Influencers & Inspiration Whereby the influence on set or in the theatre watching someone else’s film, inspires another…
Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) a poor, stunningly beautiful, Spanish dancer is discovered by an American screenwriter, Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), in Madrid. How Maria went on to become a world famous movie star, who at the time of her death was an Italian Contessa, unfolds in flashbacks from the mourners at her funeral. As they stand beneath a life-size statue of Maria, immortalized standing barefoot, as was her wont, Dawes, her former P.R. man Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) and her husband, the fatalistic Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), reflect back upon the unlikely path of The Barefoot Contessa (1954).
So how did this American film which introduced the Italian phrase che sara, sara lead to an Italian film that introduced a word that, even to this day, defines an aspect of our American obsession with celebrity?
It began when Federico Fellini saw writer/director Joe Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa. It inspired him to make his own film about the International Set. However, due to Fellini’s own “occupational point of view” (Dawes) La Dolce Vita (1960) is a far more complex and sordid film, than Mankiewicz’s, though at its core it’s still undeniably made in America. Both films open with attention focused on large statues, one’s secular, the other’s religious; Dawes’ (Bogart) equivalent is the tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), both are writers and mere cogs in the celebrity machine complex; Maria’s composure, which becomes deadened to life and to love, is reflected in the face of Fellini’s Maddalena (Anouk Aimée); both women even prefer, at telling moments, to be barefoot. Mankiewicz was pleased to learn that Fellini admired his film. Though one can only imagine, also a bit chagrined to see his fan’s version go far beyond popular success to become a world-wide phenomenon.
And that word? In La Dolce Vita there’s a photographer named Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), an associate of Marcello’s. He was so annoying, relentlessly buzzing around celebrities in his pursuit of pictures for the tabloids, that soon the pluralization of his name, ‘Paparazzi’ entered into our language and – che sara sara – has never left.
One can’t help but wonder what kind of movie Fellini would have made today when we all pose as celebrities, acting as our own press agents and paparazzi to feed, not the magazines or newspapers, but our own social media accounts.
