Milking the Moon (45 page)

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Now with
Satyricon
, I worked for a year on the film before it came out. I did research on food. I did research on dye stuffs. Fellini is the papa-daddy, and he said, “I don’t want costumes where everybody looks at them and says, ‘That’s cotton, that’s silk, that’s velvet, that’s nylon.’ I want fabric like nobody’s ever seen. I want it to look like something we never saw and never will see again, something that nobody can identify, not even in a close-up.” So he had a silk weaver in Venice who wove raw silk and processed colored silk together, then tore it into narrow strips and wove the narrow strips together. That’s Fellini making.

So first I did the dye stuff. Then I did food research. I did a whole little booklet about food for the feast at Trimalchio’s house. Then I translated the story. Then the treatment. Then the script. Then the shooting script. Then I worked as his assistant. Since many of the principals were English speaking, my job was to hover, and when he couldn’t find the word he was looking for in his head to direct, I could tell them.

There was this black girl in the film, a famous model in England who had never acted, and she was supposed to be African from some unknown island in Roman times. So I invented her African language out of my little ole Southern head and coached her at length. I thought, Suppose I was sitting on Mon Louis Island and heard what they were saying backwards. The old Mon Louis Island patois is English with a French and African accent, and it’s hard to understand. It’s almost vanished; only a few old people talk it. But my cousin Francis did record Joe Summerlin of Mon Louis Island once for about thirty minutes, just talking about fishing and storms and seeing big fish out in the bay. Well, I just did some of that. I would sit her down and say, “Now don’t speak to anybody when you get up this morning or when you come to the set. All these people and the makeup people and the wig people—they are speaking Italian, which you don’t know. Don’t listen to them. One second before you are going to go before the camera, we’re going to sit down and I’m going to coach you in what you are going to say.” And she just had one of those minds. I would just go, “Ahbiupe kylmadu woquixa,” and she would just pick it up and go on and say it.

And then the best of all…there were all these extras, all these extraordinary types, and these dwarfs from Naples. Because you see, Fellini has that sense that they are a part of life also. He’s not worshiping abstract beauty. He’s not a romantic, even though people think of his films as romantic films. He’s in the tradition of Hogarth, Aristophanes. Classic Mediterranean. He has giants and he has dwarfs. Anyway, I begged the casting director to let me be in the limousine picking up the dwarfs and taking them to the studio and delivering them back to their rooming houses in the evening. I wanted to hear what Neapolitan dwarfs talked about. I just had to; I was just dying to. So I sat there crowded into the backseat of this limousine with four or five dwarfs, just so I could hear their conversation. Well, they only talked about clothes. Because this was September and school was starting and the dime stores were full of children’s clothes. And here were these tough little gangster dwarfs from Naples saying, “Listen, the Upim on the Via Nazionale has got this blue one with three brass buttons.” The other one said, “I don’t care. At the Rinascente on the Via del Corso I saw this navy blue one with four buttons and this braid around the collar.” You wouldn’t believe it. These ugly things with these leathery skins and stinking of unwashed human flesh. I’m convinced that dwarf flesh has a higher smell.

This happened when there were all kinds of student strikes against authority and against the rich and so on. So here was this Bentley, or whatever it was, and I was sitting in the backseat, the only thing visible. There was a chauffeur and two dwarfs in the front seat. There were two dwarfs on benches and about three or four next to me. But you couldn’t see them because it was an old high car, and they were tiny. So here were these students hitchhiking rides into Rome. And I won’t tell you what they called me, seeing what they thought was an American millionaire in an empty limousine refusing students a lift…. That chapter of my life is called “Eugene and the Seven Dwarfs.” Oh, I’ll never forget those dwarfs as long as I live. That was one of the most splendid moments of my life, I think. My first glimpse of the northern lights, my meeting with Tallulah—oh, a few other glorious moments—but being in that big chauffeur-driven limousine and looking as though I were a millionaire riding in the backseat. And those Communist students shaking their fists because I wouldn’t give them a lift. I couldn’t give them a lift because I was just crowded in with all those Neapolitan dwarfs. Well, oh, God, I enjoyed making that film. Oh, was it fun. It wasn’t like work.

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Fellini and I were not good friends. Just friends. We had dinner together and all that. I went to his parties. He came to my parties. Et cetera, et cetera. But as with all great artists, you were conscious of rooms within rooms. Like with Jean Garrigue, even though we had many a giggle together and many, many, many a time when we were sitting talking about poetry or life and all, I respected in her other rooms and she respected in me other rooms. I guess I shouldn’t go into it because otherwise I’d have to do a seven-hundred-page treatise on “What Is Friendship?” But I suppose by conventional standards, he and I became friends.

One of the most extraordinary evenings I had with him was at the circus. All the circus people loved him because, of course, he dealt with the circus in several of his films. And he’d finished some film—I can’t think which one it was—and there was an Italian family circus that invited Fellini with whoever he wanted to bring, to come to a dinner served in the ring after the performance. And he invited me. Of course, I was beside myself. Because there was a dinner table set up right in the sawdust and the dwarfs, dressed in ballet skirts, were waiting on tables. And they had a tigress who had whelped two weeks before. Of course, their fur is like velvet. The vet said, “Well, come on around.” This tiger’s name was Maria; she was so beautiful you could die. He said, “Well, feel it.” I said, “Huh?” He said, “It’s all right.” And he said something like “Maria, honey, he wants to feel your fur.” Then he took my hand and shoved it through the cage, and I stroked her little haunch and she just went “Mmmmm.” She was velvet. It was a thrill. It was my first touch of a tiger. It was all so marvelous that night. Eating dinner in a circus ring. With dwarfs in ballet skirts serving. I thought: These are the moments worth living for.

There’s a rumor about how Fellini ran away and joined the circus. Well, finally I got the true story from his—I’ve forgotten whether it was his mama I met or his aunt. I just can’t remember. But it was some lady of the Fellini family, whom I met very briefly on the set, and we were talking about the circus. I said, “Is it true about Fellini and the circus?” She said the same thing Giulietta said. “The only time that Federico blushes is when he tells the truth.” She said, “He was missing one Saturday afternoon and we couldn’t find him and it started getting dark. And his father caught up with the circus that was just going out of town, and walking right behind the animal wagons was little Federico. He was just following them.” She said he was only missing for about six hours. He tells the story that he ran away and toured with the circus for about a year.

He was a delightful country boy. Like me, he’s a country boy gone to the big town. He’s an educated provincial, as I am. And he comes from a little town that has its own craziness, as Mobile does. It’s a small town up there on the Adriatic. So he’s not Roman or Sicilian or Neapolitan. He’s from the north of Italy. Somehow I could identify with him and his sort of hidden sense of satire. It wasn’t as if he were a know-it-all Roman or a know-it-all Milanese or a know-it-all Florentine or a know-it-all Neapolitan or a know-it-all Sicilian. He was from a town that was Byzantine as Mobile was Byzantine. So we Byzantine types understood each other. It’s cats and monkeys and the difference between what they think, what they say, and what they do. That’s the Byzantine holy trinity, as it is the Southern holy trinity.

Full of Spine and Free as a Bird

After I knew Fellini and after we had talked awhile and all
that, he began giving me things to translate for him. I didn’t translate the script for
8½,
but I had done translations of various other things for him to send to Hollywood or New York. So on the strength of having worked with him as translator, I was immediately hired by other people to translate. I must have translated well over five hundred film scripts, a great many stories which are five to ten pages long, and a great many treatments which are 150 pages long. It must have gone into the thousands of texts. I did one script a week and whatever bits and pieces. It was automatic. At first it was exhausting—I lost sleep over the first few. I had every known dictionary propped up on the desk. I finally realized I wrote them better if I didn’t even read them first. I would just put it there, put the typewriter here, a pile of paper and carbons there, and set out. It always came out better. With translating, you have to be both full of spine and free as a bird.

My job was to make the script accessible to illiterate American distributors who might invest. They weren’t the brightest creatures on earth, so they had to be amused, and that’s what I tried to do. I tried to explain things that were terribly Italian without seeming to explain them. Like family relationships and certain customs like Ascension Day. I always tried to make it available to somebody, let’s say, who was born in Iowa. Not writing down in any way, but making things clear. If I came to a passage I thought dull or too long, I adjusted it, thinking always of the need to sell the script to investors in America, England, Scandinavia, and Germany. I never changed anything to push my own style, my own ego, my own insight. But I didn’t mind touching up here and there because they had to be sold. It was like putting a cherry on top of a dish of ice cream. Or putting the parsley where it was needed. I didn’t think that I needed to call everybody who was involved to ask whether I could do it. I just did it.

After I’d done three or four, they were always calling every ten minutes because So-and-so, a distributor, let’s say from United Artists, was passing through Rome, and they would want, in a big hurry, something to show him. The more I was certain of what I was doing, the easier it became, and I was able to go rapidly. Quite often they gave me better prices if I could do a five-hundred-page script in five days. Some of them were desperate for something overnight, practically. So I really did thousands. I mean literally thousands.

Some were brilliant and perceptive. Some were really just outlines to make a film. Fellini was much wordier in a script than he would ever let one of his films be. There was more exposition and more dialogue. I think that was to help possible investors get the story. The actual shooting scripts were fantastic in their economy and in the intelligence, poetry, and surprising qualities of the dialogue. Some of the greatest writers on earth couldn’t write a screenplay if they tried because they don’t have that grasp of how much the camera can write. The camera can do three pages of introductory material with one shot.

Liliana Cavani was brilliant in her screenplays. I worked very long and most particularly on her. I’d never met her. I only met her after she made her first film. But some young lady, her secretary or something, brought this script for me to translate. Somebody else had translated it, but then it was said to be awful in English. So this young woman who worked with her brought it to me. I read it and was just sent by her quality and took particularly a long time and many pains over those first two scripts of hers. And I was publicizing her and beating the drum for her and praising her and saying, “Here was a new talent,” and blah, blah, blah, before she made anything.

I also worked with Lina Wertmüller from the beginning. I knew her from when she was this strange child. She was an assistant director to Fellini on
8½,
that’s how I met her. She came to me to do that
Swept Away…by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August.
I did all the English versions of that for her. I worked with her a lot. She always came to talk to me about the spirit of the script. She would say things like “I want some laughs here, but I want the essential design of these two or three scenes to be clear.” She just wanted to be sure that I was on her wavelength, and I loved working for her. Considering, you know, the position of the female in Italy, I thought anything that could be done to open the doors of their little cages would be a good day’s work. Lina was one of the—shall we say—revolutionists in the true sense of the word: you’d never call her a revolutionist. Most genuine revolutions are quiet, like the radio, the sewing machine, Mozart, Michelangelo, Edison, you know. Somebody sitting up late puzzling over things. Blood in the streets is so often not a real revolution. It’s letting the lid off of built-up steam, an outburst of national hysteria and irritation, but it ain’t a genuine turnabout.

Women in Italy were caged by family life. Caged by the duties of the mother, the duties of the homemaker. Up at dawn and wash the diapers. Then wipe the cream out of their husband’s mustache after breakfast. Send them all on their way into the world and then start cooking lunch. And then start taking the sheep to market. They hadn’t even learned to be conscious of other possibilities for themselves. Well, after the war there was a new minor bourgeoisie in Italy. Those peasant farmers who dealt their butter, eggs, and cheese on the black market all got rich. And the first thing they wanted to do was send their eldest son to university to be a doctor or a lawyer. So suddenly Italy was filled with people graduating from law school and medical school, and a lot of those young people were very vocal. And among them were some daughters of those farmers who got themselves off to school. So many of the young intellectual females had the same idea, at the same moment. It was just one of those things—a spontaneous uprising all over the nation. The time had come for what happened in England in 1900 or what happened in America in 1885, you know. The girls let loose. They bit through their chains. Lina was just one of them, a female intellectual. And I use that as a complimentary term for the people who are actively interested in life on this planet and interested in the situation in which they find themselves, beyond the walls of their house, the hedge of their garden, the town in which they live.