Tullio Pinelli, Screenwriter, Ciao!

Tullio Pinelli, one of the very great script writers ever, anywhere, died on 7 March in Rome at the age of 100. Daniel Kothenschulte, writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau, recalls the meeting between Tullio Pinelli and the director for & with whom he did much of his finest writing, Frederico Fellini: “In Rome, in 1947, a man is reading a newspaper at a newspaper stand, rather than pay for it. Another man is reading the back page of the paper the first one is holding up. They start a conversation. It turns out they are both screenwriters who are not enthralled with the gravity and pathos of Neorealism, the current Italian movie fashion. What that kind of cinema lacks, according to them, is imagination. A true story that stands at the beginning of unending inventions, of a lifelong voyage on the ‘ship of dreams.’” Tullio Pinelli liked to tell the story himself, concluding: “When we met it was as if lightning had struck. We spoke the same language and were dreaming of a scenario completely different from the one holding sway in the cinema of that time: a scenario in which a simple employee suddenly discovers that he can fly.”

Pinelli remains of course best known for his collaborations with Federico Fellini. Together, they made movies like 1953’s I Vitelloni, 1954’s La Strada, 1960’s La Dolce vita and 1963’s 8 1/2 – all of which were nominated for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Academy Awards. Pinelli was also noted for his work on Pietro Germi‘s 1951 crime film Four Ways Out, starring Gina Lollobrigida, and Fellini‘s La voce della luna in 1990.

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