DINO DE LAURENTIIS
A FORCE OF NATURE, MEGA-PRODUCER DINO DE LAURENTIIS MADE FILMS JUST AS OVERSIZED. WE REVISIT THE TIME WHEN DINO RULED THE EARTH
From Barbarella to Blue Velvet, the amazing story of the great Italian producer.
WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, is not, on the face of it, an obvious place to build a film studio. Two-and-a-half thousand miles due east of Los Angeles and the major studios, it had always been something of a sleepy burgh, a former shipbuilding town; its sole, tenuous link to the world of movies being Cape Fear River, which flows out into the Atlantic Ocean.
But in 1984 it became the unlikely home to possibly the most ambitious independent film studio of all time. Dino De Laurentiis, the legendary producer of Serpico, Conan The Barbarian, King Kong, Flash Gordon and Death Wish, had set up shop, building, in the remains of an old warehouse complex, the moviemaking operation of which he had always dreamed. And what an operation. Buzzing among the five soundstages were some of movies’ hottest directors, as well as a few who couldn’t get arrested elsewhere. Michael Mann shot Manhunter (1986) there. A kid called Sam Raimi finally got to work with his first proper budget on Evil Dead II (1987). Michael Cimino, still in disgrace in Hollywood after the debacle of Heaven’s Gate, made his comeback movie, Year Of The Dragon (1985) in Wilmington.
“What Dino achieved was utterly unique,” says Larry Gleason, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s former president of distribution and a close friend. “Obviously there were other independent producers at that time — The Weintraub Group, Cannon, Carolco — but unlike any of them, Dino actually had a physical studio. It was unprecedented.”
The lion logo he gave his new company was a typical declaration of Dino’s boldness. Dotted around the grounds and offices of the Wilmington studios were dozens of statues of Dino’s beloved big cats. “There was this bronze one in the reception area,” remembers Gleason. “Over the years most of it turned black. But every day Dino used to rub the lion’s balls ‘for-a da luck!’ So the rest of the lion was black, but his balls gleamed.”
There were, then as now, plenty in Hollywood who claimed to be in possession of brass balls. Well, bronze they might have been, but Dino De Laurentiis... well, Dino’s balls were on display in reception.
“EVERYBODY DOES THE accent when they tell the tales,” David Cronenberg (whose first commercial hit, The Dead Zone, De Laurentiis midwifed) tells Empire. “But he was just an incredible character. Dino was the last Hollywood mogul really, in terms of how much control he had and the kind of personality he had, as well as the chances he would take.”
Talking to the people who knew De Laurentiis best — the writers, directors and executives who joined him on his fourdecade adventure in Hollywood — is reminiscent of the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, with its slow camera track through an Italian restaurant as dozens of people vie to tell the best anecdote. Everybody has a tale, usually told, at least in part, in the heavily accented Italian timbre that Dino, despite spending over 40 years in Hollywood, never lost.
Like this one, from Mike Hodges, director of Flash Gordon: “Michael Allin [Flash Gordon’s original screenwriter] got a call from Dino saying he wanted to meet to talk about the script. Michael is in New York, so the next day he flies 3,000 miles to LA, takes a car up to Dino’s house and knocks on the door. Dino opens it and says, ‘What-a you here for?’ Michael says, ‘Well, Dino, we were going to have a meeting about the script.’ Dino pauses, and then says, ‘Just rememba, Flash-a Gordon save-a da world!’ And shuts the door in his face.”
Or this one, from Roger Donaldson, director of The Bounty: “Dino was incredibly superstitious. I remember in Cannes once there was this dinner in one of the villas above the bay. And Dino
walks in and looks at the table and his face turns white. There are 13 places. So he rushes outside and gets his driver. Dino brings him in and insists he stays for the whole meal so there aren’t 13 at the table.”
Larry Gleason, of course, has a corker too: “Robert Towne used to tell this story. Dino used to have all his scripts translated into English. He was having trouble with a script and Dino offered his house in the Hamptons. ‘It’s-a quiet,’ Dino says. ‘There’s-a no-one there apart from my translator. I’ll call and tell him you’re-a coming.’ So Towne goes out there and he brings his dog, this big German Shepherd. And he goes in and this guy comes round the corner, the man who translates all Dino’s scripts into English. And he says, ‘Oh, you must be Mr Towne. What a wonderful cat you have there!’ Towne said that was probably why Dino’s movies were so hit-and-miss.”
It’s a cacophony of anecdotes, some, no doubt, burnished a little in the retelling. But what they reveal is a larger-thanlife character, one forged in the spirit of the Sam Goldwyns and Louis B. Mayers of Hollywood’s Golden Age: a buccaneer and risk-taker, but an unabashed lover of movies and moviemakers. He was an unconventional giant of the industry who, years after his death, still lingers, happily and sometimes uncomfortably, in Hollywood’s collective memory. When he arrived in Hollywood in the early 1970s, De Laurentiis was already 50 years old, and had left behind him the smouldering ruins of one astonishing filmmaking career back in the home country. Born Agostino De Laurentiis in Naples in 1919, he had worked as a travelling salesman for his father’s pasta company, before a year in acting class at Rome’s new film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, convinced him that if he had a place in movies it was behind rather than in front of the camera. The salesmanship skills he had perfected flogging spaghetti turned out to be a perfect match for Italy’s sprawling, chaotic film industry. He made films with Fellini and De Sica, Godard and Bergman, as well as hundreds of trashy potboilers that sank almost as soon as they wrapped. His Italian career’s culmination had been in his sprawling studio, Dinocittà, named, with typical chutzpah, as a nod to Rome’s famed Cinecittà. But by the late 1960s, things in his home country were taking a turn for the worse. “I begin to sniff trouble in Italia,” he said. “No like what I smell in the politics.” In fact, the politics was having trouble from the whiff of financial chicanery that the vast, state-backed budget for Dinocittà was emitting. There were rumours of Mafia involvement and threats to De Laurentiis and his family. And new laws made hiring cheap foreign crews, on which his productions had relied, impossible. With typical decisiveness, De Laurentiis decided to decamp to the United States and begin afresh there.
His first wholly American project was Serpico (1973), a true story of police corruption that reminded Dino of the politics of his home country. In Death Wish (1974), he found a property that no-one else would touch, but which he embraced. But it was King Kong (1976) that established the template for a De Laurentiis production. “In Jaws, when da shark dies, nobody cry,” he announced of his ill
fated remake of the 1933 classic. “In my movie, when da monkey dies, everybody cry!”
Vastly ambitious and surrounded by an unprecedented publicity campaign which boasted of the $2 million spent on a fully animatronic ape (in the end, as on Spielberg’s Jaws, the contraption proved prohibitively uncooperative, many of the film’s shots being completed with Rick Baker running around in a monkey suit), King Kong overpromised and underdelivered. Typically unperturbed, De Laurentiis would later make King Kong Lives, an ill-advised second run at the story which had the dead ape resurrected via a giant artificial heart, and, for added authenticity, gave him a wife.
One director who got to see the producer in action was Australian Roger Donaldson, who would later go on to direct the likes of Cocktail, Dante’s Peak and Species. “Dino had an enormous impact on my life; he really did change it,” says Donaldson. “I had been signed on to do a sequel to Conan The Barbarian, but as we were writing Dino bought the rights to Conan and now I was working for Dino. He was a memorable character. Five-four maybe, but with these huge glasses, incredible energy and this way of speaking with that colloquial Italian accent. I remember him inviting me up to a dinner party at his house in the Hollywood Hills. ‘What’s the address, Dino?’ I asked. ‘De address? Er... ah... de address is-a de casual.’ But anyway, I had this meeting with him and he held up the script and said, ‘What is this piece of shit?’ He’d had it translated into Italian and our 100-page script had come out at 250 pages or something.”
That script was for The Bounty, a project which had been something of a debacle from the start. Originally cooked up as a project for David Lean, De Laurentiis had begun building a full-scale replica of the titular ship before the ink was dry on the contract. But Lean’s demands had kiboshed the production. “Essentially Dino wanted to make good on his investment,” Donaldson recalls. “He’d already built this boat that was sitting in New Zealand. I went to the Beverly Hills hotel and he said, ‘Conan is-a de piece of shit — you do The Bounty! And so I wound up directing The Bounty.”
AS ROGER DONALDSON had discovered, the key weapon in De Laurentiis’ arsenal was his uncanny ability to charm almost anything out of anyone he met. “If he ever phones you and starts to talk about money, hang up,” Anthony Hopkins once remembered his agent telling him when De Laurentiis was angling for Hopkins to reprise his role as Hannibal Lecter. “He’ll just kill you.”
“He was a master at knowing you, at making you his friend,” says Larry Gleason. “For example, Michael Ovitz [then head of mega-agency CAA] would never go out to meet anybody. You came to him. But he would go to Dino’s office because Dino made him his ‘special Italian espresso’. ‘I only come here for your espresso, Dino,’ he’d say. ‘Nobody makes it like you.’ Dino would vanish round the corner into his little kitchen and a while later would come back with this espresso and make a big show of it. Well, the secret was that in the kitchen there was just a cheap one-button espresso machine, the kind you can pick up at Home Depot for $29.95. But it was in the way he served it, the big show, the little biscuit. He was the man behind the curtain, really — the Wizard Of Oz.”
But Dino’s charm could have an edge, and there were those who found in him a darker, more coldly calculating character.
“Dino didn’t have demons; he was his own demon,” says Michael Allin, whose screenplay for Nicolas Roeg’s Flash Gordon fell by the wayside when De Laurentiis fired Roeg in favour of Mike Hodges. “You’d think you’d met sharks in Hollywood, but when you met Dino everything else turned out to be like being nibbled by goldfish. He had this genius for knowing what you wanted, and then offering it to you. Everybody else picked your pocket, and maybe broke your heart, but Dino wanted to buy you. And he was a devil when it came to money. He had this office building in Los Angeles. When he got into money trouble, he’d claim himself as a bad debt, evict himself and take it as a cash write-off.”
For Oliver Stone, working with De Laurentiis on both Conan The Barbarian and Platoon was an equally mixed experience. “Once Conan got out of [original director] Ridley Scott’s hands we were in Dino-world,” he tells Empire. “And Dino does things his way, which means shooting in Spain, it means cutting everything in the script we fucking could. I mean, the phoney cactus that
looks ridiculous. Costumes that are badly done. At heart, Dino was very 1950s. Later he wanted me to rewrite Platoon and take all the dirty words out. But, you know, that was Dino. He was one of those people who would run the world if he could. But, then again, it was independents like Dino who made little films like these possible.”
And if he could be charm personified, underneath the gregarious Italian geniality was a will of steel.
“I remember on Flash Gordon there was this moment where Dino did some kind of last-minute financing deal with [Penthouse publisher] Bob Guccione,” remembers Mike Hodges. “Guccione’s head honcho turned up at Shepperton and informed me that I had to cast Guccione’s wife and that they wanted me to redo a model shot I’d done a few days before. I went to Dino’s office at the other end of the corridor. I said, ‘Dino, are you still the producer on this movie?’ He was out of the door in a nanosecond. He came back a couple of minutes later. ‘No-a problem, Mike!’ he said. When
I got back to my office they were already unscrewing this guy’s name from the personnel board.”
SADLY, THE WILMINGTON dream was short-lived. By the late 1980s the studio was in a deep financial hole. Dino’s always variable taste in film projects had taken a distinctive turn for the worse. There was Donald Sutherland flop The Trouble With Spies (1987) and vastly overbudgeted James Clavell epic Tai-pan (1986). He inadvisably gave Stephen King his first directing gig with Maximum Overdrive (1986). (Hearing reports of trouble, Dino headed to the set, only to find King directing the movie like it was a stageplay, a static camera observing the actors walking on and off stage, left and right. “Stephen, you gotta move-a de camera!” De Laurentiis implored.)
“We had this opportunity to do a film called A Fish Called Wanda,” remembers Larry Gleason. “We thought it would be a great movie and not that expensive to do. But Dino didn’t quite get the script. It was very British and we just couldn’t get him onside. So we finally got him to agree to meet with John Cleese so he could see how hilarious he is. Cleese comes in and does a scene from the movie. All of us in the room besides Dino were rolling on the floor. We said to Dino, ‘Now do you get it? We gotta do this movie, right?’ And Dino just shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, ‘we cannot do-a dis movie.’ We were like, ‘But why, Dino?’ And Dino looked up and said, ‘He gotta da accent.’ So you know, that was probably the movie that could have saved the studio.”
After the collapse of DEG, De Laurentiis did what he always did: moved relentlessly, shark-like, forward. “He was the eternal optimist,” remembers Gleason, who continued to visit his friend regularly until his death in 2010. “He was always doing projects. He was doing business with Ridley Scott on Hannibal, he gave Jonathan Mostow his break on U-471, was among the first to work with the Wachowskis, on Bound. He was still working on a reboot of Barbarella with Robert Rodriguez.”
When the final tally was done he had produced over 600 films, many forgettable, some infamous, and a few copperbottomed hits. It had been a life teeming with stories. Best, then, to end with one.
“So, I was working on King Kong Lives,” director Peter Macdonald recalls. “And they’d built this 40-foot monkey which they needed to lift underneath a helicopter. But the bloody thing was way too heavy. Someone called Dino and told him the problem. He asks, ‘How much-a weight we need-a to lose?’ ‘About 80lb, Dino.’ He looks at the thing and then back to us. ‘Chop-a de leg off,’ he says.”
And so, one fine day, New Yorkers might have looked to the heavens, only to see a 40-foot, one-legged polyurethane ape soaring majestically above the city’s skyline. It was bizarre, outrageous, impossible to ignore.
It was a Dino De Laurentiis production.