R.I.P.: Tullio Pinelli (1908–2009)

The longtime screenwriter for Federico Fellini Tullio Pinelli has died at the age of 100 according to the New York Times:

Mr. Pinelli, who helped write more than 70 films, had been a lawyer in Turin, his hometown, where he also wrote plays. Not until his late 30s did he devote himself to movies. One day in late 1946 his life changed. He was standing in the Piazza Barberini in Rome, reading a newspaper at a kiosk, when he began a conversation with a young man reading the same paper. It was Fellini, then a young screenwriter, and they immediately fell into a discussion of films, each expressing a desire to infuse poetry and lyricism into the political neo-realism then in vogue in Italian cinema.

“Meeting each other was a creative lightning bolt,” he told a Fellini biographer, Tullio Kezich. “We spoke the same language from the start. We took a walk and ended up at his house on Via Lutezia.” He went on: “We were fantasizing about a screenplay that would be the exact opposite of what was fashionable then: the story of a very shy and modest office worker, who discovers he can fly, so he flaps his arms and escapes out the window.”

Nothing came of the idea. But from that serendipitous meeting sprang a great friendship and one of the significant collaborations in movie history. Fellini and Mr. Pinelli began by working together as screenwriters for established Italian directors — Pietro Germi, Roberto Rossellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others. Mr. Pinelli, an intellectual with a firm grounding in formal dramatic writing, gave weight to Fellini’s most effervescent flights of fancy, and when the ambitious and impatient Fellini stepped behind the camera, Mr. Pinelli helped him build his memorable tales of exuberant longing, anguishing passion and fantastical sensuousness.

How amazing. If Pinelli doesn’t happen to be standing in precisely that spot… if he’s not taking the time to read the newspaper… if he doesn’t strike up a conversation with a young man who turns out to be Fellini… but he did and the rest, as they say, is history. Pinelli’s credits include La Strada (1954), La vita Dolce (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), and Sweet Charity (1969).

Here is the final scene from La Strada: