Mario Lanfranchi


Mario Lanfranchi is an Italian film, theatre and television director, screenwriter, producer, collector and actor.
Lanfranchi was born in Parma. After receiving a degree at the Drama Academy of Milan in the early 1950s, he was hired by Sergio Pugliese at RAI, at the onset of Italian television. He was the first to bring opera to the small screen, in 1956, with Madama Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini, which introduced to a wide public Anna Moffo, at that time an unknown American soprano, who became his wife for 17 years. In 1967 he began his career as a film director with the western movie Death Sentence. He currently lives in a 16th-century villa in Santa Maria del Piano outside Parma.

Biography

Since childhood he absorbed at home the atmosphere of theatre and music. He was even held at baptism by two famous singers of the period, the tenor Francesco Merli and the soprano Mercedes Caspir, and as a very young man he was personally acquainted with some of the most notable singers, including Maria Caniglia, Ebe Stignani, Beniamino Gigli, Gino Bechi as well as promising operatic newcomers like Mario Del Monaco.
His father Guido, a music enthusiast and especially an opera-lover, had been the president of the theatre commission and later the superintendent of the Teatro Regio of Parma, and was later entrusted with other important responsibilities in the field of editing and administration of the daily newspaper Il Tempo di Milano, besides Il Sole and 24 Ore, two important financial dailies that later merged under the single banner of Il Sole 24 Ore.
After observing the restrictions which afflicted the lives of many actors, the elder Lanfranchi would have preferred to see his son in major managerial positions of important companies and so he tried to dissuade the young Mario from his interests in theatre and acting. At the end they balanced a prudent degree in jurisprudence with courses in acting and directing at the Accademia dei Filodrammatici of Milan. Mario already lived at the time in the Lombard capital of Milan where, after the devastating April–May 1944 bombings of Parma, prompted by the nearby rail and highway junctions, the family had moved him in with friends, assured that in the shadow of the nearby church's protective Madonna, he would be safer.
At the end of 1952 he met with Sergio Pugliese, a journalist and successful playwright, past manager of the radio station EIAR and responsible since 1937 for radio dramatic programs as well as variety and musical broadcasts. The new RAI network, with an eye on television programming, had sent Pugliese to the U.S. to examine the technology and, upon his return, offered him a head producer's role in the central production offices for television programs in the center scheduled to open in Milan. In reality official programming began on 3 January 1954 in the studios located in Turin.
In the golden era of the Italian cinema, movie directors viewed the new medium of television rather snobbishly, considering it a clumsy hybrid with an unlikely artistic future, and they criticized especially the impromptu editing and the telecasts in direct sound, requiring prompt reflexes and quick decision-making, without the possibility of second chances that often salvaged the fortunes of a show in a theatre auditorium. The "father of TV", then, had chosen to favour a looser theatrical form in selecting a small company of persons who, under his guidance, would have to practice with original formats and creative language for this newborn medium of television.
* Thus began the period that Lanfranchi often recalls as the most thrilling and exciting of his long and varied career.
He thought he was to direct his energies to the theatre; instead other varied projects awaited him in short order. Given Pugliese's conviction that television was a form of “radio in motion, ” where everything took on the form of a cosmic homemade theatre, with precise responsibilities with the goal of cultural and educational purposes, the versatile young director was soon entrusted not only with those opera projects, for which he is most often remembered and celebrated, but also with various other major "first events" in the history of television. They ranged from sports programs to song shows and to pure spectacles, from Eurovision to the RAI-DUE second channel, to the inaugural openings of new television studios in Turin and Naples. All this earned him the nickname "the inaugurator" among those who observed his work.
The viewers responded with genuine enthusiasm, leading to an early form of television star-recognition for the mass audience. Here singers and even opera divas competed with equal strength alongside the “Miss Good-Evenings, ” the pop-music idols, and popular sports-heroes. In little more than five years he directed about forty operas, often re-shown even today to the delight of opera fans.
With time it became understood that areas of television considered open to exploration were perhaps far less wide when compared to the earlier dreams of the young impassioned proponents at the time of the medium's beginnings. In Lanfranchi's words: “Until I realized that I was enclosing these huge spectacles inside a little box, "the box" as it became known in America, seemed more suitable for the transmission of soccer matches. After a few years, I fled and moved on to other endeavours".

Ever new adventures

To escape the insufferable boredom that crept in, given the lack of intellectual and artistic challenges, Mario Lanfranchi developed a taste for more varied and serious attractions in various fields. It became a critical factor in all his artistic and personal endeavours. He nurtured each time his store of personal enthusiasm as he enriched and developed his experiences. And this explains why he would change directions and strike headfirst toward whatever pursuit might attract his attention.
During his years spent in Milan, before marrying Anna Moffo, he had had two stable and meaningful romantic relationships with Renata Tebaldi and Virginia Zeani. Among his closest friends were Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, but a strong personal friendship also joined him to notable celebrities of popular music. A solid core group included Johnny Dorelli, Gorni Kramer, Gigi Cichellero, Alberto Rabagliati and the great tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano. In the strict sense, however, he was the only non-musician among them, though having studied music and piano. He joined the discussions of projects by members of the group. These discussions were light in form but serious in content.
At the start of the 1960s, after leaving RAI, he moved to Rome, the cultural capital but also a more central location geographically and certainly more convenient for frequent moves, both his own and Moffo's, within Italy and abroad. In those years Rome was a prime destination, not only for tourism but for work, for people in the international entertainment industry and especially in the movies. Both because of competitive costs and because "Hollywood on the Tiber" allowed foreign producers to spend their accumulated earnings in Italy, but which Italian law prevented them from exporting. To the delight of the paparazzi, the most famous names in world cinema would land at Rome's Fiumicino airport.
Early on, Lanfranchi and his wife lived in an attractive modern home across from the Palatine Hill with a view overlooking the Imperial Forums. Then, when these began to be illuminated for the delight of tourists by the phantasmagoric and noisy spectacle “Sound and Light, ” they consoled themselves with the scenographic historic palace of the 19th Century nobleman, the Marchese del Grillo. This was a circumstance that oddly caused a turn in his choices as an art collector.
In the meanwhile there was growing within the director a real crisis of rejection with regard to opera, an upheaval so deep and upsetting that, even at the distance of so many years, still makes it uncomfortable for him to set foot in the temples of opera. It was a rejection for too much love of music, one could say. He himself often felt that he was kind of intruder in his operatic productions, because patrons go to the opera first and foremost to hear the music, and the musical line as conceived by the composer should not be distorted by virtuosic directorial displays and effects. At the height of this period, while around him there raged unfamiliar theories about an ever more invasive task of operatic directing, he was obliged to honour three already-signed contracts with La Scala, the Rome Opera, and the Teatro Verdi of Trieste. To avoid long and painful negotiations and in order to be able to work on more stimulating projects, he even agreed to the payment of a punitive fine to get out of the contract.
The chronology of his artistic activity during this period is difficult to follow. Events alternate, then follow each other, and finally intermingle with regard to amounts of time spent, and approaches used.
In those days he found enjoyment in the collecting of art, in racing thoroughbred horses, in rifle-marksmanship, and billiard games. Between time spent in Rome and New York and elsewhere, between his beloved bicycle racing and horse races, he found time to compose lyrics for songs which would then be set to music by Anna Moffo and which were issued on recordings by RCA.

Producer of Carosello shows and fashion show director

For RAI he also entered the field of publicity, like so many other well-known directors, conceiving and producing in union with Sandro Bolchi many of the Carosello film-shorts that were best known during that long unforgettable period of artful publicity.
“Carosello” was started in 1957 with a kind of format of dramatized commercial promotions. It emphasized short filmed sketches, acted scenes, cartoons, etc., each given a complete story, while the commercial product being promoted would be cited on behalf of the sponsor only in a brief passage, always placed at the end, to give the impression of its being a public service by RAI.
Precisely because of the theatrical format, RAI had contracted-out the entire conception and production to private companies under the supervision of SIPRA. It involved the cream of the crop of national culture of the time. The film-shorts were all shot with the quality and technical expertise of actual theatrical movies, on 35mm film, exclusively in black-and-white. Jean-Luc Godard called them “the best product of the Italian cinema, ” an exaggerated judgment to be sure, but certainly attributable to the fact that the 42,000 filmed scenes that were aired involved about 160 production companies, with an output deemed to be equal to the production of 80 films, about 57% of Italian film production during those years.
While the faces of many famous actors served as effective promotion, less-known to the general public were the names of some of the most praised professionals. They included directors, musicians, set designers, script-writers, writers like Camilla Cederna and others that were quite well-known. Luigi Malerba himself became a producer. There were also many young conscripts who, with these Carosello productions, honed their skills before branching out into other directions. It was only at the start of the 1970s that the general public started to become aware of the importance of the names involved in these shows. It became clear that this uniquely Italian invention had a real cultural value, not merely an economic one, that had fully deserved the historic screenings of SIPRA S. p. A. films at the Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1971.
It is estimated that before the death-knell sounded for Carosello, the telecasts had been seen by about nineteen million viewers, an indication of its public success which is even today enviable given the number of TV sets in use. When RAI in 1977 declared the format's abrupt end, they certainly could not imagine that they would have left all of Italy in a state of mourning and sadness during the years following, even afflicting the nation with the diagnosis of "Carosello syndrome", and Italian advertising agencies have had to come to terms with that fact ever since.
If the Carosello pieces made in the course of one decade by the team of Lanfranchi and Bolchi can barely be numbered, the fashion field instead was one less pursued by director Lanfranchi, apart from two instances.
In the season 1962–63 at the cloister of Venice's Island of San Giorgio, the theme selected by Lanfranchi was The Birds, from the orchestral work of the same name by composer Ottorino Respighi.

The man: irony, cult of the ephemeral and cupio dissolvi

It is impossible to distinguish in his case the personality of the man from his achievement. A synthetic definition of the private Mario Lanfranchi, one of the few if not the only one not pertaining to public or social events, is attributable to Vittorio Sgarbi. Among the words of an article that appeared in 1985 on the occasion of the auctioning off of “one of the most important art collections of the postwar period” one reads:
A "polite gentleman from Parma", a journalist defined him at the time of his separation Anna Moffo, almost as if to excuse himself with readers for the extreme modesty of his most intimate feelings.
There had been a progressive deterioration in the couple's relationship, since the many commitments which the singer was strongly determined to honour, to the detriment of her physical and emotional health, led her ever more frequently abroad. The occasions for being together were increasingly rarer. Available periods of time were never convenient.
The marital separation request was submitted in October 1973 and Miss Moffo settled in their New York home, where she already spent most of her time. The divorce was finalized in March of the following year, so that in November she would be able to marry the American billionaire Robert W. Sarnoff, the son of David Sarnoff, founder of RKO and himself president of RCA, for which Moffo was the reigning operatic singer in those years. The frenetic activity of the soprano reached its apex that same year, with a full 220 appearances in 18 operas at the Metropolitan. Not even her second husband, fourteen years older than her and certainly as competent as her first, had succeeded in dissuading here from this treacherous tour de force which wore out her voice for good.
Lanfranchi, in the meantime, was pursued by news reporters with the first among a ravenous and long series of stories through which, however, he never more put at risk his own freedom.
The unique and constant presence in the life and work of this uncommon personality remains his innate sense of art and even more so of the theatre, that first true love that he never forgets, for which he had as a young man withdrew from his father's expectation. The shrewd recent question of whether he was more an actor in life or rather a director in the world of artistic creation, drew from him, as a response, this unique declaration with its nostalgic flavor:

Rome, the great adventure, a late-developing love

His move to Rome at the start of the 1960s was determined not only by logistical convenience but also by the desire of the director to apply to movies that hybrid concept already experimented with in the first opera-film of his La serva padrona . Being excited by American film-noir and as a perceptive viewer of all films, accustomed to think in large terms and always urged on by new movements in the artistic world, he wanted to establish himself with his own impulses as a director beyond the limited framework of the "small box". “The real cinema was absent from my career; it was something I had to try.”
But the circumstances and the period were not favorable. Right at the beginning of the 1960s Cinecittà, as a Hollywood-substitute, had reached its finale. The misfortunes and high production costs of Cleopatra, which almost pushed 20th Century Fox into bankruptcy, were giving it the final blow. Producers were increasingly more reluctant to invest capital in projects seen as risky or and not backed by established names or at least guaranteed.. Lanfranchi was not Roman, had no film background, not even, it can be said, as an assistant director to anyone. Furthermore, he came from the rival medium of television, which was sort of a ‘brand of infamy.’
On the other hand, the attention to the various increasing international obligations of his youthful wife who possessed a strong personality, full of determination and discipline, Italian in heritage but American in her upbringing, took away in those first years together the time and energy that the director needed for himself.
Anna Moffo had risen to the rank of diva in the brief space of one night, thanks to television and her future husband, but the forms of diva-worship had in the meantime changed a great deal. It was the advent of the small screen itself which had been the principal agent of this change: bringing famous personalities, stars or heroes directly into everyone's home as though they were guests, setting into motion an unstoppable social and cultural leveling. Stars had come down from their comfortable Olympus of privacy, ferociously defended by the star system. But in order to maintain their high fame and salaries they became in time chained to their celebrity status and not only to their talents. It became imperative to promote themselves by appearing everywhere, being photographed for newsreels, by paparazzi, or photographed in whatever form possible, even in banal, mundane and false "every day" situations, so that the economic miracle of the time could be reflected more and more in the open-eyed dreams of ordinary people.
There was nothing more normal than that a young woman-turned-diva in a foreign country would want the help of a husband in managing the rapture of fame suddenly thrust upon her at only 23 years of age, and which her prudent consort tried to make her careful about, especially in regard to the crush of ensuing obligations. And so Lanfranchi, the Pygmalion responsible for the start of the great transformation and discoverer of the versatile artistic gifts of his wife, was a unique case in the history of an opera singer. He assumed for years the role of a loving tutor-husband. In the meantime he undertook those rigorous studies of painting which, on the one hand, left him time to spend together with his wife and on the other hand gratified him with an art collection unique in its kind in importance, and even more significantly, as a cultural undertaking.
In the Roman studios in the meanwhile he had observed the parade of Italian-style westerns with fictitious Americanized names. In an attempt to facilitate access in another direction, the director had written four episodes with a western setting, and between one Carosello and another he had suggested to RAI a contract to make a western. The western project, judged too raw for family television programming, was not approved. But right after that, in 1966, RAI signed a contract for the new concept of the short films of TuttoTotò, inaugurated for the first time a custom of external contracting that is today very common. And the following year there was one for the production and direction of the second series of "The Anna Moffo Show", filmed at Cinecittà studios, starring international personalities like the great harpist Nicanor Zabaleta, Andrés Segovia, still considered the greatest guitarist of all time, Earl "Fatha" Hines, top jazz pianist, Ferruccio Tagliavini, international tenor and actor, etc.
Ever determined about making something for the cinema, Lanfranchi had meanwhile re-worked the four western episodes and was constructing a screenplay out of them. After nearly a five-year wait, he finally succeeded in directing the first film of which he was also the creator.
All of them became cult films or super-cult films years later, to be analyzed and re-evaluated by critics who, under the American influence, imparted a proper historical dimension to all the so-called Italian B-movies of that period. “The inaugurator, ” like a betrayed lover, had unconsciously plotted his own re-evaluation.
The film historian Carlo Montanaro, who appears in the credits as an assistant to the director, writes: “The really curious thing is that the film constitutes the sole attempt at a musical made in Venice, if one excludes purely invented trivialities and Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, where, however, there are no dance numbers in Venice. ”
In Italy the film was seen only on RAI, but it received theatrical distribution to movie theatres in various other countries, including America and Japan, and the returns were used for preservation projects. In order to re-program the film for the retrospective "Venice and post-Romantic 19th Century heroines – Venice, the City of Women – from Senso to Sissi, curated by Gian Piero Brunetta in the setting of the 2011 Carnival of Venice, and not being able to trace either a positive print in good condition or a negative, which had disappeared along with the widow of the producer, it was specially re-edited from a work copy that remained in the possession of the director.
Paradoxically, this unwanted film is the one where the author's fountain of dreamlike fantasy and irony shines through more fully, both amused and amusing. However the violently conflicting relation with protagonist Nureyev had given him the final coup de grace. He felt once again the urge to change his life, to seek new challenges. He packed up and with determination took the road of a cultural emigrant, and thus withdrawing from active participation, with some occasional succumbing to the temptation of his love for the theatre.

Theatre, "my love", visits and re-visits

From the floor-planks of the stage to the small screen, from phantasmagoric displays en plein air or to the big productions that swelled the boxoffice receipts in the West End or on Broadway, from the directing of operatic productions to filmic ones, the mark of the theatre is for Mario Lanfranchi like a second skin, a habit never shed.
After having "fled" from RAI in 1960 and his move to Rome, along with his crisis of rejection from opera productions and the like, he restored his strength in the theatre, supervising for television, from outside, a series of adaptations and dramatic directing projects and the first cycle of The Anna Moffo Show. Unfortunately, in the archives of RAI, unless there are some fortuitous discoveries, only two films survived of the director's recorded TV dramas – one for Harlequinade by Terence Rattigan and one for S'egli tornasse by Orio Vergani – and only a few seconds of the TV movie Ritorno dall’abisso.
In addition, by the mid-1960s he had lost interest and, as a result, he became bored with even directing TV plays. So, while on the one hand he continued to conceive and produce Carosello pieces, on the other hand he invented that Festa Italiana which topped in 1966 the box office records at Madison Square Garden.
Between these two events he had found time to produce the second series of The Anna Moffo Show.
Once returned to Italy, he went to live in his , where he gave life to a first-of-a-kind event Villa Lanfranchi opens its gates, or more appropriately "spreads wide its gates", given the fact that admission was free. It became then, for several years, a pleasing and well-attended repeated event under the title Performances in the Villa, shows of various types, as he himself likes, comprising theatre, music, jazz and rock concerts, in which many artist friends took part. On these occasions, and for other manifestations of a cultural nature, he would occasionally dust off his own past as an actor and writer.
For a number of years he has returned regularly on television, no longer behind the camera but as a regular guest of broadcasts of music and entertainment and he is also often invited to recall, with his inexhaustible and entertaining verve, past events that he had been part of or which he had witnessed. For Parma TV he recorded three cycles of broadcasts, released on DVD as well, in which he reads the modern fables of Andreina Chiari Branchi. And occasionally he once again offered to his audience prose selections and poetry in his beloved Parma dialect.
Theatre in 360 degrees.

Collections and hobbies, myths and not myths

An unrepeatable undertaking: creation and dispersion

His first Roman residence hosted a boldly displayed collection of modern paintings, but when Lanfranchi leased for his wife Anna Moffo the most beautifully decorated and tranquil palace, the Palazzo del Grillo, he thought that they were not well-suited to those very old rooms. At an auction of a collection belonging to Konrad Adenauer he acquired a canvas which he had over a while taken a fancy to. Seeking confirmation by an expert on the value of the piece, not in economic terms but artistic ones, he had the audacity to write to none other than the fearsome and gruff Federico Zeri, who, amused instead by such ingenuousness, examined the painting and declared that, yes, it was an attractive piece, but also a piece of worthless junk, a fake! That encounter had a shattering effect on the director, not because of the disaster of his first purchase, but because he left the home of Zeri, who would become one of his dearest friends, madly in love with old masters paintings.
Under the wise and patient guidance of such a teacher, who, as also affirmed by Vittorio Sgarbi in the above-noted article, turned out to be the complete opposite of what was rumored, he devoted himself for long years to assiduous studies, unto the smallest details, of the masters of painting, while his collection became enriched with ever more important new pieces, discovered on his own amid private holdings, at small auctions, at antique dealers or even espied in larger auctions where they passed unnoticed. The greatest reward for his humble and diligent scholarship, as he tells with justified pride, came once from Zeri, who was unable to go in person to view a painting, and asked Lanfranchi himself to go in his place to examine for authenticity and state of conservation a great painting attributed to Il Grechetto.
The director comments elsewhere: " I had gotten divorced and I had split up my collection. It was divided in half and I became aware that I was dedicating much of myself to these inanimate objects, and taking away potential love for human beings all at once love disappeared."
As far as the decision made to disperse the entire collection, he corrects the melancholy sunset, citing a phrase that had inspired him:


Besides this he also rid himself of noted collections which he was, without being untrue to himself, the first to create, the inaugurator:
With the persistent ambition of a lover and collector, within a vaster world collection, he is trying to put together one of the entire Italian cinema, always up to the 1970s, with “special dedication to the early period in which the Italian films dominated the world market. "When I was studying at the Academy, it was said that Italian films were almost entirely lost, with a few rare exceptions. It was Gian Piero Brunetta who told me that many of the films had been saved and brought to new life by fine researchers and excellent restoration experts. From there came my morbid interest in the Italian silent cinema, the discovery of the diva cult, and a reborn interest in the American silent film, which owed a great deal to those Italian productions, as seen today with a very different eye.” And then there are smaller collections within the mother collection: American film-noir, cinema and the theatre, films on Venice, westerns, films dealing with billiards.

The sports enthusiast, or the spirit of emulation

Billiards. Another great passion. In the Lanfranchi household the professional green table is enthroned in the center of a sober room all by itself and in a corner only the billiard-stick holders and some photos on the walls. Twice a week, every week, matches are played. Among his personal friends and playing partners are the four times world champion Gustavo Zito, moving on later to the most generously sponsored sports poker, and even before "Lo Scuro" of the films of Francesco Nuti, alias, whose memory will be forever linked to the difficult ottavina reale shot created by him.
Marksmanship: shooting sport and clay pigeon shooting. Even this is a continuing weekly ritual, sometimes outdoors with clay pigeons, or else in the shooting gallery that he had built in the basement. The villa was the hunting lodge of his maternal grandfather, who had put into his hands rifles and pistols when he was still a boy, but the director never loved hunting despite the sporting tournaments, his over-and-under 686 E Trap Beretta and a small collection of personal firearms.
Bicycle racing. He has always been an indomitable enthusiast and an expert, in which he succeeded years later in involving even his Anna Moffo. A little before the start in the directing of opera, RAI in 1955 had assigned him the first live television transmissions directly from the world championship event at the Vigorelli Cycle-racing Stadium of Milan, and the start of Giro d'Italia race. He rode until a few years ago on the seat of a "supersport" bicycle, later abandoned because of traffic, and hardly satisfield by his essential hour of daily exercycle workout while he watches films from his collection.
Horses and greyhounds other myths. The latest but hardly the last.