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The main trouble: hardly any Italian film makes enough money at the box office to defray production costs. Last year the total deficit was $15.8 million—nearly a third of the total annual investment in Italian movies. The industry has survived thus far merely because the government awards each picture a subsidy that ranges from 10% to 18% of its box-office gross. . In effect, the industry exists on government sufferance and is subject to all the hazards of politics and bureaucracy, as well as to the normal risks of business.
The "crisis" of last spring showed everybody what was what. The government happened to mention that it was considering withdrawal of the film subsidy. Next day almost all production in Italy stopped. Frantic conferences went on for a couple of days. The government announced that it would continue the subsidy. Thereupon, everybody went back to full production. But the government had seen its power and began to use it more vigorously.
Economic and artistic tutelage are only the worst of it. While the general cost of living has multiplied 52 times since 1945? the cost of making movies has gone up about 95 times. Italian producers now have to compete with prices paid by Hollywood producers, who since 1946 have shot (in whole or in part) a couple of dozen films in Italy. And the stars demand enormous salaries (De Sica really has made $6,400 a day), because the companies are not sure enough of their financial existence to sign long-term contracts.
Another big trouble is inexperience. The business has expanded so fast that half the people. hardly know their jobs yet. When Ulysses was supposedly finished and the company disbanded, the cutting room suddenly discovered 23 gaps in the continuity of the film. Extra scenes had to be spliced in at considerable extra cost. Again, when a company was shooting in Sicily, Hollywood's Anthony Quinn tore the pants he had been wearing in all the scenes. It took three days to get another pair from Rome. Meanwhile, the company sat around and did nothing, with the result that the $3.95 pants cost $22,000.
Villas & Cadillacs. But while the boom lasts, the Italian movie colony, borrowing from Hollywood in every field, is eating high on the bel paese. "California," in Italian, is an adjective meaning luxurious, and californially they live today in Rome. The producers sit behind desks as big as pingpong tables, and send their Cadillacs fishtailing through the crooked little Roman streets. The Rossellinis have had as many as nine cars in their garage, and Actor Raf Vallone owns twin Lancias ($24,000 apiece)—one blue, one grey. Each morning he can pick a car to match his tie.
On the ruins of the tombs built by the
Roman patricians of antiquity, the new movie rich are raising some of the world's most expensive homes. Actress Yvonne Sanson can be seen out on the New Appian Way in a "ranch-style villa" with a 600-sq.-ft. living room, walled in glass, in which four huge Gobelin tapestries look like so many postage stamps. Amedeo Nazzari, the Italian Errol Flynn, has a 2O-room duplex in Rome furnished with 18th century antiques, and a villa on the Tyrrhenian Sea with a ballroom, rifle range, tennis courts, and a regulation-size soccer field.