He makes underground films with the Super 8 that he bought directly from Isabella Rossellini, dreaming of one day being able to make it big. They are “visual poems”, he says. However, they are appreciated a lot out there and this pushes him to enroll in the Experimental Center. Carlo Verdone he knows that is the right direction. He began working as a documentary maker, then as an assistant on some films, then the call came from television.
The transmission is called “Non-stop” and he characterizes it with a succession of irresistible characters. Soon the phone rings. On the other end of the receiver is the thick, mellow voice of His Majesty Sergio Leone: “I’ll be your next producer,” she tells him. Carlo almost faints. He literally can’t believe it. “That was it for me – he said recently, to Pass through the Basement – the change of life”.
Because, from the moment he picked up the phone, he understood that cinema could truly become his main path. However, the path is anything but easy. “I still have to understand why you make me laugh,” Leone tells him when they meet. “I don’t know why, you look like a land registry employee, and yet… you have a rubber face.” Brood, Sergio, inhaling mounds of air from his nostrils and mouth, as if to nourish those intricate thoughts.
“I wrote a little story – Carlo relaunches – maybe I’ll take it to him so he can read it”. Leone tells him yes. “Come tomorrow.” Now Carlo feels he can really play his cards. He leaves the subject and returns the next day, thrilled. “Have you read it, master? Are you laughing?”. Leone looks up from the paper, frowning. “He makes you cry”issues his sentence.
The search for the perfect screenwriter to put alongside Verdone begins from there, because, as Sergio says, “You don’t have any kind of experience”. So this strangely matched couple starts ringing the bell to all the screenwriters and directors in Rome, desperately looking for someone who can grasp Verdone’s character and help him convey it with those skills that he lacks.
“We went to anyone – says Verdone – and everyone said the same thing: Sergio, but this one has a world all its own, it has characters all its own. Only he can govern them”. Then Leone is convinced, looks at him and says: “Do you know what? You can manage it yourself. They’re coming tomorrow. Welcome And De Bernardi – the screenwriters of My Friends – and they follow you”.
The beginning of a journey that will lead
Verdone understood how to write a perfect screenplay: “It took me three years, I succeeded with Borotalco”. A film that uncorks a bright career. Game with a resounding failure, as in the best plots.