Happy 103rd Birthday Dino De Laurentiis

Today is the 103rd birthday of the film producer Dino De Laurentiis. His list of credits are basically just a list of the greatest films of the last half of the last century. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Dino De Laurentiis
DATE OF BIRTH: 8-Aug-1919
PLACE OF BIRTH: Torre Annunziata, Italy
DATE OF DEATH: 11-Nov-2010
PLACE OF DEATH: Beverly Hills, CA
Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for producing La Strada
Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award

BEST KNOWN FOR: Agostino “Dino” De Laurentiis was an Italian-American film producer. Along with Carlo Ponti, he was one of the producers who brought Italian cinema to the international scene at the end of World War II.

Dino De Laurentiis left home at 17, determined to be a director. He earned tuition to film school by working as an extra, actor, and prop man, and produced his first film, L’Amore Canta, before his 21st birthday. He served in the Italian Army during World War II, then resumed making movies, and over subsequent decades he became a very successful Italian film producer. Often working with Carlo Ponti, De Laurentiis’s best Italian films include Fellini’s La Strada, Miseria e Nobiltà, and Fellini’s gloomy night with a prostitute Le Notti di Cabiria. He also produced Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, the brutal revenge drama Death Wish, and the brutal slave drama Mandingo.

Most Americans, though, had never heard of De Laurentiis until he re-made King Kong with Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, and Jessica Lange. The movie seemed tawdry and tedious, and the producer’s name was featured in big letters on the poster, so for years after that, whenever De Laurentiis released a new film critics wrote, “from the man who made the King Kong remake”. His reputation as “Dino De Horrendous” was not enhanced by such subsequent turkeys as The White Buffalo, Orca, The Hurricane, Flash Gordon, and an unnecessary sequel, King Kong Lives.

But De Laurentiis deserved more respect than he got, because between the schlock he also delivered some simply outstanding movies — the police drama Serpico, the spy story Three Days of the Condor, Ragtime, Cronenberg and King’s The Dead Zone, and David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. De Laurentiis also produced Manhunter, an excellent thriller based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon.

Both of De Laurentiis’s brothers, both his wives, and most of his children have also worked in film. His granddaughter Giada De Laurentiis is the host and master chef of Everyday Italian on the Food Network.