No, But I Saw the Picture

In a winter rain, Italy's Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani picked up a workman's trowel and mortared the cornerstone. The vicegerent of the vicariate of Rome splashed the stone with holy water. Yet all the fanfare was not for some vast new public utility. It was for Movie Producer Dino de Laurentiis and his new $11 million studio, located on a 750-acre site 13 miles south of Rome. It was official recognition that one of Italy's most vital export industries is its booming movie business, and that the biggest thing in Italy's movies is Dino de Laurentiis.

A one-man heavy industry, De Laurentiis has been pampered by the government with tax concessions and subsidies. His new studios have four immense sound stages, three of which can be combined, by sliding steel doors, into a giant indoor county, complete with pocket oceans for underwater scenes. A sort of Cecil B. DeMilione, he recently completed Barabbas with a cast of 8,000, many of whom are lions. And now he is preparing for the motion picture that will make Ben-Hur seem like a minor travelogue, the ultimate, untoppable, millennial religious epic --a $30 million, twelve-hour adaptation of The Bible. De Laurentiis will stick with the original title.

Adam & Ekberg.. "In a certain sense, the Bible is already a screenplay," says De Laurentiis, who has hired British Playwright Christopher Fry to help him prove it. Unnecessary parts--"the Psalms, for example"--may be cut. But Noah and Jonah will voyage, the Red Sea will part, and Moses will, of course, once again receive the Ten Commandments. Since De Laurentiis feels that "we can only do this once and it had better be right,'' he is in constant touch with the Vatican's motion picture office. Also, he does not want The Bible to be a Roman Catholic picture, so he plans to consult authorities of the Church of England, leading rabbis, and Dr. Billy Graham. Where differences exist, De Laurentiis will shoot alternate scenes. Hence, in the cutting room at judgment day, the film editors may include a Douay man, a King James man, a Revised Standard splicer, and so on.

Dino de Laurentiis smiles indulgently at such Hollywood efforts as George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (scheduled for production this spring and summer), which will run a scant three hours. The Bible, which will go before the cameras next year, will be shown to audiences in three segments, two for the Old Testament, one for the New. Roughly a dozen directors will work on the picture. None are signed yet, but De Laurentiis thinks Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita) might get things off to a rousing start with the Creation. He is saving Ingmar Bergman for the Apocalypse.

With a tradesy eye on his congregation, Dino is going to make the film in English, dubbing it in Italian. Who will the actors be? "Everybody," says Dino. It is easy to imagine Van Johnson munching an apple offered him by Anita Ekberg, Frank Sinatra slinging stones at Jackie Gleason, Claudia Cardinale holding Laurence Olivier's head on a platter. No one has actually been cast yet, but two are all but certain to appear: Anthony Quinn, who has done some of his best work in De Laurentiis films (La Strada), and beautiful, languorous Silvana Mangano, who married Dino soon after she appeared, all youth, legs and bosom, in Bitter Rice. They now have four children.

$54,545 a Word. A middle-sized man behind heavy black glasses, Dino de Laurentiis, 42, is an unlikely figure for the duce of Italian cinema. At 16 he won a scholarship at a motion picture school, ducked out of his family's prosperous spaghetti-making business, and came to Rome. With Dino's success, the whole family has since abandoned spaghetti for films. De Laurentiis served a lighthearted war, demobilized himself as soon as the Americans landed, and went back to making movies with black-market film. In 1953 he and Co-Producer Carlo Ponti (who achieved added fame by marrying Sophia Loren) broke into the U.S. market with a stinker called Ulysses. Dino got his first Oscar for La Strada, and went on to make a lot of overblown bad movies and several good movies, such as Nights of Cabiria, for which he got another Oscar. In a non-Shakespearean epic called The Tempest, he transformed eleven words of Pushkin ("The rebels rushed up to us and ran into the fortress") into a $600,000 cavalry charge. He made one bad mistake (at least financially) when he refused to produce Fellini's La Dolce Vita. De Laurentiis says that Fellini would not eliminate the murder of two children, and "as a husband and father, I could not make such a picture."

Despite this single failure in judgment, De Laurentiis has made so much money that his personal income now runs about $10 million a year. And largely because of him, the Italian film industry--which in its first postwar years could barely afford a Shoeshine--now looks more like Hollywood than Hollywood itself.

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