGIL, the left-wing trade union) volunteered a fund- raising to secure the remaining finance. Unconvinced, De Santis declined the offer and the project was further delayed (Masi 1982: 52). Meanwhile, Giorgio Agliani and Libero Solaroli – respectively, producer and production manager of both Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora/Outcry (1946) and De Santis’s The Tragic Pursuit – joined the proposed Italian/French co-production. While still seeking final funding from France, a letter dated February 1952 confirms that crewing and casting had been completed – with stars Massimo Girotti and Isa Miranda in the lead roles – and that a new draft of the screenplay finalized. A new ad hoc company would be created to handle the executive production and draft a final budget and production plan, with principal photography scheduled to start in the week between 21 and 28 April (De Santis et al. 1952). When, eventually, the production was green-lit, ‘somebody’ from the

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Central Office advised the distributor against backing the film financially and the project was put on hold indefinitely (Argentieri and Cipriani 1954: 10). Seemingly confirming an a priori preclusion against De Santis, Vitti also reports an official note published in the Araldo dello Spettacolo, on 7 August, stating verbatim that another project titled Case aperte/Open Brothels was ‘forbidden by the Central Office once they found out De Santis would direct it’ (Vitti 2006: 396). The networking abroad was not altogether useless though. De Santis’s next feature, Roma ora 11/Rome 11:00 (1952), was produced by Paul Graetz

Figure 2: Nostro pane quotidiano/Our Daily Bread: Screenplay first draft (1950–1952) with handwritten annotations by De Santis (Courtesy: CSC- Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

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12. Co-written with Gianni and financed by French company Transcontinental Film with RKO’s finan- Puccini and Elio Petri. Some script drafts cial backing, in association with Titanus, the other big major studio in Italy. indicate alternative Further collaboration with the latter was facilitated by Titanus’ mogul Goffredo titles (i.e. Furore Lombardo in exchange for some ‘personal favours’; Lombardo asked De d’autunno/Autumn Wrath and Chi muore, Santis to associate his name with a few films by less-known directors (namely, chi vive/Somebody Ubaldo Maria Del Colle, Basilio Franchina and Giuseppe Amato; all relatives Dies, Somebody Lives). or friends of Lombardo) as a selling point (Lombardo 1952). But De Santis’s Interestingly, the narrative core of the ensuing collaboration with Titanus was not without trouble. As a direct result story is very similar to of the new law on cinema, Titanus forced him to pre-emptively cut down and Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and His re-write the script for his next movie (De Santis 1953), Un marito per Anna Brothers, made just a Zaccheo/A Husband for Anna (1953) shot between 1952 and 1953 on the coast few years later. near Naples, while De Santis’s usual collaborators – Gianni Puccini, Elio Petri 13. Legge 897/56. and Libero De Libero – were already developing Giorni d’amore/Days of love (1954), the script of which was optioned by Minerva-Excelsa Film in April 1953 for eight million ITL (Excelsa Film 1953). Overall, the two years following the disappointment of Our Daily Bread were a time of intense activity for De Santis, who co-wrote and directed three films and collaborated on three more; but this apparently positive streak was destined to be short-lived. Days of Love was brutally mutilated at post-production stage. De Santis and his collaborators appealed to the lower court in Rome against the cuts executed without De Santis’s consent (ANSA 1954: 2). The litigation delayed the release of the film until De Santis settled for a compromise and was allowed to personally supervise a second edit in November 1954 that, ‘although far from the original idea, at least manages to ensure narrative consistency and technical quality’ (De Santis 1954). The subsequent mediation of friend producer Giovanni Addessi patched up the relationship with Titanus. Between 1955 and 1956 De Santis developed various drafts for two projects: Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (1956), which he admittedly did not like; and L’uomo senza domenica/The Man with No Sunday (1956), the story of a working class family of immigrants in the mid-1950s at a time when internal migration in Italy was reaching unparal- leled proportions.12 In January, a young Dino De Laurentiis, then producer for Titanus, wrote in a letter to De Santis: ‘If you have doubts about Men and Wolves, and you’d rather make [The Man with No Sunday] right away, just let me know and I will help you as best as I can’ (De Laurentiis 1956). The Man with No Sunday was never approved by the Central Office; it would incite class hatred, since in the story the protagonist kills his employer. Men and Wolves was made instead. Everything seemed to work out for the best during principal photography. Happy with the rushes of the first ten days of shooting, Titanus tycoon Goffredo Lombardo entrusted De Santis with complete control of the set (Lombardo 1956). However, once again, 500 metres of film were axed in post-production. De Santis abandoned the projects, sued the company and sent an open letter to the newspapers to disown his author- ship. It was the first time that an Italian film-maker had dared to go that far (Grossi 2002: 118).

Exile (1957–1968) When it was promulgated in 1956, the long-awaited new law on cinema left the funding system substantially unchanged.13 In a letter to De Santis, Elio Petri – one of his usual co-writers – complains that ‘in order to develop a script nowadays, we need to found our own production company and seek

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Figure 3: Bertolt Brecht’s letter offering De Santis to direct a DEFA-produced film version of his Mother Courage and Her Children, following De Santis’s meeting with Joris Ivens in Rome (31 December 1953; courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

deals abroad’ (Petri 1957a). Interviewed at a French festival in the late 1960s, De Santis admitted that at a certain point he felt … ‘my career would hit rock bottom if I did not emigrate abroad’ (De Santis 1967: 20). By the mid-1950s De Santis’s relations with Italian producers and distributors and with the Central Office for Cinema were indeed at loggerheads but, on the other hand, he was more and more sought-after in other European and

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14. When Brecht wrote American countries. The first offer arrived from no less than Bertolt Brecht, via his letter to De Santis, two drafts of the script a mutual friend, the Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens. Brecht liked the estranged had already been acting style in No Peace Under the Olive Tree and invited De Santis to adapt his completed by German Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder/Mother Courage and Her Children.14 The film writers Wolfgang Staudte and Emil Burri would be produced by DEFA, the state-owned company of East Germany, and translated into with shooting planned for the summer of 1954 (Brecht 1953). Italian. From Brazil, Ruy Santos, manager of Interfilmes, asked De Santis to write 15. Unfortunately, and direct an adaptation of Jorge Amado’s novel Seara Vermelha/Red Field the names of the (1946), another story of immigrants set in the Sertão desert. Interfilmes had characters mentioned by Cavalcanti cannot already secured the necessary funds from some Brazilian investors; De Santis be found in any of showed interest in the project but eventually declined (Santos 1954a, 1954b, the manuscripts held at the De Santis 1954c). Another offer came from Poland, where Rome 11:00 and Days of Love Fund, therefore it is were huge box office hits. Jan Korngold, a representative of the nationalized impossible to assign a Film Polski, invited De Santis to Poland, possibly accompanied by famous title to this project. writer Cesare Zavattini, to sign a deal for the making of a comedy on a subject matter of his own choice (Korngold 1955). Until 1956 De Santis declined the offers coming from abroad because in one way or another he still managed to make his own films in Italy. The row following Men and Wolves marked a point of no return, however. In another symptomatic letter, Petri reports news from producer Giovanni Addessi and writer Ugo Pirro who ‘know people’ at the Central Office, and describes a ‘vulgar campaign against you … the truth is we’re getting used to this revolt- ing pile of bullshit’ (Petri 1957b). Eventually, De Santis made up his mind and went to Yugoslavia to write and shoot Cesta duga godinu dana/The Year Long Road (1957) with Jadran Films. The production proved long and difficult, mostly due to the technical inexperience of the then relatively young Yugoslav film industry; however, for the first time in his career De Santis enjoyed total control and freedom over the entire process (De Santis 1992). Between 1957 and 1959 De Santis was working on several fronts. From abroad he kept receiving offers. From France, thanks once again to Giovanni Addessi’s contacts, Alberto Cavalcanti pitched a package with stars such as Charles Vanel, Simone Signoret, Abbe Lane and Serge Reggiani. Cavalcanti invited De Santis to Paris in order to discuss the ‘final agreements’ of the deal for a script to be written by De Santis and submitted to the Centre National de la Cinématographie (Cavalcanti 1957).15 No further development ensued but, by comparing two letters received by De Santis a few months later – one from co-writer Ugo Pirro in August, the second one sent from Paris by Addessi – it seems that the latter had managed to strike a slate deal for four co-productions. The first one should be developed from a treatment written by De Santis titled Masaniello (1957); Addessi claimed that Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren could play the lead roles (Pirro 1957; Addessi 1957). Pirro was also a founding member of A.R.T.A. Film and, thanks to Cavalcanti’s mediation, he landed another slate deal for four co-productions with the Belgian company Electro-Bel who wanted De Santis at the helm of the first project (Pirro 1958). Returning from Madrid, Pirro also hinted at the possibility of shooting ‘a film on Lorca’, inspired by the poet’s Llamada a la muerte de Ignacio Sanchez Mejia, with UNINCI’s producer Ricardo Muñoz Suay, with whom apparently De Santis had signed a deal (Pirro 1958; Pinto 1957); however, neither the Lorca project, nor another one adapted from Lope de Vega’s La casada infiel could stand a chance of passing censorship in Franco-ruled Spain, and were therefore dismissed (Caro Baroja 1957b, 1957c). At least until 1959, when the Spanish documentarist Pío Caro Baroja, along

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Figure 4: Elio Petri’s handwritten letter; on the first page, Petri complains about the ‘desperate situation’ in Italy (De Santis receives this letter when he is abroad) – exhibitors on strike, producers and distributors going out of business, the upcoming law on censorship, the low quality of most films – while on the second page he praises Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Elia Kazan, whom he calls De Santis’s friend (12 February 1957; courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

with UNINCI’s producer Cesareo Gonzalez and manager Guillermo Zuñiga, attempted an international co-production with Mexico, Venezuela and a Los Angeles studio (Caro Baroja 1959; Zuñiga 1959). Proposals from Latin-America sought De Santis as early as 1957. In letters received from Caro Baroja and from Francisco Pina y López – writer for Juan

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16. Partly to mend his Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga, among others – one project clearly ways, Amoroso then helped De Santis stood out as a preferred option: a biopic of Anastasio Aquino, the leader of produce La garçonniere the campesinos’ insurrection, to be shot with non-professional actors in the (1960), obviously a style of Lima Barreto’s O Cangaceiro/Cangaceiro (1953) or Eisenstein’s Thunder backup option that credits exactly the Over Mexico (1933) (Caro Baroja 1957a; Pina y López 1957). Pina y López same extensive team of was trying to interest Columbia Pictures in the idea, and the independent writers as Pettotondo. producer Jorge Pinto wrote to Caro Baroja that he was raising funds in El 17. Even today only Salvador although, eventually, he was unsuccessful in securing the necessary one copy of the film finance (Caro Baroja 1957d; Pinto 1957). One last negotiation took place in survives at the De Santis Fund archives in Brazil, where Cavalcanti suggested an adaptation of Amado’s Gabriela to be Rome. organized locally by a producer named Audrá (Amado 1959). 18. A film on John Reed Once again, apart from each individual attempted production develop- was made a few years ment history, the most likely reason why De Santis ended up not pursuing later by Sergej Vassiliev. any of these opportunities further, is to be found in yet another attempt to make a large-scale international project in Italy. Between 1957 and 1959, De Santis had been drafting several script versions of Pettotondo/You’ve Dressed Yourself in Scarlet (1957–1959) initially in collaboration with Pirro and Petri and, later, with Tonino Guerra, Franco Giraldi and Carlo Bernari. Rising star Claudia Cardinale was cast in the lead role, preferred to Rosanna Schiaffino and Anita Ekberg (Toffetti 1996: 369). Because the film was to be shot in Southern Italy, the executive producer was Roberto Amoroso. Amoroso wrote to De Santis in July 1959, right before starting prepping production on location. The shooting script was finalized in September by De Santis and his team of co-writers and the production plan states 26 October 1959 as the first day of shooting (Amoroso 1959). However, history was doomed to repeat itself for De Santis; just a few days before the scheduled date, Amoroso was ‘informally advised’ by the Central Office and the film called off (De Santis 1992b).16 In the same year, The Year Long Road went on to win the Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award. In Italy, however, it was excluded from the Venice Film Festival and from distribution;17 these two huge disappointments convinced De Santis to head East again. De Santis’s films were very popular in the USSR in the 1950s and the first invitation from Mosfilm to visit their studios in Moscow dates back a few years (Kuznezov 1954). After the advent of Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the CPSU, at the 1955 Cannes festival the USSR announced their intention to co-produce films with other countries. De Santis eventually travelled to Moscow and reported about it in an article for the newspaper l’Unità, only a few weeks after the production of You’ve Dressed Yourself in Scarlet had been aborted (De Santis 1959). During his stay in Moscow, De Santis liaised with some of the most important figures in the Soviet film industry – Alexandr Zguridi, the General Director of Mosfilm, Vladmir Surin and writer-director and critic Szergej Jutkevics. De Santis initially pitched three of his own scripts, only two of which are mentioned in his correspondence: Meo Patacca (inspired by Berneri’s eponymous melodramatic poem whose protagonist is a folk- loric hero in seventeenth-century Rome), and a treatment on the story of John Reed, the American radical activist and journalist who was indicted for founding the US Communist Labour Party and later fled to the Soviet Union (Zguridi 1958a). The ideas were rejected and De Santis was given two other subjects instead based, respectively, on Stendhal’s novel Vanina Vanini and on the short stories written by Maksim Gorky during his stay in Italy (Zguridi 1958b).18 Back in Moscow the following year, De Santis eventually agreed to

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Figure 5: Dubrowskij (1967–1968): Treatment with handwritten annotations; scene introducing the main protagonist being summoned by a police officer (Courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

shoot Italiani brava gente/Attack and Retreat (1964), the first ever Italian-Soviet co-production, produced by Galatea and Mosfilm (later joined by the French company Coronet). De Santis was finally happy to work ‘in the best possi- ble conditions; the means made available to me were endless, perhaps even more than I needed’ (Parisi 1983: 112). Upon its Italian release, Attack and Retreat was labelled as defeatist and anti-patriotic. After a short collaboration to co-write Antonio Pietrangeli’s La visita/The Visitor (1964), De Santis went back to Moscow to work with Ugo Pirro at another big budget project, Alexander Puškin’s Dubrowskij (1967–1968). Following negotiations with Mosfilm, the first draft of the treatment is dated

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19. A first sketchy outline June 1967. Previous cinematic adaptations of the novel had been shot by lists four episodes. The use of pseudonyms Clarence Brown (The Eagle, 1926) and Riccardo Freda (Aquila nera/Return of the was quite common Black Eagle, 1946). The challenge of replacing Rudolph Valentino and Rossano among spaghetti Brazzi in the lead role – a Decembrist general-turned-avenger and therefore western film-makers, in order to appeal to not too dissimilar from Meo Patacca and Masaniello – was to be taken on by foreign markets as well. new Hollywood idol Robert Redford. In fact, thanks to Dino De Laurentiis, now an established producer in the United States, a co-production between Mosfilm and Columbia Pictures was conceived for this project. However, Pirro and De Santis got trapped in ‘development hell’ due to mutual misunder- standings with Valentin Ezhov, the Soviet screenwriter with whom Mosfilm had teamed them for the dialogue in Russian. In 1968, when even Ezhov’s replacement with Viktor Sklovskij (the well-known Formalist theorist) proved fruitless, they gave up the project (Masi 1982: 97). In the same period De Santis also worked in Romania at another ambitious project; a cinematic adaptation of Ovid’s The Art of Love for an Italian Romanian co-production. Ovid is the archetypal intellectual whose erotic tales were incredibly popular in ancient times, and was forced into exile for political reasons; it is easy to see how De Santis might have identified his own situation with that of Ovid (Farassino 1978: 48; Parisi 1983: 113). The first draft of the treatment, co-written with Sergio Amidei between December 1965 and May 1966, was approved; several revised treatments and script drafts followed over the next two years. Although De Santis described the time spent in Romania as very happy and intellectually stimulating, the Romanian producers rejected the screenplay eventually, accusing it of being pornographic and written according to the canons of western cinema; that is, too commercial and too focused on the sexual elements of Ovid’s work, rather than as a potential art film. In fact, when De Santis submitted the script in 1968, Soviet tanks had just been sent in to repress the Prague Spring revolution, and news of artists, scientists and intellectuals either banished or sentenced to hard labour had begun to circulate. All of a sudden, The Art of Love became a very inconvenient film to produce.

Return to Italy, and coda (1969–1997) Following Sergio Leone’s worldwide success with the western genre from 1964, dozens of spaghetti westerns began to be made in Italy. In between his jour- neys to Eastern Europe, De Santis developed a few Italian projects with a clear aim to adjust to the current market trend. In 1965, and then again in 1967, he registered different drafts of a short treatment for a three-part spaghetti western to be co-directed (under the pseudonyms Dan Pepper and Joe Santos) with Gianni Puccini and Carlo Lizzani.19 One of the many working titles, I dieci giorni che sconvolsero il West/Ten Days that Shook the West (1965–1967), is a clear, although indirect reference to John Reed’s well-known account of the Bolshevik Revolution. All drafts are very little developed though, more similar to rough story outlines than to a treatment proper. Once back in Italy for good, De Santis managed to shoot what would remain his last feature film, Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire/The Promising Career of an Upstart (1972), although he had to fund it himself in partnership with his friend and co-writer Giorgio Salvioni. In his own words, De Santis made this film ‘out of desperation’ (Farassino 1978: 48). In the following two decades, De Santis worked at only a few more unrealized feature projects; available at the De Santis Fund are several draft manuscripts of two

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20. De Santis also taught for a brief time in the 1990s at the NUCT, the New University for Cinema and TV in Rome.

Figure 6: Handwritten outline for Su e giù per il West/Up and Down the West (1965). (Courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

projects titled, respectively, I sogni di Giove/Jupiter’s Dreams (1982–1988) and Agnese lungo il mare/Agnese Near the Sea (1982–1986). Between 1983 and 1987, De Santis was a teacher at the CSC, the same National School of Cinema he attended as a young student more than 40 years earlier. Towards the end of the 1980s, he wrote a treatment and a screenplay titled Ballata d’agosto/Ballad of August (1984–1987), to be played by two acting students from the CSC (Di Gianni 1999: 14).20 While the Italian film industry was plunging into one of its worst slumps ever, from the late 1970s through to the 1980s and early 1990s, De Santis’s creative activity hardly slowed at all, as he developed one television project after the other, all submitted to RAI, the Italian public broadcasting network. A very ambitious 4-hour TV movie entitled I fatti di Andria/The

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21. Film critic Tullio Kezich Andria Revolt (1977–1982) was developed over a period of almost five years, (1999) reports that 21 a shorter, theatrical from 1977 to 1982. De Santis signed a contract with RAI who secured version was also finance but he eventually stepped down. State-owned RAI was (and still is) planned but never far from being autonomous, its channels controlled by the major political developed. parties. De Santis denounced the pressures put on the producers because of the controversial subject matter (Kezich 1999; De Santis 1982a, 1982b). Nevertheless, De Santis continued to submit new projects to RAI, focuss- ing on the current issue of political terrorism. Following the murder of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978, most members of the Red Brigades were arrested and brought to trial. In the mid-1980s De Santis

Figure 7: A scene from Sorvegliato speciale/Under High-Security Surveillance (1986–1988): Screenplay draft (Courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis).

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developed a series of episodes titled Interviste brigatiste/Interviews with the Red Brigades (1984–1988), in which he interviewed notorious female terrorists then detained in jail – Susanna Ronconi, Liliana Tosi, Silvia Arancio, Sonia Benedetti, Barbara Graglia and Loredana Biancamano. Susanna Ronconi in particular inspired Il permesso/The Furlough (1988–1989), a docufiction that purported to follow the rehab programme of former terrorists intro- duced in Italy by the government. De Santis re-wrote the screenplay in 1989 once again, this time with Franco Reggiani, and submitted it to AMA Film. Other projects exploring the subject of terrorism were Sorvegliato speciale/Under High-Security Surveillance (1986–1988), to be shot inside real prisons in Rome and Turin, and Vite parallele/Parallel Lives (1986–1988), a title certainly inspired by Plutarch’s famous biographies, for a six-episode serial that sought to portray the lives of two members of the Red Brigades through the memories of witnesses and relatives. De Santis and Reggiani worked together again on a three-part movie treatment in May and June of 1990; the working title of this story is I fatti di Napoli/Naples Stories (1990). He co-directed (with Bruno Bigoni) an educational documentary, Oggi è un altro giorno (Milano 1945–1995)/Today and Another Day (1995), which won the Libero Bizzarri Award for Best Documentary. De Santis pitched one final narrative documentary project to RAI titled Paese mio, passato e presente/My Own Village Then and Now. On 6 February 1996 he even faxed a detailed budget for a total 660 million ITL but the project was not developed any further. De Santis died on 16 May 1997. In conclusion, thorough archival research and collation of primary sources provide us with both evidence and, where this is not directly available, with reasonably reliable information to address and correct critical accounts that are often partial and sometimes incorrect due to less informed assumptions. Even as late as 2009 a widely respected film histo- rian and avid researcher of archives like Gian Piero Brunetta can dismiss the ‘De Santis case’ in a couple of lines; Brunetta seems to support the thesis that De Santis was ostracized ‘by decree’ and scapegoated because of his excessive ideological commitment, and simply concludes that he ‘left the business prematurely’ (2009:140). This article seeks to tell a different, more complex, story. The case of Giuseppe De Santis offers illuminating insights into the multiple factors that determine and influence the development of a film project, and thus has paradigmatic application. The materials analysed at the Fund indicate that quite a few of his projects remained unfinished due to circumstances that are typical of the awkward genesis of so many productions, e.g. difficulty in seeking finance or in setting up co-productions, other projects being prioritized for similar reasons, professional disagreement during development, or even due to historical contin- gencies beyond anybody’s control (such as the Romanian project). Several others were delayed, called off or rejected for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the creative process or their potential marketabil- ity; troubled relationships with producers and distributors mostly due to censorship, laws and the ministerial control of the public funding mechanism (at least until the 1960s, when De Santis was ‘forced’ to emigrate), and the influence of political parties in the decision-making process regarding television productions in more recent times. Eventually, at the 1995 Venice Film Festival, De Santis was belatedly awarded a long-awaited Golden Lion, alongside Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Alberto Sordi. Ironically, the award was for his lifetime achievement.

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References Addessi, G. (1957), letter to De Santis, 12 October, Paris [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Agnese lungo il mare/Agnese Near the Sea (1982–1986), [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9779/57161, 9790/57209 (2 treatments)]. Amado, J. (1959), letter to Alberto Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro, 4 June [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Amoroso, R. (1959), letter to De Santis, Naples, 24 July [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. ANSA (Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata) (1954), Notiziario cinematografico, 25 September. Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire/The Promising Career of an Upstart (1972), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Giorgio Salvioni, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 129 mins. Aquila nera/Return of the Black Eagle (1946), Wr: Baccio Agnoletti, Mario Monicelli, Steno, Dir: Riccardo Freda, Italy, 109 mins. Argentieri, M. (1982), ‘Il neorealismo di Giuseppe De Santis: anticipazioni e professionalità’, in V. Camerino (ed.), Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Lecce: Elle Edizioni, pp. 10–17. Argentieri, M. and Cipriani, I. (1954), ‘La censura cinematografica in Italia’, Società, 3, June, p. 10. The Art of Love (1966–1968), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Sergio Amidei, Salvatore Laurani, Giorgio Salvioni [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9771/57104, 9669/56928, 9709/56977, 9711/56984, 9743/57067, 9747/57071, 9759/57083, 9760/57084, 9763/57087 (9 treatments, one in English); 9678/56937, 9769/57102, 9770/57103, 9773/57106, 9816/57298 (5 screenplays)]. Ballata d’agosto/Ballad of August (1984–1987), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Franco Reggiani [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9714/56987, 9716/57000, 9762/57086 (3 treatments); 9696/56962 (1 screenplay)]. Brecht, B. (1953), letter to De Santis, Berlin, 31 December [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/04; Inv. 58531]. Brunetta, G. P. (2009), The History of Italian Cinema. A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Caccia Tragica/The Tragic Pursuit (1946), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Michelangelo Antonioni, Umberto Barbaro, Carlo Lizzani, Cesare Zavattini, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 80 mins. Camerino, V. (ed.) (1982), Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Lecce: Elle Edizioni. O Cangaceiro/Cangaceiro (1953), Wr: Lima Barreto, Rachel de Queiroz, Dir: Lima Barreto, Brazil, 105 mins. Caro Baroja, P. (1957a), letter to De Santis, Mexico, 3 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1957b), letter to De Santis, Mexico, 28 March [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1957c), letter to De Santis, Mexico, 16 June [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1957d), letter to De Santis, Mexico, 21 September [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1959), letter to De Santis, 21 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604].

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Castaldini, E. (1995), Ossessione allo specchio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Florence: Edizioni FEDIC. Cavalcanti, A. (1957), letter to De Santis, Paris, 19 March [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Cesta duga godinu dana/The Year Long Road (1957), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Elio Petri, Gianni Puccini, Maurizio Ferrara, Tonino Guerra, Mario Socrate, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Yugoslavia, 130 mins. Costa, A. (ed.) (1982), ‘Giuseppe De Santis: l’avventura neorealista’, Cinema & Cinema, 9: 30, pp. 16–72. Damiani, D. (1950), letter to De Santis, Milan, May [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/1009/03, Inv. 58501]. De Laurentiis, D. (1956), letter to De Santis, Rome, 20 January [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. De Santis, G. (1948), letter to producer Arrigo Colombo, Rome, 12 April [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/1009/03, Inv. 58501]. —— (1951), ‘È in crisi il Neorealismo?’, Filmcritica, 1: 4, March-April, pp. 109–12. —— (1953), ‘Interview with Giuseppe De Santis’, Vie Nuove, 8: 7, 17 February, p. 15. —— (1954), letter to Antonio Mosco [President of Minerva-Excelsa Film], Rome, 2 November [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/05; Inv. 58586]. —— (1959), ‘Cinema e vita nell’URSS’, l’Unità, 6 November, p. 6. —— (1962), ‘Le cinéma dans notre temps. Une interview de Giuseppe De Santis’, Temps Nouveaux, 34, pp. 9–10. —— (1967), ‘La Route d’un An sera, peut-être mon meilleur film: Confrontations 3 – L’Italie, vingt ans aprés’, catalogue, Perpignan, p. 20. —— (1981), ‘Cinema, Sud e memoria. Il regista Giuseppe De Santis racconta’, Paese Sera, 16 July, p. 9. —— (1982a), ‘E il Gran Censore insabbiò quel film’, l’Unità, 22 January, p. 18. —— (1982b), ‘Porte chiuse agli eroi straccioni nel regno del kolossal’, l’Unità, 26 January, p. 9. —— (1984a), ‘Neorealismo con’, in M. Furno and R. Renzi (eds), Il Neorealismo nel fascismo. Giuseppe De Santis e la critica cinematografica 1941–1943, Quaderni della Cineteca 5, Bologna: Edizioni della Tipografia Compositori, pp. 127–38. —— (1984b), ‘La sinistra ha rinunciato’, Cinemasessanta, 25: 155, January- February, pp. 10–12. —— (1992a), letter to Guido Aristarco, 9 October [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/07; Inv. 58622]. —— (1992b), ‘Ciak, non si gira’, Moda, 95, March, p. 20. De Santis, G., Agliani, G. G. and Solaroli, L. (1952), letter to producer [named Eugenio], Rome, 27 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/04; Inv. 58531]. Di Gianni, L. (1999), ‘Una persona amica’, in M. Grossi and V. Palazzo (eds), Giuseppe De Santis, maestro di cinema e di vita, Fondi (Latina): Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, pp. 29–32. Dubrowskij (1967–1968), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Ugo Pirro, Valentin Ezhov, Viktor Sklovskij [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9687/56946, 9688/56947 (2 treatments); 9689/56948 (1 screenplay)]. The Eagle (1925), Wr: George Marion Jr, Giorgio Salvioni, Dir: Clarence Brown, USA, 73 mins. Excelsa Film (1953), two letters to De Santis, Rome, 18 April [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/04; Inv. 58531].

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Farassino, A. (1978), Giuseppe De Santis, Milan: Moizzi. —— (1984), ‘Giuseppe De Santis dalla critica al cinema’, in M. Furno and R. Renzi (eds) Il Neorealismo nel fascismo. Giuseppe De Santis e la critica cinematografica 1941–1943, Quaderni della Cineteca 5, Bologna: Edizioni della Tipografia Compositori, pp. 17–28. —— (ed.) (2002), ‘Dossier. Giuseppe De Santis: esplorazioni d’archivio. Le carte di Peppe’, Bianco&Nero, 63: 3–4, May-August, pp. 98-101. La garçonnière (1960), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Bernari, Franco Gerardi, Elio Petri, Tonino Guerra, Ugo Pirro, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 90 mins. Giorni d’amore/Days of love (1954), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Libero de Libero, Elio Petri, Gianni Puccini, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 109 mins. Grossi, M. (2002), ‘Un dannunziano della Ciociaria. Cronache su un film polemico’, in V. Zagarrio (ed.), Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi. Un neorealismo postmoderno, Rome: SNC, pp. 115–27. Grossi, M. and Spagnoletti, G. (eds) (1997), ‘Dossier: Giuseppe De Santis- l’escluso’, Close-Up, 1: 2, p. 5. I dieci giorni che sconvolsero il West/Ten Days that Shook the West (1965–1967), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis (as Joe Santos and Dan Pepper), Gianni Puccini, Carlo Lizzani [also titled, Noi che spariamo la colt/Shooting the Colt hand- guns, and Su e giù per il West/Up and Down the West] [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9830/57327, 9833/57389 (2 treatments)]. I fatti di Andria/The Andria Revolt (1977–1982), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Franco Reggiani, Luigi Vanzi [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9673/56932 (1 treatment); 9674/56933, 9675/56934, 9676/56935, 9677/56936, 9818/57300, 9819/57301, 9820/57302, 9821/57303 (8 screenplays, two drafts per episode)]. I fatti di Napoli/Naples Stories (1990), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Franco Reggiani [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9806/57241, 9807/57242 (2 treatments)]. Interviste brigatiste/Interviews with the Red Brigades (1984–1988), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9823/57305, 9824/57306 (2 volumes, interview scripts)]. I sogni di Giove/Jupiter’s Dreams (1982–1988), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9748/57072, 9749/57073, 9750/57074, 9751/57075 (4 treatments); 9752/57076 (1 outline)]. Italiani brava gente/Attack and Retreat (1964), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Ennio De Concini, Augusto Frassinetti, Gian Domenico Giagni, Sergeij Smirnov, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy-USSR, 150 mins. John Reed project (1958), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Antonello Trombadori. Kezich, T. (1999), ‘Uomini e “lupi” (di Andria)’, in M. Grossi and V. Palazzo (eds), Giuseppe De Santis, maestro di cinema e di vita, Fondi, Latina: Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, pp. 23–27. Korngold, J. (1955), letter to De Santis, Paris, 17 January [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/05; Inv. 58586]. Kuznezov, S. (1954), telegram to De Santis, Moscow, 1954 [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/05; Inv. 58586]. Landau, L. (1950), telegram to De Santis, Paris, 9 August [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/1009/03, Inv. 58501]. Lombardo, G. (1956), letter to De Santis, Rome, 13 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Madre Coraggio ed i suoi figli/Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1953), Wr: Wolfgang Stauble, Emil Burri [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9740/57051, 9795/57217 (2 screenplays)].

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Maras, S. (2011), ‘Some attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting reserch’, Journal of Screenwriting, 2: 2, pp. 275–86. Un marito per Anna Zaccheo/A Husband for Anna (1953), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Alfredo Giannetti, Salvatore Laurani, Elio Petri, Gianni Puccini, Cesare Zavattini, Dir.: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 101 mins. Martini, A. (1981), ‘La ricerca realistica come impegno civile. Conversazione con Giuseppe De Santis’, Cult Movie, 3, p. 11. Masaniello (1957), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9798/57220 (1 treatment)]. Masi, S. (1982), Giuseppe De Santis, Florence: La Nuova Italia. Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi/No Peace Under the Olive Tree (1950), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Libero de Libero, Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 100 mins. Nostro pane quotidiano/Our Daily Bread (1950–1952), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [also titled, Noi che facciamo crescere il grano/We, the Wheat Farmers] [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9766/57090, 9803/57239, 9804/57240, 9835/57460, 9836/57461 (5 treatments); 9671/56930, 9686/56945, 9708/56976, 9794/57216 (4 screenplays, one draft in French)]. Oggi è un altro giorno (Milano 1945–1995)/Today and Another Day (1995), Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Bruno Bigoni, Salomone Ovadia, Italy, 38 mins. Paese mio, passato e present/My Own Village Then and Now (1996), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9787/57200, 9789/57208 (2 treatments)]. Parisi, A. (1983), Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis: tra passione e ideologia, Rome: Cadmo. Il permesso/The Furlough (1988–1989), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9732/57041, 9775/57108 (2 treatments); 9733/57042, 9746/57070 (2 sceenplays)]. Petri, E. (1957a), letter to De Santis, Rome, 12 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1957b), letter to De Santis, Rome, 18 December [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Pettotondo/Roundbreast (1957–1959), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro, Tonino Guerra, Franco Giraldi, Carlo Bernari [also titled, Ti sei fatta la veste rossa/You’ve Dressed Yourself in Scarlet] [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9811/57283, 9736/57045, 9810/57282, 9768/57092 (4 treatments, one draft in English); 970256970, 9712/56985, 9731/57040, 9815/57287, 10325/61232 (5 screenplays, one draft in French)]. Pina y López, F. (1957), letter to De Santis, Mexico, 7 April [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Pinto, J. (1957), letter to Pío Caro Baroja, San Salvador, 13 June [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Pirro, U. (1957), letter to De Santis, Rome, 3 August [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1958), letter to De Santis, Rome, 30 June [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (1949), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Corrado Alvaro, Carlo Lizzani, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 100 mins. Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Wr: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli, Dir: Luchino Visconti, Italy, 180 mins.

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Roma ora 11/Rome 11:00 (1952), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Cesare Zavattini, Basilio Franchina, Rodolfo Sonego, Gianni Puccini, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 98 mins. Rossi, U. (1982), ‘Ha taciuto o lo hanno fatto tacere?’, in V. Camerino (ed.), Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Lecce: Elle Edizioni, pp. 67–72. Sacco e Vanzetti/Sacco and Vanzetti (1971), Wr: Giuliano Montaldo, Fabrizio Onofri, Ottavio Jemma, Dir: Giuliano Montaldo, Italy-France, 111 mins. Santos, R. (1954a), letter to De Santis, São Paulo, 22 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/05; Inv. 58586]. —— (1954b), letter to De Santis, São Paulo, 2 March [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/05; Inv. 58586]. —— (1954c), letter to De Santis, Rio de Janeiro, 17 May [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/05; Inv. 58586]. Il sole sorge ancora/Outcry (1946), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Aldo Vergano, Giuseppe Gorgerino, Guido Aristarco, Carlo Lizzani, Dir: Aldo Vergano, Italy, 90 mins. Sorvegliato speciale/Under High-Security Surveillance (1986–1988), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9825/57307, 9826/57308, 9827/57309 (3 screenplays)]. Thunder Over Mexico (1933), Wr: Grigori Aleksandrov, Dir: Sergei M. Eisenstein, USA, 70 mins. Toffetti, S. (1996), Rosso fuoco. Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Turin: Lindau-Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Tosi, V. (1953), ‘I film da girare. Noi che facciamo crescere il grano’, Il lavoro, 8 November, p. 16. Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (1956), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Giuseppe De Santis, Cesare Zavattini, Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro (uncredited), Gianni Puccini, Ivo Perilli, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 107 mins. L’uomo senza domenica/The Man with No Sunday (1956), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro, Tonino Guerra [also titled, Furore d’autunno/Autumn Wrath and Chi muore, chi vive/Somebody Dies, Somebody Lives] [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9781/7191, 9698/56964 (2 treatments); 9699/56968 (1 screenplay)]. La visita/The Visitor (1964), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis (as Gino De Santis), Antonio Pietrangeli, Moris Ergas, Dir: Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 129 mins. Vite parallele/Parallel Lives (1986–1988), Wr: Giuseppe De Santis, Franco Reggiani [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll./Inv. 9812/57284, 9813/57285, 9814/57286 (3 treatments)]. Vitti, A. (1996), Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2006), ‘I retroscena dietro la disoccupazione’, in A. Vitti (ed.), Peppe De Santis secondo se stesso. Conferenze, conversazioni e sogni nel cassetto di uno scomodo regista di campagna, Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, pp. 381–401. Zagarrio, V. (2002a), ‘Il vento del nord tra gli ulivi di De Santis. Intervista a Carlo Lizzani’, in V. Zagarrio (ed.), Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi. Un neorealismo postmoderno, Rome: SNC, pp. 27–36. —— (2002b), ‘La Ciociaria tra Aci Trezza e la Monument Valley. L’utopia del verosimile in Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi’, in V. Zagarrio (ed.), Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi. Un neorealismo postmoderno, Rome: SNC, pp. 39–73. Zanelli, D. (1982), ‘Tra nostalgia del neorealismo e sogni letterari’, In V. Camerino (ed.) (1982), Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Lecce: Elle Edizioni, pp. 89–95.

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Zguridi, A. (1958a), letter to De Santis, Moscow, 18 April [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. —— (1958b), letter to De Santis, Moscow, 4 May [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604]. Zuñiga, G. (1959), letter to De Santis, Madrid, 21 February [CSC De Santis Fund: Coll. 2/11/009/06; Inv. 58604].

Suggested citation Russo, P. (2014), ‘The “De Santis case”: Screenwriting, political boycott and archival research’, Journal of Screenwriting 5: 1, pp. 101–123, doi: 10.1386/ jocs.5.1.101_1

Contributor details Paolo Russo is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University. Also a professional screenwriter, he is currently collaborating with director Matthew Huston and Minor Hour Films (www.minorhourfilms.com). He has co-written the feature film Three Days of Anarchy (2006), premiered at Tokyo IFF and at 30+ international festivals. Contact: Oxford Brookes University, School of Arts, Headington Road, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Paolo Russo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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