Marco Spagnoli: Documenting Cinema History

With a gift for melding disparate clips into compelling documentaries, he has captured the spirit of Italian cinema from the 1930s to the present.

Marco Spagnoli is one of Italy’s most prolific film journalists, having made numerous documentaries on the country’s beloved film icons and reporting in-depth about cinema for a variety of publications.

 

Among his most compelling works is the 2011 documentary “Hollywood Invasion,” which zooms in on Italian and European cinema during the “Dolce Vita” decades from 1950-80. Utilizing NBC newsreels to tell his story, Spagnoli offers an extraordinary take on this period in cinematic history.

 

The film features rare clips of Hollywood stars like Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe roaming about Italy in the 1950s, as well as tantalizing behind-the-scenes glimpses of several American productions.

Marilyn Monroe in a scene from “Hollywood Invasion” 

You’ll have a front-row seat to the creation of iconic moments like the chariot races in William Wyler’s 1959 epic “Ben Hur,” and you’ll listen in as Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins talk and joke on the set of Anatole Litvak’s 1963 “Five Miles to Midnight.” 

In another segment, Bryant Gumbel and actor Peter Ustinov offer revealing commentary on the set of the star-studded 1977 miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth,” which is currently available on NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock.

 

Also featured is a rare interview with 20th Century Fox founder Darryl Zanuck while on location in Europe. He talks about his departure from the company to become an independent producer and his many films shot on the continent. Among them is Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 “Cleopatra,” which was shot on the shores of the Mediterranean in Cabo di Gata. At one point in the film, Mankowitz and Elizabeth Taylor offer their take on the mixed reviews the film received upon its release.

 

President Kennedy in Naples, 1963

In a patch of the film that briefly veers away from cinema an,l.,d into the cultural revolution that was sweeping America and Europe, raw footage of President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Naples in July of 1963, just four months before he was assassinated, is featured in its entirety. 

That cultural shift paved the way for a new genre of Italian cinema heavily influenced by America: the Spaghetti Western. To address its emergence, Spagnoli offers interviews with Claudia Cardinale and Bridgette Bardot while they were on location shooting “The Legend of Frenchie King,” a 1971 Western comedy that was co-produced by the French, Spanish, Italians and British.

 

In a short but key interview about his 1976 American-made phenomenon “King Kong,” prolific producer Dino De Laurentiis talks about the end of the La Dolce Vita way of life and cinema in Italy. He addresses the political and economic crash of the ’70s, when even Federico Fellini was making films on a shoestring budget. 

 

On the set of “Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” 

Spagnoli then shows stunning clips of the making of Fellini’s 1976 “Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” (Fellini’s Casanova) at Cinecittà. The passage features interviews with Donald Sutherland and Sandra Allen, the Chicago-born woman noted in the Guinness World Records as the tallest woman in the world. She had a part in the film as one of Casanova’s love interests.

“Hollywood Invasion” is an impressive accomplishment. Spagnoli breathes new life into these once-forgotten clips, bringing them together to tell the story of Hollywood’s impact on European cinema during a bygone era when the two continents joined forces to make classic films that have stood the test of time.

 

In his 2014 “Sophia racconta la Loren,” Loren tells the story of her life in a compilation of interviews spanning seven decades. Again, Spagnoli takes a wealth of disparate clips and organizes them into a compelling story. The documentary also features remarks by the great Vittorio De Sica and addresses two of their early collaborations, including “Two Women,” for which Loren won an Academy Award.

 

“I spent a year with Sophia Loren without ever meeting her, a year between the Centro Sperimentale, the archives of the Istituto Luce and Rai Teche looking at all the footage relating to Loren and her extraordinary life and career,” Spagnola is quoted as saying on the Cinecittà website. He notes that the documentary is not a film on Sophia Loren, but on the perception of her in the Italian media from the early ’50s, when she appeared on the scene, to the present day, as the icon she’s become.

 

Spagnoli documented the life of another Italian icon in 2014. “Anna Magnani a Hollywood” is told from the point of view of her son, Luca, and is narrated by her granddaughter, Olivia.

 

Anna Magani and Tennessee Williams

Spagnoli begins the documentary by spotlighting Magnani’s collaboration with Tennessee Williams on Sidney Lumet’s 1960 “The Fugitive Kind” and delves into Hollywood’s fascination with her. Magnani’s son gives rare personal insights into many of her idiosyncrasies, for example, explaining why she always arrived in America by ship due to her fear of flying.

The film shows footage of the departure of the ocean liner Andrea Doria from Naples in April 1953, when Magnani set sail to present Luchino Visconti’s “Bellissima” at the Trans-Lux 60th Street theater in New York. On her first overseas trip, she met Bette Davis, and the two became lifelong friends. Magnani talked about how much she loved the energy of New York and the people she met, but how she was too overwhelmed by the city to consider living there.

 

Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s book “Hollywood Babilonia,” Spagnoli’s 2017 “Cinecittà Babilonia” recounts the story of the early days of Italian cinema during the ’30s and ’40s in the shadow of Fascism. 

 

The documentary begins with Benito Mussolini laying the first brick of Cinecittà on Jan. 29, 1936. The studios were built after a fire broke out at the Cines studios where, until that point, all of Italy’s films were made. The neighborhood along Via Tuscolana was chosen because it is easily reached from the city center, yet located in a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome. 

Marco Spagnoli directing "Cinecittà Babilonia"

Cinecittà opened its doors on April 28, 1937. From that point until 1943, when the war broke out, 279 films were made there. Executives had high hopes that the appeal of the era’s megastars, like Amedeo Nazzari and Alida Valli, would reach beyond Italy’s borders.

 

The story is told with a combination of historical footage, film clips, recent interviews and dramatizations. “Cinecittà Babilonia” takes us inside Rome’s iconic film school, Centro Sperimentale, which is located across the street from Cinecittà. 

 

Among the film’s countless informational gems, Enrico Vanzina, the son of legendary director Steno, tells the captivating story of how his father came up with the term “Telefono Bianchi” (White Telephones) to describe an early genre of Italian cinema.

 

In another scene, directors Giuliano Montaldo and Carlo Lizzani discuss the transition from war propaganda films to the neorealism movement, which ties into the impact of Hollywood’s pre-code film era on Italy’s cinema.

 

These days, Spagnoli is busier than ever. In addition to his ongoing work as a print journalist, last year he directed “Spazio italiano” (Space Made in Italy), which traces Italian space exploration from Galileo to the present. His latest documentary, “La voce del padrone — Franco Battiato e ti vengo a cercare,” examines the influence of musician-poet-filmmaker Franco Battiato on Italian culture. It premiered at the Taormina Film Festival in June.

 

All of the aforementioned documentaries are available online. Click on the titles for direct links. For more information about Spagnoli’s projects, visit marcospagnoli.it.

- Written by Jeannine Guilyard for the September 2022 issue of Fra Noi Magazine. Click here to subscribe.