Tullio Pinelli, RIP

Tullio Pinelli

The NY Times reports:

Tullio Pinelli, whose prolific screenwriting career included a long partnership with the director Federico Fellini, with whom he wrote many of Fellini’s best-known works, including “I Vitelloni,” “La Strada,” “La Dolce Vita” and “8 ½,” died on Saturday in Rome. He was 100...

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.”