Hollywood Italians

"This book is a celebration of nearly a century of images of Italians in American motion pictures and their contribution to popular culture." "Hollywood Italians covers the careers of dozens of stars including Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Marisa Tomei, James Gandolfini, and many others. In addition, the book reviews the work of such Italian American directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese." "In all, Hollywood Italians discusses scores of films with a concentration on the most important, including their literary and European-cinematic roots. The book is capped by a comprehensive examination of The Godfather and its two sequels, as well as the international television phenomenon The Sopranos."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"[This book] explores the different ways in which Italian American directors from the 1920s to the present have responded to their ethnicity. While some directors have used film to declare their ethnic roots and create an Italian American 'imagined community,' others have ignored or even denied their background . . . Cavallero's exploration of the films of Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola,and Tarantino demonstrates how immigrant Italians fought prejudice, how later generations positioned themselves in relation to their predecessors, and how the American cinema, usually seen as a cultural instituion that works to assimlate, has also served as a forum where assimilation was resisted." -- Book cover.

"Avoiding the sometimes sterile and by now often futile debate concerning stereotypes, Hollywood's Italians is instead an act of loving archeology: digging in the past and assembling a colorful kaleidoscopic mosaic of tesserae. It is a pointillist portrait of a collective community. Each chapter is devoted to a theme, be it Italians who made their way to Hollywood, the transition from stage to screen, the symbiotic interaction between television and film, music on the screen, food and family, and peopled with dozens of mini-biographies that reveal often surprising bits of information. The appendix, listing all Italian American Academy Award winners and nominations, is invaluable as a historical document. Readers will bask in the wonderful nostalgia while being simultaneously entertained and enlightened." - - Stanislao G. Pugliese, Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies, Hofstra University

The story told in this book, which analyzes the presence of Italians in California in the early decades of the twentieth century and the influence they exerted in various sectors (from architecture to art, from crafts to the burgeoning film industry), began in 1915, the year Salvatore Ferragamo arrived in the United States and soon after moved to the sunny West Coast. That same year the Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco, where Marcello Piacentini's Italian Citadel made waves and marked the beginning of the powerful and lasting influence of the Renaissance style on the local architectural language. Against the backdrop of Italian emigration to the States - the fil rouge running through the entire book - and of a Hollywood on its way to becoming the world capital of the young film industry, the volume tells of personalities who were already myths in their day, such as Enrico Caruso, Rudolph Valentino, Lina Cavalieri, and Tina Modotti; cinematic milestones like Cabiria , Ben-Hur , and Romola ; the star system and iconic directors; the important part played by Italian musicians in the birth of jazz; and the thousands of Italians who worked "behind the scenes," making a vital contribution to the creation of the Hollywood myth. This complex story, told both in words and in images, paints a varied and multifaceted picture of the "set" on which the Shoemaker of Dreams began his thrilling creative adventure in America.

This cinema history illuminates the role of southern Italian performance traditions on American movies from the silent era to contemporary film. In Napoli/New York/Hollywood, Italian cinema historian Giuliana Muscio investigates the significant influence of Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors on Hollywood cinema. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, Muscio demonstrates how these artists and workers preserved their cultural and performance traditions, which led to innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies. In doing so, she sheds light on the work of generations of artists, as well as the cultural evolution of “Italian-ness” in America over the past century. Muscio examines the careers of Italian performers steeped in an Italian theatrical culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance, acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story—that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema—is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.

DIVA study of the cultural policies of the Italian communist party following the collapse of fascismand the struggle with popular consumer culture that led to its demise in 1991./div