I moved to Rome at the age of 50, with no real prospect for anything, just a few friends living there, and a very minimal bit of money. I went because I'd wanted to live there for some years and at 50 I told myself if I didn't get on doing what I wanted to do, I'd drop dead before I'd done them, money be damned. I also went hang-gliding that year, something I'd wanted to do for 20+ years.
Without really trying, a few months after arriving I went to a small party of some people whom I didn't really know,and bumped into Enzo Porcelli, a producer who'd worked with Bellochio, Amelio, and allegedly Godard. He casually said he wanted to work with me (?!) and I casually said, OK. This led to a few casual meetings, and "a deal". A perhaps not so untypical "deal" in the film biz, but also a very untypical one: there would be no script, which in Italy was unheard of.
And I would have to use the wife of one of the investor/producers as an actress in a lead role. But otherwise it seemed pretty open. The budget was - well this is where it got a little mushyy. It was around 200,000 Euro. Or 500,000 Euro. It depended on who was being told.
So Enzo, producer, introduced me to various actors, aside from the investor's wife. And he brought in his "professional" sound crew. And in a short while we began shooting using an Aaton 35mm camera. And in a short while we stopped shooting. His "crew" - meaning Porcelli's production manager, the sound guys, worked their way. Slowly, mindlessly, and in a fixed pattern marked by long lunches. On the first day of shooting at the office I said I didn't want to bring the 10 boxes of equipment, in their boxes, but just the camera - in my lap -, the extra lenses, and... And I talked them out of half of it. So we went to the little fashionable clothing store and they dumped all the boxes smack in the middle of where I'd be shooting ! It became clear very fast that they didn't work my way. The sound pro then hauled out his Nagra, and since they are heavy, his rolling cart for it, wires, mikes, etc. He'd earlier refused to use my new half-pound digital sound recorder, though I'd asked that he use it. So we shot a few hours, and lunch came, and.... This went on a few days, and finally an actress I'd taken on, worked with improvising, froze up twice when it was time to deliver. I stopped shooting. I fired her. Her boyfriend, who imagined himself a film world hotshot came to the office, threatening, and when confronting me announced "sono Calabrese" - to say from some N'drangdreta mob world, and to say I was to quiver in my shoes. I stared him down and he left, never to hear from either him or imaginary actress friend again. I told Porcelli I was stopping the film as in the manner his folks worked there was no way we'd get it done in the time and budget we'd allowed. So we stopped, and I dumped his production manager and his sound guys, and we waited a few months. When things resumed I had mostly new actors - though still the wife of Mr Money - and new ideas, and a new mini-crew: in this case a friend, Theo Eshetu, a video maker who'd never done sound before, using my digital recorder; an Italian American production manager, Eve Sylvester; and a writer friend to help when needed, Edoardo Albinati. Working my way things went rather fast and well, though not without a few producer-inspired hiccups along the way. Then came the editing, where the real problems began. Avid had just come out, and Porcelli had a few setups, and lots of storage. Gianni Amelio was working on Lamerica and doing his kind of massive shooting ratio. I got an editor techie, one Benni Atria, listed in the credits as "editor" which he most certainly was not. He was a techie, and a lousy one whom I spotted in one day as not really knowing what he was doing. I asked Porcelli to replace him but got a firm "no." So we proceeded, with Atria doing about a pack every 3 hours of smoking, and popping out for a break and an espresso about every 20 minutes. It was slow and painful going between the smoke, the breaks and the incompetence. Meantime I kept getting bumped from one storage set to another so Amelio could take ever more space for his endless shooting ratio. After a month or 6 weeks we had it edited, all the sound on the computer. We scheduled a mix for February 2004 in Fellini's old studio, which Porcelli was sure had digital capacity. They didn't. Shopping for a place that had it, I found a studio in Vienna and booked a session there for April But when it came time to go Atria didn't know how to extract the EDL material from the computers. Cancelled that mix. And again, same thing for another studio. I issued Porcelli and ultimatum and said if we didn't meet the next mix I was off the film. I found a studio in London that could do it, and in July we went to mix. We booked 5 days for the mix. On arrival on downloading from the EDL it turned out that lots of material - surprise surprise - wasn't there. Thanks Benni. Thanks Porcelli who'd failed to fire in December when I asked him to dump the editor. It took us 3 and a half days to reconstruct the track, using library sounds, and I got a day and a half to mix. To say I was unhappy understates the matter. Porcelli then accused me of prolonging things. On completion of the film I was supposed to get my last paycheck - held up since February. I was running out of money and needed it. The film was due for a premiere in Venice, and Porcelli than blackmailed me, saying he would give me half my money then, and hold the other half until after Venice and that if I said anything bad about him there he'd take my money and hire a lawyer to sue me for defamation !
Meantime in order to secure PR for the film, he'd planted stories in the Italian film press about production problems and such. Needless to say at the press conference in Venice the first questions were about those "problems" to which I responded that I could say nothing as my producer had said if I told anything I would not get my final paycheck. End of conference.
A month later, when the final payment was due in the new revised blackmail contract, the money needless to say was not forthcoming. So I told Porcelli (the name in Italian means "little pigs") that I understood that going to court we'd both be dead before anything was determined and it would cost a lot; I told him going to the press he'd naturally win since, well, we were in Italy, he was Italian and well connected in the press. And then I told him if he didn't pay, and immediately, I'd ask RAI 3, the TV station that had funded the film, to do an audit. His budget had claimed he had raised $750,000 or so, of which they'd forked up $250. I made a film that looked to them like 750, but I knew it was phoney and they got one set of cooked fraudulent books, and the real price had been all their money and Porcelli had used my talents to pull off this fraud. Porcelli paid immediately since RAI 3 was his customary cash-cow.
In Venice the film showed, got raked over the coals by most the Italian critics of right and center, who had liked it when I cast a harsh glance at America, but didn't care to see themselves seen in the same manner, least of all from an outsider. A few regional and far left papers thought it was a good accurate glance at Italia, 1994. Need I say my options in the Italian film world vanished.
I think shown today it would be a different story, with people noting how accurately descriptive it was of Italy - then and now.
