The Cinema Magician

...But praise by intellectuals (of whom Fellini was always wary) can also be a problem...

...He became impervious to personal attacks—often physical—as when he and his frequent star, Marcello Mas-troianni, after being jostled and spat at, adjourned for "a lunch of risotto with saffron at Biffi Scala," and talked about other things...

...His close-ups are as good as his panoramic shots, and except for there being no music by Nino Rota, reading the book feels very nearly like a Fellini film...

...If the camera had no film...

...They were not quite as numerous as gossip or Federico would have it...

...to them, Federico may have owed his divided personality...

...He thought he was doing something completely different and much more basic—a made-up magazine, a magazine film...

...If there weren't even a camera...

...Kezich is the film critic for the distinguished Corriere Delia Sera, and was for over 40 years a close friend of Felli-ni's...

...But at this time, he never dreamed of becoming one himself...

...in French, trepasser does mean to die, but there is nothing like that in either English or Italian...

...Asked during production of La Dolce Vita if he had an affair with Anita Ekberg, he replied, "You should certainly please tell everyone that I have...

...And what a life he had...

...Fellini dies on October 31, 1993, the day after his golden wedding anniversary...

...This led to other journals and to the radio...

...Albeit totally unmusical, he meets the wonderful composer Nino Rota and forms a close partnership with him...

...The shattering La Strada was called by critics old, fake, insincere, literary, unrealistic, pathological, and childish...

...Illnesses of various kinds afflict him...

...But he buys Fed-erico the first of his many fancy cars...

...My only reservation about Federico Fellini concerns the poor translation by Minna Proctor and Viviana Mazza...

...A sequel to it, Moraldo in the City, swiftly banged out by Fellini, Pinelli, and Flaiano, does not get made...

...But what would have been a noteworthy collaboration with Ingmar Bergman (the directors admired each other) falls through because of an American producer's insolvency...

...Absorbing, too, are the accounts of how Fellini and Pasolini haunted Rome's disreputable quarters and palled around with prostitutes (who adored Fellini) for The Nights of Cabiria and of Fellini's conflicts with major actors (he hated working with stars...

...The huge obstacles that even a star director encounters, and sometimes actually hurdles, increase one's admiration for Fellini, even if his methods and treatment of coworkers (his wife included) were often less than admirable...

...figuratively, a big baby or layabout...

...In his belief that cinema should reinvent rather than imitate reality, he had his set designer create the Via Veneto in the studio, and claimed that it was better than the real thing...

...Nor did he ever don a swimsuit or take a still photograph...

...There isn't a newspaper in the world that describes [his passing] as anything other than a loss for humanity," writes Kezich...

...Indeed, it is hard to tell with Fellini whether his art imitated his life, or vice versa...

...Most peculiarly, we get "trespassing" for dying...

...This biography testifies to the promised great future's permanent present...

...We read: "[Pier Paolo] Pasoli-ni and Alberto Moravia, each with his own personal take on [La Dolce Vita], manage to provoke more worry for the director than reassure him...

...Ingmar Bergman spoke to me in the early 1970s of his love for Fellini...

...Most important among them was The Voyage of G. Mastorna, on which the director vainly worked almost his whole life...

...The method changes...

...Even more oddly, growing up he rarely saw movies...

...Kezich evokes vividly the young man's Roman adventures, one of them leading him toward a young actress who appeared in one of his radio sketches, Giulietta Masina...

...Giulietta, also ailing, dies five months later...

...Other such miscarriages include an early one for Sophia Loren and a late one with script by Carlos Castaneda...

...The heat from his creative mind melts him," he said...

...Living with her extraordinary aunt Giulia, Giulietta had experimented unsuccessfully with other arts until settling on acting...

...Luckily, mistranslations like these, and many more, cannot obscure the book's quality...

...world history...

...Three bank commercials he does make are attended only by some 20 people at the Venice Festival...

...sanguinely, he gets involved with a magician and magic...

...Already while working on Variety Lights, he declared that cinema called for clear ideas, hard work, and the ability not to care about anybody else...

...Apologizing to the befuddled fellow with a hand gesture, he runs off to hide on a side street, collapsing on the curb very near the house where, coincidentally, he was to spend his last years...

...Joseph in The Miracle with a million-lire check, which Roberto takes back a half-hour later...

...Too clever and talented to be long stuck in Rimini, and perhaps spurred on by a traveling circus (clowns were to be a lifelong passion), he duly went to Rome to be, as Kezich writes, "swallowed up as if by a starving, protective and dangerous mother...

...Marriage to Giulietta, beginning in her aunt's comfortable apartment, also meant dodging the wartime draft...

...the movie is directing me"— though he does not see this as a drawback...

...It was to endure 50 years—until death—and though, Kezich observes, Federico "doesn't give up flirting with other women, he does it with the security that Giulietta is beside him...

...This surfaces in a film dedicated to his wife, Juliet of the Spirits, which brings about the end of several friendships and collaborations...

...He places the man and artist into the context of the annals of cinema, as well as of Italian politics and John Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News...

...Lattuada, also a director, pushed him into directing a few scenes of his Variety Lights...

...But at 464 pages, it is so ample in critical scope and brimful of irresistible information as to make one despair of doing it justice in a mere review...

...Even so, in the last films, as in The Voice of the Moon, Fellini fans "can find solace in that the maestro, though weary and disconsolate, is still there, immersed in the task of finding an answer to the amorphous chaos of existence...

...Fellini the director did not spring full-fledged from his youthful brow...

...Fritz...

...Curiously or not, Fellini was never to show interest in politics or soccer, the most traditional topics of Italian society...

...Between reticence and self-contradiction, however, Fellini managed to obfuscate any clear identification with himself in his films...

...He now does much more reading, and even some painting...

...To cite but one incident, take Fellini's narrow escape from the Nazis...

...With Rota's death, the scores, too, lose a good deal, and Felli-ni's control slackens: "After the first few weeks, I'm not directing the movie anymore...

...Unwell, he cannot make the trip to Hollywood for a Lifetime Achievement Award...

...It would all be meaningful even if the movie were never printed, edited, seen...

...Federico was born in 1920 in the sleepy little Adriatic town of Rimini...

...Federico is, of course, a joker himself: He does not read Casanova for his film about him, or Petronius for what becomes Fellini Satyricon...

...As Kezich observes, he was gradually turning into "a real movie animal capable of the most Machiavellian behavior...

...Her elfin charm and sound values attracted the young man "worn out by the carousel of furnished rooms and boarding houses...

...He enjoys "the simple task of doing it...

...His mother, Ida, a city girl rejected by her family for marrying beneath her station, became pious and withdrawn...

...Dreams were ever more important to Fellini, and he kept a Dream Book, including even such nightmares as when he is forced to have mortifying sex with an ugly woman...

...With his gift for drawing, particularly caricatures and comic strips, he landed a job with the comic magazine Marc'Aurelio, drawing and, later, writing comic sketches...

...The later films are lesser works, but at Kezich's hand, make for no less riveting reading...

...Toward the end of his life," Kezich writes, "the shadow of the great film Fellini never made [Mastor-na] weighs heavier on him...

...Sordi and a bunch of young actors are sensational in the film...

...I can't work the way I used to, with a screenplay and dialogue...

...And such things as "hung" for hanged, "off of," and "thusly...

...Lured into screenwriting, Fellini worked on many important movies, such as Roberto Rossellini's Open City and Paisan, and films of the no-less-important Pietro Germi...

...He doesn't like the label 'neo-decadent' and is totally perplexed by the comparison drawn between him and the poet Giovanni Pascoli...

...Much of 8 1/2 is made up of dreams and dreamlike fantasies...

...Now I just want an outline, and then I improvise while I'm shooting...

...jumps off the truck to embrace him...

...Unfairly, it garners only a Silver Lion at the Venice Festival...

...Before very long, Federico was also a gag writer for others, including film directors...

...Actually, as Kezich confirms, he had already made those films...

...Making his first film, the enchanting The White Sheik, he doesn't improvise (as many believe) but knows what he wants and how to get it, though he incorporates ideas that come to him during shooting...

...Until his death after Orchestra Rehearsal, Rota provides Felli-ni with arguably the finest film scores ever composed, the one for Sheik no exception...

...Especially ironic—or prophetic—is one headline: "FOR FELLINI, THIS IS THE START OF A GREAT FUTURE...

...Despite their differences, they stayed together...

...Kezich locates the reason for its being "one of the most admired and praised works in the history of cinema [in] that it teaches bravery and (with difficulty, effort, pain, and joy) how to say 'I.'" Reluctantly, Fellini gets some psychotherapy...

...Forced onto a truck during a mass roundup, he spots a Wehrmacht officer and, madly shouting "Fritz...

...Kezich is uniquely informative and insightful about such unrealized projects in which great efforts were invested...

...A vitellone is literally an overgrown calf...

...Still, what reactions he had to endure...

...Fellini hated the theater, except variete, the European vaudeville, at which he often hung out...

...One day when he can manage the heat . . . he will make pictures you have never seen in your life...

...He became coscenarist with such leading practitioners as Alberto Lattuada, Brunello Rondi, Ennio Flaiano—later on, Bernardino Zapponi and Tonino Guerra—and his steadiest partner-to-be, Tullio Pinelli...

...The youth, his somewhat younger brother, and their friends indulged in escapades worthy of the vitelloni that figure so prominently in Fellini's cinema...

...Next comes Fellini's loveliest film, I Vitelloni, into which he smuggles Alberto Sordi (his White Sheik) against the producer's wishes...

...Meanwhile, Kezich also keeps amusing track of Fellini's principal love affairs, some of which, more or less transformed, end up in the movies...

...But he himself became a star by and by, and his sets turned into tourist attractions...

...His provincial father, Urbano, had a wholesale business, mostly in coffee and cheese, and was handsome and gregarious...

...To survive in the lean postwar era Fellini draws portraits of GIs in cafes...

...He suffers physically from it...

...He is bribed by Rossellini to play the fake St...

...Apropos of the autobiographical Amarcord, Kezich remarks: "Fellini is incapable of hating anyone, even the Fascists . . . depicting them as clowns only slightly more sinister than the rest of the clowns...

...There is much that is ungrammatical, un-English, or simply grotesque...

...We read about "Madre Cabrini," of being "speared on by neurosis," of "Ciro and Serse" (for Cyrus and Circe), the "Commission of Ten" (for Committee), "a square with a dome [for cathedral] like the one in Koln [for Cologne...

...Also a playwright and scenarist, he is no run-of-the-mill journalist: Though he knows in which restaurant and with whom Fellini ate what meal, he does not clobber you with unnecessary detail or allow friendship to cloud his judgment...

...Producers, censorship, the Church—^what battles Fellini has with them...