TENACITY MOST ALWAYS WINS, BY KENNETH JOHNSON

I often get calls and e-mails from people asking me for advices and telling me their frustrating experiences in the film industry, and in the most of the cases I ask myself what to reply.

I’m by nature optimistic and realistic: I’m crazy enough to try with all my strength to do something almost impossible, with all the odds against me, and then I understand that sometimes there’s no way to do it, and you have to change your plans even if on paper it was almost done.

So should I tell them the truth (that is hard, stressful, it never ends and the ones who fail are far more then the ones who succeed), or should I wink and say with a smile “Yeah, go on with it, good job!”?

To answer that, I report below what Kenneth Johnson (creator of the TV series V) told me once:

Bartolo, I think all artists have faced similar frustrations. Many of the greatest directors & writers have faced seeming insurmountable odds and all of us sometimes suffer defeat and rejection despite our very best efforts... but passion and tenacity most always wins eventually.

We're still working hard to get V before the cameras as a movie. On the hardest days, I can still say, hey, I'm not dead yet -- and try another tack.

CANNES FAKE PICTURES

AN USUAL HOLLYWOOD STORY

I met a Brazilian Actress who lived in Hollywood for a long while. To pay the rent she used to work as screaming girl in low budget horror films.

She tells me that one evening she is at a party and a young man holds her face and starts talking like a crazy, telling her he likes her very much, he saw all her films and they must do something together.

He writes his number on a piece of paper, and later she throws it out, because she thinks he’s a maniac.
Then she leaves for Brazil, and for a year she works in a soap opera. But she gets bored, and comes back to Hollywood.
There, she sees the guy from the party on TV, now famous.

It was Quentin Tarantino.

THE DAY I MET VITTORIO CECCHI GORI

I get in Vittorio Cecchi Gori’s house with just one thought: whatever the result of our meeting will be, this event will stuck forever in my life, and will mark the edge between before knowing Cecchi Gori and after I met him.

Whoever I will be, whatever job I will have, from now on I can say at the age of 27 and with no big studio backing me I’ve been able to set up an appointment with the biggest Italian Producer, 3 times Grammy winner, in his home, to tell him about my project.
I’m with the giants now, that is Cecchi Gori’s Christmas tree, and the bathroom I get in is the same Cecchi Gori uses.

We are at the end of a busy day for both of us, he has just finished a meeting with his management, he’s tired, but welcomes me in his studio like I were one of his lot.

I’m struck by the humanity I find in this room: his collaborators treat him with an intimate respect, because he’s the boss, but is also a man for whom they have feelings.
But most of all I’m struck by the humanity the man I consider the biggest one shows to me, who am still no one, and I don’t feel anymore I’m the professional who is leading a very ambitious project, but a little boy deeply inadequate.

Despite his tiredness, I see a charisma in him I never saw elsewhere, and if in my other experiences I faced bureaucrats who seemed interested just in delaying my projects, he seems to try to find a way to help me before any valid reason not to.

Cecchi Gori doesn't tret me with the patience of a teacher with a student, but as a professional who talks to another professional. He doesn't just talk about his ideas, he fights for them: he slaps the table and cries Films have to be made in Italian and subtitled in English, that’s the way you win Oscars! Americans have 10 professions to do what just one can do, and Financiers can’t say anything. I’ve always been a Producer, Executive Producer and so on… like [he names a film I don’t understand] they had to shoot in a villa full of mirrors in the woods, and nobody thought that the cameras were going to be reflected in the mirrors! Then they called the agency to make things straight. Hey, that little joke costed me 2 million dollars!

He’s not just a person with the right intuitions, who treats all the film as products that grant him money: he is someone that still puts his soul in what he does, he puts his face in his projects.

At the end of our meeting he asks me for the script, and tells me we will meet up again. His sentence appears to me meaningful and a lot more real compared to the usual We’ll let you know that people use in the show business.

We’ll meet up again, he says, Nobody does a film in just one meeting.

P.S.: I’d like to thank very much the Head of the Press Office of Cecchi Gori Group, Mr Emilio Sturla Furnò: a very nice guy without whom I wouldn’t be able to have this meeting.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

(Cannes, 20th May 2009) Sometimes it is hard to be a man and keep the emotions, especially thinking about all the efforts, and that that hell could be ended forever.These are me and Charles Fries: my American Distributor and Executive Producer, with whom today I signed a deal for a worldwide distribution.

From now on I have all the guarantees I need to give to my investors, I can take their money and make my film.

Shaking his hand, today he told me:

“The end of the beginning”.