Barbara Corsi
A little over a century since its birth, circa 1905, the Italian film industry is still very much alive. Italian cinema has frequently experienced extreme lows, both quantitatively and qualitatively—part of what Gian Piero Brunetta (1986) defines as cycles of growth and crises. However, it has always managed to change direction by tapping into creativity and versatility. The strength of the Italian industry resides in the same characteristics that constitute its weaknesses: the fragmented nature of production, distribution, and management companies; their lack of capitalization and integration in the production chain; and the uncertain or irregular ties with financing bodies or editorial industries (publishers, journals, newspapers). When compared to Hollywood, the Italian framework undeniably presents “characteristics of underdevelopment, rather than mature industrial development,” as Francesco Contaldo and Franco Fanelli argue (1986, 23). However, it is precisely its lack of industrial organization and standardization, which favors qualities such as instinct, craftsmanship, a penchant for risk, trade association, a corporative mentality, and diplomatic skill, that allowed Italian entrepreneurs in the postwar to build an industry that became the second most powerful in the world.
State participation contributed to this with a twofold effect: on the one hand, it relieved producers of worries about turning a profit and, therefore, from the necessity to follow decisively the route to industrialization; on the other, it allowed companies to adapt to market cycles with extreme flexibility, expanding or shrinking according to circumstances. Quite often, state‐sponsored producers and artists understood the film product as a hybrid between a consumer good and a work of art, privileging the cultural and creative result over the economic return.
The same attitude that tends to position Italian cinema outside the rules of the market can also be found in most historiography on the subject. Cultural resistance to acceptance of the economic‐industrial nature of cinema explains the scarceness of bibliography on the subject, and accounts for an approach that for a long time simply ignored its economic underpinning. The two basic texts, L’industria cinematografica italiana by Libero Bizzarri and Libero Solaroli (1958) and Storia economico‐politica del cinema italiano 1945–1980 by Lorenzo Quaglietti (1980), are at the same time enriched and conditioned by the authors’ direct involvement in the production phase and their adherence to communist ideological culture, both of which set limits to the analysis of certain phenomena. Left‐wing militancy was also shared by Contaldo and Fanelli, authors of L’affare cinema (1979), who tried to analyze the crisis of the industry and market that occurred in the 1970s, inspired by an anti‐American thesis that is only partly justified.
Only in recent decades have there been signs of interest in the economic history of Italian cinema, but sporadically and on specific topics or periods. A major study, that tells the entire story through the analysis of documents as yet largely unreleased, is still wanted. Compared to the big American studios, Italian companies hold institutional memory in low esteem, scattering their archives or conserving them in private rooms, from which they are slowly reemerging. Even what remains of the enormous heritage of documents of ANICA (Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini, with the final “A” later coming to stand for “Audiovisive”) has only recently been salvaged, promising to shed light on many aspects of the association’s strategy since its foundation on July 10, 1944.
One month after the liberation of Rome, despite disastrous material conditions, cinema industrialists were already planning for reorganization. Cinecittà’s studios were semi‐destroyed and partly used as refugee camps; film was in short supply, and cinema equipment had been looted. And yet, already in October 1946, Roberto Rosselini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) won the jury’s Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival, bringing international acclaim to Italian cinema and opening a phase of rebirth.
This did not happen by chance; in the 1930s, the Fascist regime had designed a legislative and institutional system to support cinema with the goal of incentivizing an industry that was the main source of popular entertainment. The figures who sponsored this initiative—the ministers Giuseppe Bottai, Dino Alfieri, and Giuseppe Volpi, and the head of cinema, Luigi Freddi—were seeking to establish a cinema not of propaganda, but rather of high‐quality entertainment, that would communicate to national and international audiences the achievements of the Fascist nation: the modern and dynamic spirit of its society and an economic and ideological system of control internalized by entrepreneurs. This latter has been well documented by Vito Zagarrio (2004), who compares the “Freddi code” to the Hays Code. To this end, artistic and technical training of the utmost professionalism was put in place, with the establishment of the school of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and the building of the modern Cinecittà studios in 1937. It was this environment that shaped the careers of the actors, screenwriters, technicians, producers, and directors who made Italian cinema great in the postwar period, along with the knowledge and experience acquired through collaboration with other European cinemas2 that had been dynamic until the beginning of World War II.
These consolidated foundations made possible the rebuilding of the industry in the postwar period. The fathers of neorealism, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica, had begun to experiment with new styles in the last years of Fascism; actors had trained at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia or in variety theaters; technicians had practiced their craft at Cinecittà; and producers had already given their productions a distinctive brand. Riccardo Gualino built Lux Productions’ reputation for the high artistic quality of its films (Malombra, Mario Soldati, 1942; I promessi sposi, Mario Camerini, 1941); Gustavo Lombardo, with the production company Titanus, privileged comedies and melodramas (Fermo con le mani by Gero Zambuto, 1937; La storia di una capinera by Gennaro Righelli, 1943); and the Scalera brothers specialized in the spectacular (Noi vivi/We the Living by Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942). Many of these production companies doubled as distribution houses, counting on their own network of agencies to distribute their films alongside foreign films, which helped to balance the business.
This dual function proved useful when, in 1949, the first comprehensive postwar law regarding the cinema, signed by then vice secretary to the presidency of the Council of Ministers, Giulio Andreotti, reestablished the so‐called buoni di doppiaggio or “dubbing vouchers” system, already in place under Fascist law. For every Italian film produced, the producer would receive from the state an amount equal to what a distributor would have to pay to import a film from abroad. So, when the producer and distributor were the same, the mechanism benefited both branches of activity. Although this might appear to be a contradictory system, alongside other legal directives supported by Andreotti the vouchers were a stimulus to consolidation of the supply chain of production distribution, an incentive to open the market, and the means by which Italian agencies could create tie‐ins with American majors to whom producers could transfer the vouchers as a form of payment.
From the enactment of the Andreotti laws—one in July 1949, and another longer and more detailed in December—until their expiry in 1954, Italian cinema took a gigantic leap: from 71 films in 1949 to 146 in 1953, and from a market share of 17% to 39% (Quaglietti 1980, 245, 248). In parallel, exports increased (1452 contracts for 81 countries in 1953—Associazione Industrie Cinematografiche ed Affini 1953, 49),3 as did the number of cinemas (from around 7500 to 9500) and audience size (from 616 million in 1949 to 819 million in 1955, the largest it had even been in Italy) (Quaglietti 1980, 252, 253).
“Italian production is now projected toward the global market. The position of our film industry as second in world importance, after the USA, is now indisputable” (Associazione Industrie Cinematografiche ed Affini 1953, 9). In these words, ANICA’s president Eitel Monaco presented the successes of the cinema sector in 1953, marking the important change taking place in those years: while previously, production was for the domestic audience, and only in rare cases for the global market, productions targeting the foreign market were now dominant. The industrialists therefore understood the importance of taking international markets into consideration, since the Italian market was insufficient to justify investments, and began to cultivate a network of relations with colleagues, especially European, starting from the Italian–French coproduction accord of 1949. The signing of the agreement was an event that made 1949 a turning point for the Italian film industry, and one of the key factors behind the strong growth of the period 1949–1953, together with the Andreotti laws, the success of films pioneering new genres, and the election of Eitel Monaco as president of ANICA.
Monaco began his career under Fascism and was for many years president of ANICA’s predecessor, the Federazione Nazionale Fascista degli Industriali dello Spettacolo. In 1941, he became direttore generale della cinematografia (director general for cinema), the highest state authority for matters regarding cinema. In all his roles, he managed always to safeguard the economic interests of the industry, thanks to diplomatic skills that also allowed him to return to the leadership of the association only a few years after the fall of the Fascist regime. From 1937 to 1971, it was he who shaped policy for cinema entrepreneurs, always in close discussion with government authorities (Corsi 2011).
The reelection of Monaco as ANICA’s president in 1949 and the enactment of the Andreotti legislation the same year are seen as elements of continuity and stability on which production companies could finally rely for the launch of their new industrial strategies. This renewal was enhanced by the appearance on the scene of a new generation of producers.
At Lux and Titanus, sons succeeded their fathers: Renato Gualino, son of Riccardo, continued to emphasize quality as Lux’s defining characteristic, selecting the best directors, actors, and technicians of the time to make films of medium‐to‐high budget. Goffredo Lombardo took over direction of the medium‐to‐low budget popular genre from his father, Gustavo, placing melodrama and the comic film at the center of Titanus’ strategy. Both companies forged new parameters for classic genres. Consider, for example, the Titanus series Catene (Chains, 1949), Tormento (1951), and I figli di nessuno (Nobody’s Children, 1951) by Raffaello Matarazzo, and the Lux series centered on the diva Silvana Mangano—Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis, 1948), Anna by Alberto Lattuada (1951), Mambo by Robert Rossen (1954)—which give melodrama a new form. Riso amaro also marked the debut of Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis, two producers who would shape the direction of the Italian industry after years of training at Lux, before striking out on their own.
The cinema industry of the 1950s was built on the twin pillars of the series and the figure of the star actor, nurturing performers such as Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Amedeo Nazzari, Yvonne Sanson, and Gino Cervi—in clear contrast to the neorealist trend of using nonprofessionals. Catene, the box office darling of 1949, generated five additional films starring Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson. Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, Luigi Comencini, 1953), with Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida, was followed by Pane, amore e gelosia (Frisky, Comencini, 1954), and Pane, amore e … (Scandal in Sorrento, Dino Risi, 1955). Don Camillo by Julien Duvivier (1952), from Rizzoli productions, with Gino Cervi and Fernandel, gave rise to the sequels Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, Duvivier, 1953), and Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone by Carmine Gallone (1955). Titanus’ Poveri ma belli (Poor But Beautiful, Risi, 1956) launched a group of young actors who returned to the screen in Belle ma povere (Risi, 1957).
These new films were shot on the sets of Rome’s Cinecittà which, rebuilt and returned to production after 1950, absorbed the majority of work, ending the decentralized ideal envisaged by neorealist theoreticians after World War II. Industrial centralism and the abandonment of neorealist values in favor of mass‐audience productions were the points on which the various interests that determined cinema policies converged. The Christian Democrat government, focused on economic recovery and political appeasement, sought to discourage with every means possible the treatment of themes that highlighted the backwardness and poverty in which a large part of the population lived. Producers aimed for profit and compliance with the legal requirements to obtain state benefits, while distributors and retailers demanded entertaining films that would attract audiences through classic elements, such as story and big‐name actors. The audience, meanwhile, had begun to reject the neorealist films it had partially identified with in the immediate postwar years, switching its loyalty to genre films, which made the Italian share of the market grow noticeably.
In 1949, both the public and the cinema industry had settled on a certain type of film product whose characteristics were clearly described in the magazine of the film retail association AGIS (Associazione Generale Italiana dello Spettacolo): “the wide Italian audience does not much enjoy reflecting on its daily miseries … [;] it prefers to be carried away to unfamiliar places: environments that are fictional, luxurious, or from another time” (Villa 1949, 3). The tone of the article anticipates by three years Giulio Andreotti’s famous open letter to Vittorio De Sica that argued: “because of Umberto D, people will be led to believe that this is Italy, and the director will have rendered a great disservice to his country” (Andreotti 1952, 5).
Government officials and distributors alike looked favorably on films successfully targeted at mass audiences, that producers sought to replicate in order to consolidate the production structure with the public’s approval. These conditions stimulated the expansion of the industry’s most important metrics: the number of films produced, audience size, and the number of cinemas—whose openings were only loosely regulated until 1950. The latter grew from 5000 working cinemas immediately before the war to around 8000 in 1950, of different size and type across the nation, from elegant, city‐center cinemas to tiny screens only open on weekends.
This widespread network, alongside the other factors mentioned earlier—a new class of producers, renewal of the nation’s cinema genres, state support, and capable leadership by the industry associations—were important for the growth of the internal market, but what was most essential at an international level was the new practice of coproductions. The Italy–France accord of 1949 was the outcome of over 10 years of collaboration. In the following years, similar agreements were signed with Spain, the German Federal Republic, and Austria, placing the Italian industry at the center of a network of European partnerships. The coproduction formula envisaged that the production companies of two or more countries would pool their financial, technical, and artistic resources to make films that would automatically acquire the nationality of the coproducing countries, as well as access to all the benefits included in the different legal frameworks. Such films enjoy a more robust production base, draw on more resources than any single‐nation film, and also start with a wider distribution capacity since they rely not only on the producing countries but also on the commercial potential that each can offer.
From 1949 to 1974—the golden age of Italian cinema—dozens of films were coproduced each year in a variety of forms, from auteur cinema to popular cinema. For 25 years, in their diplomatic networking and flexible production combinations, Italian producers displayed the best of their entrepreneurial and planning skills, revealing themselves to be, on occasion, ahead of their time. The concept of a Union of European Cinema—already formulated in 1953—that would grant works of cinema the status of free circulation, and producers the prospect of accessing financing from a common investment bank, anticipated by decades the economic trajectory of the European Union, though it ran aground on the complex bureaucratic steps necessary for its creation (Giannelli 1953; Corsi 1999). In practice, however, coproductions gave European cinema, with Italian cinema as the pivot, an international dimension that amplified its potential and resonance. The function of coproductions revealed itself as essential to the Italian industry, which lacked a distribution network as strong and widespread as the one in the United States.
The Hollywood majors dominated the Italian market after 1944, and for about 10 years starting in 1951 they permanently occupied part of Cinecittà to shoot large‐scale productions, such as Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951), Ben‐Hur (William Wyler, 1959), and Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), absorbing a wide range of Italian expertise. The arrival of the Hollywood majors was the result not of the splendor of the ruins or Rome’s other romantic attractions, but of the opportunity of finally putting to use Italian box office profits that, because of measures to defend the currency enacted in 1946, were blocked in special accounts and could not be transferred abroad. The production of high‐budget period films in Italy also allowed for savings, since the price of labor was so much lower than in Hollywood. Since the signing of agreements between ANICA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 1951, many stars of the American big screen had moved to Rome, amplifying the myth of “Hollywood on the Tiber,”4 which reflected glamour on Cinecittà. Italian cinema benefited from the international publicity guaranteed by the presence of American celebrities, and from close contact with Hollywood methods of industrial production that taught technicians, directors, and producers how to manage a set with greater efficiency and verve. Sergio Leone improved his ability to manage complex sets while working as second‐unit director on Ben‐Hur and assistant on other mammoth American productions, while producers such as Dino De Laurentiis developed multidirectional relationships and methods of work (Muscio 1999; Balio 2000). Contacts established in the early 1950s later took the form of funding for Italian productions by the majors, who, although not in coproduction relationships with Italian companies, contributed to the production of many films realized by entrepreneurs they held in high esteem, such as Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis: L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, Vittorio De Sica, 1954), La strada (La Strada, Federico Fellini, 1954), War and Peace (King Vidor, 1956).
Hollywood and Rome are the top two places for global cinema production. When distances are reduced we understand each other better …. Italy is a country that exports its cinema product, and it is logical for it to have a common policy with the United States for the conquest of foreign markets. (Fatti della Settimana 1953, 3)5
So said Monaco in 1953, listing the successes of Italian cinema. However, justifiable satisfaction at the results achieved in so few years ran the risk of obscuring the weaknesses of the Italian industry and of trumpeting a common policy with the majors that did not exist. The direct exchange with Hollywood on the ground did indeed stimulate rationalization and modernization of production methods, but one negative effect was a significant rise in the cost of labor that added to a general rise in costs due mainly to celebrity fees, in a national setting that was itself beginning to take up the star system. It is also true that the Italian industry relied considerably on exports, but among all the countries that bought Italian films, North America was a very limited market and hardly a reciprocal one: in 1953, Italy exported 28 films to the United States but imported 220 American films (Associazione Industrie Cinematografiche ed Affini 1953, 55).
The number of American films imported to Italy was capped under the 1951 ANICA‐MPAA agreements, which further envisaged the creation of a company, Italian Film Export (IFE), whose sole purpose was the distribution of Italian cinema in the United States and whose shares were held by the American majors out of their funds blocked in Italy. The achievements of IFE, which operated exclusively on American soil, were scanty in view of the scale of trade: 131 Italian films distributed in the United States from 1951 to 1956,6 compared to 1125 new American films imported to Italy over the same period. “The main error of the Italian‐American agreements was to presume to be able to compete with the American majors in cinemas owned by the majors themselves … [;] a film that was not programmed in one of the most profitable first runs in one of the 13 big US cities with more than half a million inhabitants could only have a hard life and low use,” wrote Bizzarri and Solaroli (1958, 145), encapsulating well the difficulties of a constantly unbalanced relationship, which led to delusions of parity each time a great Italian director won an Oscar, but that never penetrated the nerve center of the American internal distribution system.7
In Italy, American distributors operated from a position of strength even within ANICA, in which they participated alongside Italian companies who were rarely integrated in production. Excepting for the most important and solid Italian firms, such as Titanus and Rizzoli, production was the weakest link in the supply chain due to the increasing number of short‐term companies, built for speculation and with no managerial capacity. From 1953 to 1959, 391 production houses were in operation, around two‐thirds of which (265) produced only one film (Quaglietti 1978, 19), but this unstable constellation had been a permanent characteristic of the Italian production framework from its origins, alongside financial weakness and dependence on state subsidies. To what extent the latter were necessary to even out the imbalance between excessive production costs and too small a market was demonstrated in 1954 when the Andreotti law expired and the government suspended subsidy decisions for two years. Uncertainty triggered a fall in production from 190 films in 1954 to 91 in 1956; a medium‐size production company, Excelsa, went bankrupt; and even Lux was forced by its excessive budgetary outlays to halt production and focus on distribution.
When the law was finally re‐presented in 1956, with few changes to the original version, production resumed at its hitherto fast pace, with 137 films in 1957, growing to more than 200 in 1961. Thus opened a period of extraordinary achievement for Italian cinema, which managed to produce a unique combination of great auteur films, high‐quality comedies, and successful popular genre productions. Take, for example, the unexpected success of a genre film, Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, Piero Francisci, 1958), which initiated a new phase of cinema production that accompanied and represented, as well as any phenomenon of the time, the economic and social transformation of Italy in the years of the Economic Miracle (1958–1963).
In cinema, the boom was maintained largely by popular products. The phenomenon of the peplum—an apocryphal and cheaper version of the American sword‐and‐sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s shot in Cinecittà—lost momentum around 1963, to be immediately replaced in the audience’s esteem by the Italian western which, after a few films of only moderate success, exploded in 1964 with Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) by Sergio Leone, followed in the next two years by Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965) and Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966). Sergio Leone’s “dollars trilogy” was representative of a means of production particularly meaningful at the time, combining international collaboration and the Italian production chain’s internal resources.
Even before Per un pugno di dollari, European westerns had been produced according to the same formula, which later became classic: a three‐way coproduction among Italy, Spain, and Germany. Germany is where the genre took shape; Spain provided the best locations; and Italy offered the management and artistic personnel. Among the first Italian companies to coproduce westerns was Alberto Grimaldi’s Produzioni Europee Associate (PEA), whose name was coined precisely to reflect its preference for coproduction with other European countries. PEA, like many other companies, specialized in mass‐audience films, often made use of the “guaranteed minimum”: a type of funding advanced by retailers and distributors on the basis of a forecast on the minimum profit a film could expect to earn in their areas (city, province, or region). The system, which would sustain Italian film production until the crisis of the state TV networks sparked by the appearance of private television stations, was genuinely cinema‐based, since the funds came from other participants in the supply chain involved first hand in the production of films that their audiences might appreciate. Demand, in fact, often came from regional agents and distributors with whom film producers had collaborative relationships. This explained the sudden multiplication of films of the same genre after the success of a prototype, a phenomenon that repeated itself on various occasions over a 20‐year period: from peplum, through western, to police drama and erotic comedy.
The success these genres enjoyed, one after the other, can be explained by an astute evaluation of the audience’s expectations, combined with the screening space given to the films by the agents and distributors—who were also their financiers. Compared to other production companies in the medium–low budget category, however, PEA took an extra managerial leap by attracting into its orbit a first‐rate director, such as Sergio Leone, and the attention of United Artists. The American company was initially interested in the foreign distribution rights to Leone’s films, but after the director’s relationship with PEA ended, it remained in business with Grimaldi’s company, giving birth to a 20‐year collaboration that witnessed the production of such successful auteur films as Fellini Satyricon (1969), Pasolini’s Trilogia della vita (Il Decameron/The Decameron, 1971; I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales, 1972; and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte/Arabian Nights, 1974), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972) and Novecento (1900, 1976).
Confidence in Grimaldi’s ability to find a synthesis among an author’s innovative and provocative creativity, the logic of industry planning, and economic profit was the secret to the lasting alliance between PEA and United Artists. In general, respect earned “on the ground” was the precondition that made it possible for Italy’s best producers to make great films, alongside being their own guarantors for investments available through different sources.
Grimaldi’s relationship with PEA—or Ponti and De Laurentiis’s with the Hollywood majors—was not so different from that of independent producers and American studios in the “flexible decentralized system” following the end of the studio system (Perretti and Negro 2003). The definition was well suited to a polycentric system, such as the Italian one, which had always been flexible, without strong structures to anchor it, nor properties, such as production studios, to maintain.
The 1960s were the high point of Italian cinema and its industry, led by individuals such as Ponti, De Laurentiis, Lombardo, Angelo Rizzoli, Giuseppe Amato, Grimaldi, Alfredo Bini, Franco Cristaldi, Mario Cecchi Gori, and Gaetano De Negri. Despite obstacles and prosecutions for censorship, these entrepreneurs accepted the risk of believing in an artistic idea, often visionary, writing one of the most beautiful pages in the history of global cinema, along with the films’ auteurs.
This golden age opened with an exceptional decade, 1950–1960, during which two of the highest examples of Italian comedy were released, both directed by Mario Monicelli—I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958, produced by Cristaldi’s Vides) and La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959, produced by De Laurentiis)—and two “auteur super‐spectaculars” in Vittorio Spinazzola’s definition (Spinazzola 1974): La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita, 1960) by Federico Fellini (RiAma: Giuseppe Amato–Angelo Rizzoli–Gray Film–Pathé Cinema) and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) by Luchino Visconti (Titanus‐Les Films Marceau). The period ended with Bertolucci’s Novecento, Grimaldi’s last production in Italy before his move to the United States, where Dino De Laurentiis had emigrated some years earlier. The abandonment of Italy by its two most important producers signaled the end of the vision that had made its cinema great: the combination of a strong attachment to national culture with international strategies of coproduction that reached their zenith in the 1960s.
The coproduction formula, in different combinations, accounted for between 40% and 50% of Italian films produced in the decade (see Table 6.1), confirming the Italian industry’s dynamism in integrating its strengths with those of other cinema traditions to realize ambitious projects. The other side of the coin, however, was vastly increased production costs, which were already alarming in the early 1960s. To counter this trend, Goffredo Lombardo produced an unsuccessful program of low‐budget films by new filmmakers, and he was finally overwhelmed by the excessive costs of Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) and Il gattopardo (The Leopard, Luchino Visconti, 1963), which dragged Titanus into bankruptcy in 1964.
| Year | Total Italian Productions | Coproductions | Percentage of Coproductions |
| 1952 | 132 | 13 | 9.8 |
| 1954 | 190 | 46 | 24.2 |
| 1956 | 91 | 23 | 25.2 |
| 1957 | 137 | 71 | 52 |
| 1958 | 141 | 65 | 46 |
| 1960 | 160 | 66 | 41.2 |
| 1962 | 245 | 106 | 43.2 |
| 1964 | 290 | 155 | 53.4 |
| 1966 | 232 | 143 | 61.6 |
| 1968 | 246 | 116 | 47.1 |
| 1970 | 231 | 99 | 42.8 |
| 1972 | 280 | 111 | 39.6 |
| 1974 | 231 | 55 | 23.8 |
| 1976 | 237 | 34 | 14.3 |
| 1978 | 143 | 24 | 16.7 |
| 1980 | 160 | 32 | 20 |
| 1985 | 80 | 7 | 8.7 |
| 1982 | 128 | 14 | 10.9 |
| 1984 | 108 | 12 | 11.1 |
| 1986 | 109 | 16 | 14.6 |
| 1988 | 150 | 16 | 10.6 |
| 1990 | 115 | 17 | 14.7 |
The internal contradictions of the Italian industry system—impressive planning capacity but low company capitalization, overproduction, and excessive costs—came again to the fore as audience support decreased and the US industry changed strategy. Italian cinema’s international success in the 1960s and early 1970s was certainly enhanced by the tendency of the Hollywood majors to support its production and distribution. Christopher Wagstaff (1996, 171) goes so far as to speculate that the entire achievement of European cinema in these years was due to the studios’ interest, and that the collapse that ensued was caused by the withdrawal of American funding. Without reaching such a stark conclusion, we can still assert that Italian and European cinema had drawn great benefit from Hollywood capital and Hollywood crises: it was precisely at the start of the 1970s that the majors were back on the track of recovery after a period of strong internal restructuring.
The new strategy with which the majors took back the initiative in the European market was the launch of spectacular, high‐budget products, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), distributed in several copies simultaneously and exclusively in first‐run theaters. The impact of such saturation selling in Italy was twofold: first, positive though not decisively so at the box office, given the continued existence of other forms of exhibition; and, second, devastating to the small enterprise which, unable to program such film events, was progressively marginalized in the market. The distribution strategy dealt a serious blow to peripheral theaters in precarious economic circumstances, which until then had contributed by retaining the loyalty of an audience with limited economic possibilities—that is, routine but not strongly motivated cinemagoers. When private television entered the market in 1976 with an unlimited offer of free films, that audience and those theaters started to disappear.
From 1977 to 1983, the number of theaters that SIAE classified as nonindustrial (lacking a professional 35 mm projector) was reduced by half (from 4313 to around 2300), and audiences decreased from 373 to 195 million, while the percentage of cinemagoers in the total of the population fell from 43% to 35%. As Claudio Zanchi (1963, 8) noted, “The small enterprise finds itself in the most disastrous and dangerous situation, because when the only theatre in a small village closes down, the cinema market in that area is gone, and the spectators are completely lost.” His warning proved correct as well as prophetic, in terms of the difficulty in attracting back to the cinema once abandoned audiences.
The aggressive distribution policy also caused delays in film exhibition, which led to a decrease in audience frequentation. Lack of compliance with higher levels of comfort and safety, inflexible rules for opening new theaters, lack of promotional measures, and the constant increase in ticket prices to compensate for decreases in audience9 had the effect of alienating the spectator from cinema, rather than building a loyal customer base.
The height of this neglect of public needs was reached on February 13, 1983, with the fire in the Statuto cinema in Turin. The theater, which showed reruns, was formally in compliance with safety regulations, although the electrical system had deteriorated and most emergency exits did not work. When a short‐circuit triggered the fire, 64 spectators, mainly youths, were trapped inside and suffocated by the gas produced by the flames of the seats’ upholstery—material already outlawed in some countries. Many venues were forced to close after the tragedy, since they were financially unable to comply with more restrictive safety regulations and more efficient controls.
However, the main reason behind the fall in theater numbers and audiences—which dropped to an all‐time low of 100 million in 1988—was the appearance in 1976, after a long monopoly by the state broadcaster, Rai (Radiotelevisione Italiana), of private television networks, which was accompanied by a total lack of regulation of the relationships among the media. The establishment of Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest, with three national networks, was encouraged and overseen by the government of the Socialist Bettino Craxi, and Berlusconi’s company remained outside and above any legislation until some ad hoc decrees in 1984, whose principal guidelines were reiterated in the Mammi Law in 1990. The duopoly that resulted from the division of television networks between Rai and Fininvest blocked access to other TV operators and had repercussions for the film industry by triggering an intense race for the television broadcast of films and the purchase of network rights. Rai, which since the second half of the 1960s had been directly engaged in quality cinematic production (with some controversial choices, such as L’albero degli zoccoli/The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi, 1978) and La veritàààà (Cesare Zavattini, 1982), abandoned riskier projects to race after the Fininvest model: massive broadcasting of purchased films and easy entertainment packages. Although Rai and Fininvest devoured tens of films each day to fill television schedules, their financing of cinema production was minimal, and no legislation existed to force them to compensate adequately for the product, such as the law passed by minister Jack Lang in France under President François Mitterand.
In a context very distant from both Hollywood’s multimedia studios and the French model of the regulatory state, the dictatorship of the cinema product exercised by television in Italy was almost complete. With the network crisis and the recapture of a dominant market position by US companies, the participation of television channels in production became as decisive as the distributor’s minimum guarantee had been 20 years earlier. The result was that the figure of the producer lost importance, to the point in many cases of becoming simply the executor of a project that lay in the hands of the TV networks and the state—sponsors who pursued considerations that do not always coincide with those of the cinema market.
In this changed cultural and economic climate, Italy’s traditional producers left the stage, to be replaced by entrepreneurs who could usefully negotiate with the television networks, or even owned one. With three national networks controlled by Fininvest in 1984, Silvio Berlusconi launched Reteitalia, his own film production company, often partnering with other production companies, but always with the controlling financial interest. Until 1995, when it was replaced first by Mediaset, then Medusa, Reteitalia produced 155 feature films, the highest number by a single company in the history of Italian cinema (Bernardini 2000, 363)10 and a preponderant national share, given that total production in this period was around 120 films per year. The rise of Reteitalia inaugurated the era of cinema carino (“cute” or pleasing cinema), characterized by middle‐of‐the‐road television values and targeted at a general audience, eschewing controversial subjects and more complex discourse.
Another rising producer was Mario Cecchi Gori, whose company owed its growth precisely to the network use—first with Fininvest and then with Rai—of the rich heritage of comedy produced in earlier years, from Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, Dino Risi, 1962) to the L’armata Brancaleone series by Mario Monicelli (1966–1970). Cecchi Gori and Berlusconi joined forces to create Penta, a distribution and production company that aimed to vanquish the competition and act as a minor major, even to the point of establishing a branch in the United States. The experience, which lasted from 1989 to 1994, was successful in Italy and Europe, but failed in the United States, where Penta Films produced few films, among them Man Trouble by Bob Rafelson (1992) and Night and the City by Irwin Winkler (1992), both of which flopped at the box office.
Franco Cristaldi had also attempted an assault on the great American market in 1975, founding Filmit Inc. with Fernando Ghia and screenwriter Robert Bolt, in Los Angeles. Under the direction of Ghia, who would produce Roland Joffe’s The Mission in 1986, Filmit signed a number of development agreements with US companies, but failed to see any to fruition for lack of funding. Alberto Grimaldi, meanwhile, had been forced into a successful legal battle against Universal and Disney over rights to Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002), which the Italian had optioned ahead of everyone, and for which he won top billing in the film’s production credits (Corsi 2012). Only that most American of Italian producers, Dino De Laurentiis, prospered in the ranks of Hollywood, producing in more than 30 years of American activity such successes as Serpico by Sidney Lumet (1973) and Hannibal by Ridley Scott (2001), and alternating them with abject failures (Dune by David Lynch, 1984, Body of Evidence by Uli Edel, 1992). Notwithstanding the failures, he was given the highest accolade for an independent producer, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards of 2001.
Insertion into the logic of the Hollywood film industry was challenging for even the most international and capable of Italian producers, in spite of the confidence and support of American production companies when working together with Italian film industrialists in Italy. Nevertheless, names such as Franco Cristaldi lie behind the Italian Oscars of the 1980s and 1990s. It was Cristaldi who forced Giuseppe Tornatore to cut and reedit the first, flawed, version of Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso) which then went on to win the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1989 and the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 1990.
Apart from the major producers, who continued to mount some international projects, the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by the retreat of Italian cinema to the narrow horizon of national comedy; by dependence on a large number of films produced with state subsidies, often to low standard; and by a steep fall in coproductions (see Table 6.1). Throughout the 1980s, coproductions averaged 15 a year, or around 10% of total national production. The domestic market was captured by comedy films, dominated by star performers, often drawn from cabaret (Renato Pozzetto, Diego Abatantuono, Francesco Nuti), either directing themselves or in partnership with a director for a series centered on a single character. The trend attracted audience support,11 but then withered, as had other serial successes of the past, leaving a vacuum in its wake. As audience appreciation of Italian cinema waned, market rating remained increasingly reliant on the success of film events with mass appeal, such as Il ciclone (Leonardo Pieraccioni, 1996), La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997), and the Christmas phenomenon of the cinepanettoni.
The latter, entirely produced by Aurelio De Laurentiis’ Filmauro, began in 1983 with Vacanze di Natale by Carlo Vanzina and produced a fresh chapter each year, shot in ever new tourist locations, but always based on the same narrative framework: a farcical conflict between characters of different geographical origins who meet in holiday destinations (O’Leary 2013, 21). Massimo Boldi from Milan and Christian De Sica from Rome, stalwarts in the series, became the masks of these regional archetypes, and director Neri Parenti took over from Vanzina with undiminished success. The release of the latest cinepanettone would attract millions of cinemagoers (mostly nonspectators for the rest of the year) to an entertainment ritual that cut across all age groups. Mirroring an Italy that identified with its own provincialism and the innocent transgressions of slapstick comedy, the cinepanettone had a positive effect on the market at a difficult time for the business, and buoyed up Filmauro, the only production company still independent of network financing and self‐sufficient in distribution.
It is, nonetheless, true that the kind of genre cinema that had made the Italian scene rich and diverse in the 1960s seems to have disappeared in favor of a choice between farce and auteur cinema, in which the state offers the only alternative to television network finance.
The mechanism of state funding had been introduced in Article 28 of the 1965 law, which made possible an advance to cover part of the costs for projects of cultural value. In 1994, a modified version of the law widened state participation to include a role as guarantor for credit accessed by productions through third parties, in order to free up quality projects from their dependency on pre‐purchases by television networks. The procedure of ministerial selection, muddled and not always appropriate, nevertheless gave the green light to tens of low‐budget films that lacked adequate development and a solid relationship with the distribution and retail chains. The new ruling incentivized the do‐it‐yourself approach, allowing filmmakers to receive funding even without a sound financial project or the support of a proper production company. The producer could limit his role to obtaining the remainder of the funding without ever worrying about finding coproducing partners or market outlets. The dependency shift, caused by a wrong‐headed cinema policy, alongside the parasitism of many dodgy characters looking for easy profit, damaged production quality, rather than bettering it; undermined audience trust; and killed the fundamental role of the producer.
To break this perverse mechanism, which threatened to drive their role to extinction, Italian producers, under the aegis of API (Autori e Produttori Indipendenti), headed by Angelo Barbagallo, proposed in June 2000 a reduction in the percentage of state funding (though not for first or second films) from 90% to 50% of the total budget. The stated objectives were “to restore professional dignity to the producer and to encourage the sourcing of means for producing films from the market.” In addition, “the Italian producer should be open to European coproductions, to casts with actors who promote the sales or launch of films in Europe, and to the kind of stories that might have access to, and support from, national and international markets” (Kataweb 2000).
In a historic change of direction from their previous relations with the state, producers were asking for less money but more room for economic alliances of a more specifically cinematic nature, preferring to surrender some financial security to correct a system that was no longer fit to have market impact. The limits of a type of state intervention based on individual film production, rather than on the development of stable business models, are nowadays clear, especially in an audiovisual context of global reach, in which there is once again a need to empower coproduction strategies. Renewed professional awareness by a generation of young producers, combined with the shift in the film industry and film policy, facilitated the passing in 2004 of a new law and, in 2009, of a new system of indirect tax‐credit financing—measures that sought to replace the logic of nonrepayable financing with incentives.
From the late 1990s to 2004, the urgent need to change the mindset of how the film business was run, not only to revitalize production but also to revamp cinema consumption, became clear to all industry operators. The business model, largely unaltered for decades, finally began to adapt in 1996 when Walter Veltroni, then deputy secretary in the office of the prime minister, liberalized licenses, thereby opening the market to competition and the construction of multiplexes. The renewal of theaters had proceeded slowly since the Statuto tragedy: at the end of 1992 only 5% of screens (180 out of 3300) were part of multitheater complexes, a very low percentage by European standards. Measures for the creation of multitheaters began to grow from the mid‐1990s, encouraged by the increase in audiences that started in 1993–1994, reaching 118 million tickets in 1998—the year of James Cameron’s Titanic—but slowing in the years following and never quite managing to break the 120‐million‐a‐year mark. However, the spread of multiplexes, concentrated in areas already well‐served, did not produce the desired results in terms of audiences, and the introduction of digital technology in 2008, which forced the business to make up in 15 years what it had delayed for decades, put the entire industry to the test. Digital media could, however, provide an opportunity for revival for the smaller parts of the sector that had resisted the general trend, allowing them to organize a more varied offering in terms of days and time slots. The new technology, therefore, pushed agents to take the defining step toward managerial training of a profession that until the 1990s had been operated more or less passively, as a dynastic heritage or a sinecure.
Inadequate professional training had been a bugbear of the Italian cinema industry until at least the early 2000s, when specialization and competition in cinema labor practices became so intense as to no longer allow for casual or opportunistic presences in the sector. The plunge of industry metrics to a historic minimum in the 1990s—83.5 million spectators in 1992, 17.2% share of Italian market in 1989, a few dozen films exported in 1998–1999 (see Tables 6.2 and 6.3)—was the point of no return for tolerating managerial deficiencies that affected all sectors of the industry.
Table 6.2 Italian films distributed abroad (Ruggeri 2001, 61–77)12
| Year | France | United Kingdom | United States |
| 1991 | 28 | 8 | 15 |
| 1992 | 22 | 1 | 2 |
| 1993 | 16 | 2 | 1 |
| 1994 | 18 | 5 | 7 |
| 1995 | 17 | 5 | 2 |
| 1996 | 24 | 5 | 1 |
| 1997 | 16 | 1 | – |
| 1998 | 9 | 1 | 2 |
| 1999 | 17 | 3 | – |
Table 6.3 Foreign films imported into Italy (Bertozzi and Russo 2000, 476–77)
| Year | France | United Kingdom | United States |
| 1991 | 40 | 28 | 228 |
| 1992 | 38 | 27 | 209 |
| 1993 | 19 | 16 | 198 |
| 1994 | 19 | 18 | 173 |
| 1995 | 23 | 21 | 179 |
| 1996 | 24 | 31 | 182 |
| 1997 | 26 | 37 | 182 |
| 1998 | 31 | 34 | 183 |
| 1999 | 37 | 44 | 178 |
From 2006 to 2010, of the 612 films produced, 360 were sold abroad (86 in North America), on the basis of rights transfer or guaranteed minimum. But 87% of the tickets to Italian films purchased globally in the same period were at home (Pasquale 2013, 60), a sign that Italian titles were unable to attract foreign audiences because of either a lack of appeal or inadequate promotion. Partial exceptions to this trend were comedies and biographical films (the genres preferred abroad), auteur/art films presented at festivals, and films with international casts. These three groupings account for all Italian films that have garnered significant success in recent years: Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, 2009), Gomorra (Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone, 2008), Sorrentino’s Il divo (2008) and La grande bellezza, and Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino, 2009). Guadagnino’s film showed the stark contrast between the national market, where it was almost totally ignored (47200 tickets), and foreign markets, in particular Anglo‐Saxon. In the United Kingdom, it attracted 159000 spectators (out of a total of 855480 European spectators in 20 or so countries); in the United States it earned over US$6 million at the box office, while gaining critical success and a nomination for a Golden Globe.13
The film that best represents the great artistic, commercial, and cross‐media potential of the new Italian cinema is Garrone’s Gomorra, based on Roberto Saviano’s book of the same name (2006), which totaled 3.5 million spectators in 25 European countries and generated a successful television series sold worldwide.
The Gomorra‐Il divo phenomenon exploded after the former won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008 while the latter was awarded the Prix du Jury: an Italian double‐header that had not happened in years. Though profoundly different in style, the two films marked the emergence of a lively Italian cinema that tries to observe and decipher the past and present, and is the product of high professionalism (Corsi 2012). Domenico Procacci’s Fandango, producer of Gomorra, and Indigo Film of Francesca Cima and Nicola Giuliano, who believed in Sorrentino from his first film to the Oscar‐winning La grande bellezza, are two of the best examples of new production companies built on managerial skills, coproduction strategies, and the ability to assemble different financial packages from both within and outside Italy.
Thanks to these and other producers, the reorganization of the Italian cinema industry is starting to bear fruit, 15 years after API’s demands for trade autonomy and the simultaneous unprecedented success of a group of films outside traditional comic categories that signaled a new direction: La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, Nanni Moretti, 2001), I cento passi (One Hundred Steps, Marco Tullio Giordana, 2000), and L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss, Gabriele Muccino, 2000). Muccino’s film, in particular, won notable success even in the difficult American market, where it was distributed after having won the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002. It also inspired an American remake, Last Kiss (Tony Goldwyn, 2006), and drew the attention of Will Smith, who asked Muccino to direct two films for which he was both protagonist and producer—The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006, and Seven Pounds, 2008—launching Muccino into the world of Hollywood.
After a long period of decline following the dispersion of talent in the 1980s, the prerequisites exist today to rebuild a successful quality cinema and recreate the links with a public that still remains unstable. One can see a renewed awareness of their craft on the part of the new generation of screenwriters, directors, and producers, and a greater competence in managing different sources of financing, such as tax credits or production funds placed at the disposition of regional film commissions. There has been an increase in the number of films shot in English or even outside Italy (Hungry Hearts, Saverio Costanzo, 2014), as well as positive signs of a desire to return to genre filmmaking (Il capitale umano/Human Capital, Paolo Virzì, 2013; Smetto quando voglio/I Can Quit Whenever I Want, Sydney Sibilia, 2014), and thus to move beyond the limits and boundaries of comedy, which is difficult to market internationally. From the time that state funds diminished and their dispersal was subjected to more restrictive measures, one has been able to observe a greater dynamic between the most competent film companies, some of which have made international coproduction a prerequisite of their activity, as in the case of Transmedia from Gorizia (Zoran, mio nipote scemo, Matteo Oleotto, 2013), which has collaborated regularly with a Slovenian production house.
The support of the state, in the form of financing or of distribution to theaters, is nevertheless still required for Italian cinema, above all to launch young directors and to stimulate auteur cinema. It is now necessary that the promise of rebirth be nurtured within an encouraging legislative framework that can adequately compensate the makers of cinema by putting in place more restrictive obligations on the new “distributors” of film products—TV, telephone companies, Internet platforms, and so on—and to take steps to combat piracy, which steals spectators from theaters. International recognition tells us that Italian cinema still speaks to the world. All we can hope for is that “la grande bellezza” of its past will find new expression and validation in its present.