A few words in praise of Tullio Pinelli, the Italian screenwriter who died aged 100. Pinelli is most associated with Federico Fellini, for who he scripted such films as La Strada, La Dolce Vita, and one of my favorite films of all time, 8 1/2. Pinelli was a lawyer, but that aspect rarely reflected in his films, unlike Kieslowski's choice screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz whose scripts reek of lawyer, but in a very good way. (Need artful penance this Holy Week? See Dekalog, all of it.)
8 1/2 is an extremely polarizing film, affection for which strongly depends on how grounded are your feet to earth when you see it. It still though perfectly captures the eccentric, formless process by which an artist creates art. There is no mythology assigning to Pinelli authorship over 8 1/2 (unlike Citizen Kane), and it can be argued that Nino Rota's immortal score is more indispensable in defining 8 1/2. I'd expect though that Fellini's vision would not have materialized without his trusted collaborator by his side, even if he may have wanted him hanged at times.
After Fellini died in 1993, I dutily read his New York Times front-page obituary at the Jefferson Library, then handed the paper to the article photocopied. The lady running the Xerox machine saw the news, and exclaimed, "Huh? Namatay na siya?!" We had a nice chat for a few minutes, and I learned she had been a film buff in the 1960s. It did cross my mind that the apparent career path of film buffs of the 1960s ended with operating Xerox machines in libraries 30 years hence. A few years later, I enrolled in law school.
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