Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films by Yehuda Moraly

Author:Yehuda Moraly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2020-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

The different versions of the work

The many vicissitudes linked to the writing of Mastorna explain the large number of versions of the screenplay.

A. First there is the letter-synopsis Fellini sent Dino De Laurentiis in the late summer of 1965. Substantial extracts from it are reproduced in the chapter on Mastorna in Tullio Kezich’s Fellini biography. The letter was also published in French in the Éditions Sonatine translation of the screenplay (2013). It is of great interest as it includes extremely theatrical passages, such as the fight with the eagle and the suit fitting in the hotel room, which are absent from the more developed text, which is much more restrained. In certain places Fellini also explains his intentions:

Supposing that it must have one, the meaning of the film should be as follows. We project on to a dimension we normally call the world beyond, all our hopes, our rigorous education and our ignorance, without realizing that this other world, invented, imbued with mystery, fantasy or morality, inevitably conditions our life in this world, which is, consequently, in its turn invented and made mysterious, in other words caught up in false schemas. The joyous disorder which I want to translate into the film should objectivise the other world in the same way as the protagonist (and most of us along with him) imagines it, and suggest the character’s liberation.43

B. An English text was deposited with the Italian Society of Authors. Presumably this is a translation of the text sent to De Laurentiis, which the director wished to protect immediately.

C. The screenplay, which was typed in March 1966, is a synthesis of the respective texts by Dino Buzzati and Brunello Rondi. Umberto Rondi, the screenwriter’s son, was kind enough to give me access to it. This was the text on which preparations for shooting were to be based. It is full of crossings out. Entire sequences disappear.

D. Fellini’s second letter to Dino De Laurentiis postdates not only the work carried out with Rondi and Buzzati but also the cuts made to the screenplay. The letter – which was published in Dario Zanelli’s book, after Fellini’s death – takes account of the cuts made to the typescript by hand, and the handwritten alterations For example, the episode of La Cicciona’s kitchen, which he cut on the typescript, is thus not mentioned in the letter. The night club where Mastorna meets the clairvoyant is replaced in the typescript by public lavatories; the letter then describes lavatories, not a night club. The car in which Mastorna travels to the station is replaced in the typescript by a bus; the letter then has a bus not a car, and so on.

E. Lastly there is the text published by Kezich after Fellini’s death. This version, while taking account of the work done on the project with two other co-writers, Bernadino Zapponi and Tonino Guerra, shows only minor differences from the 1966 text. In the unpublished screenplay typed in 1966 the protagonist’s name is Mastorna. In the revised text published by Kezich the name is initially Mastorna.

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