July 30, 2022 10:06 am
When you arrive in Cinecittà you pass through a concierge, built in the early twentieth century Italian rationalist style that seems to prepare visitors for a journey into the past. The majority of visitors, about a hundred thousand a year, come precisely for this. Cinecittà extends over more than forty hectares on the outskirts of Rome and houses the Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema, where you can visit a permanent exhibition of the illustrious history of Cinecittà itself, and another entirely dedicated to Federico Fellini, conceived by his protégé Dante Ferretti.
Beyond the hangars of the 19 soundstages, tourists can wander through the narrow streets and permanent sets of Cinecittà. The largest is a fiberglass reproduction of an ancient Roman city, complete with an amphitheater and triumphal arch. It’s a reminder of the studio’s glory days, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it was used to make epic films such as Ben How e Cleopatra. Thanks to this it has earned the nickname of “Hollywood on the Tiber”.
Until recently, says the CEO of Cinecittà, Nicola Maccanico, “this was a place where people came to experience the history of cinema and where, every now and then, someone came to shoot a film”. The directors were mostly Italian or of Italian origin, like Martin Scorsese, who shot here Gangs of New Yorkor Anthony Minghella, who chose Cinecittà for The English patient. But all of this could drastically change.
Total immersion
In absolute terms, Italy is destined to become the main beneficiary of the European Union post-pandemic relaunch fund (pnrr): it should receive, or borrow at subsidized rates, more than two hundred billion euros. Of these, 260 million have been allocated to significantly improve and enlarge Cinecittà. “The production of films, series and documentaries is experiencing a dizzying growth,” said the minister of culture Dario Franceschini. “We must be ready”.
Cinecittà is about to expand by over two thirds and will purchase state-of-the-art equipment
The plan is to increase the number of studios to 24, and to develop a new 31-hectare site nearby. The new lot, only half a kilometer away at the closest point, will have eight more soundstages and 16 hectares of outdoor area. Whether measured by surface area or the number of studios, Cinecittà is about to expand by over two-thirds. It will also purchase some state-of-the-art equipment already in use in US and UK studios, including a giant LED screen, which immerses the actors in the fantasy world they are staging much more effectively than traditional green screen.
The question is whether this huge investment will pay off. Until a couple of months ago, the answer was clearly affirmative. Cinecittà was fully booked and its fortunes had gradually improved over the last ten years, also thanks to the advent of streaming. But the April announcement of a decline in Netflix subscriptions cast a shadow over the entire film and television industry. And now much of the world economy risks inflation and possibly recession.
Maccanico agrees that “there could be a period of consolidation. But I believe that the spaces we will create at Cinecittà will be profitable even in a period of slow growth ”. Rome, he argues, exerts an immense attraction on film productions, even in the presence of growing competition from low-cost studios in Eastern Europe.
First of all, a generous tax relief: a credit of 40 percent on eligible production costs incurred in Italy, which can reach up to 75 percent of the total cost of production and a maximum of twenty million euros per year. Then there are the Cinecittà technicians. And finally, says Maccanico, there is Rome itself. “If you tell an actress like Charlize Theron that we will shoot for six months in Sofia or for six months in Rome…”. Maccanico leaves the sentence unfinished, but with an eloquent raised eyebrow he suggests that, for stars accustomed to a certain quality of life, the choice is obvious.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
This article appeared in the British weekly The Economist.