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After the bannings of
Ça ira,
Chi lavora è perduto,
NEROSUBIANCO, and
L’urlo;
and after the feuding over Yankee;
and after the
TINTO BRASS—Withdrew “The Shriek” from film-author program at Cannes last year and sent it to Berlin instead. Brass was in England filming “Dropout” as producer-director. He rolled another, “Vacation,” entirely on location along Adriatic Coast. To recover from financial stress of improvised filmmaking in the past two years, Brass goes commercial next month to film an untitled thriller.
He finally did make a commercial thriller in 1988, but it probably had nothing at all to do with this one.
INTERLUDE
After so many financial failures and so many vocal objections to his films from so many quarters, I’m amazed that Brass didn’t quit. If I had been in his shoes, I would have concluded that my movies hadn’t really been good after all, and I would have pursued another career. But for some reason Brass kept going, and he was right to have done so. He explained his compulsion, which he credited to his peculiar personal metabolism, to Nerio Minuzzo in L’Europeo (9 November 1967): “All this talk about cinematic æsthetics, I don’t understand it at all. My only problem is filming. If I go six months without putting my eye on a viewfinder I go mad.” But the question still arises: How was he able to keep going? His family were apparently well to do, and that probably helped, even if he was disinherited. And to top that off, his wife’s family are, as far as I can guess, wealthy. Brass’s wife, Carla Cipriani, who is known as Tinta, was an integral part of her family’s famous Locanda Cipriani in Venice, a luxury restaurant—which serves as a location for some of Brass’s films.
TAKE A LOOK AT THESE WEB
SITES:
Locanda Cipriani
The Locanda Cipriani on Torcello
Jennie Schacht, “Una Bella Mangiata in Italia”
AND THE INEVITABLE DEAD LINK:
http://www.weissmann.com/Samples/cp/dining.htm
Tinto Brass wrote a lovely love letter to his wife on an earlier version of that first web site, but it has since disappeared. Oh well.
And a relative’s establishment, Harry’s Bar,* was once upon a time the favorite hangout of numerous celebrities, Ernest Hemingway among them.
With such a background, moviemaking might not be easy, but it’s certainly not impossible. And if you can afford it and if you’re having fun, why not continue—and damn the rest of the world, right?
*[A bitter legal family battle a few years ago resulted in the owner of Harry’s Bar getting the exclusive right to use the Cipriani name for olive oil and condiments. My suggestion to Carla Cipriani is to adopt the name “Tinta” for her line of products.]