Steno (director)
Stefano Vanzina called Steno ( born January 19, 1915 in Rome, † March 12, 1988 ibid ) was an Italian film director and screenwriter who was mainly known for numerous film comedies, including films of the Commedia all'italiana.
Life
Stefano Vanzina was the son of Giulia and Alberto Vanzina Boggio, who had emigrated to Argentina in his youth and later worked as a journalist of the Corriere della Sera. As Vanzina was three years old, his father died, leaving the family in economically broken homes back. Vanzine graduated from high school and enrolled at the University in the Faculty of Law, studying but not finished. Instead, he began a study to set designer at the Accademia di Belle Arti in order to be admitted also at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Encouraged by the creative environment, he began to draw caricatures and cartoons, as well as to compose vignettes and humorous texts under the pseudonym Steno. This pseudonym, a tribute to the novelist Flavio Steno, Vanzina maintained. Only in two films, he used his family name.
Vanzina began to write for the Tribuna Illustrata, later he was on the editorial board of the humorous magazine Marc'Aurelio. At the same time he started for the next five years, radio plays and plays, among others, for Marcello Marchesi and Federico Fellini. Through this work he met Mario Mattoli know who opened the doors to the world of film. From then on Vanzina worked on numerous films as a screenwriter and assistant director. He wrote, among other screenplays for Giorgio Simonelli, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Riccardo Freda and Carlo Borghesio. In addition, he played as an actor in two films.
In 1949 he made his directorial debut with Bye Bye Braverman, in collaboration with Mario Monicelli, with whom he had written since the early postwar period together film scripts. He produced his first film, Totò a colori early 1952. In the next 30 years he was involved with great success in numerous comedies, as a director as well as a screenwriter and film producer. In Vanzinas comedies worked with well-known Italian film comedians such as Totò and Alberto Sordi. The irreverence and irony of his screenplays in 1954 led to a scandal: His comedy Le avventure di Giacomo Casanova fell victim to censorship. Large sections were cut, the work came out garbled on the canvas. A reconstructed version has now been listed from 62 ° Mostra del Cinema di Venezia.
Gained international recognition Vanzina in the 1970s with the puncture - movies in which constantly Bud Spencer took over the lead role. In the 1970s and 1980s he created pilot films and series episodes for the Italian television. His last work for the big screen was the movie Animali Metropolitani, a relentless reckoning with the hedonistic Italian society in the late 1980s. This film came out three months after his death, he met with little interest from the audience.
Twenty years after his death, a documentary was released under the name of Steno, Genio Gentile, whose premiere took place at the Festa del Cinema di Roma. His two sons Enrico and Carlo Vanzina Vanzina include with their jointly produced the most commercially successful films of Italian directors present.