The film producer who has turned Naples into a great film

And, as in a movie, we take a leap in time. In 2004, Luigi’s son arrived in Naples after a lifetime between the United States and Rome. Some relatives of Torre Annunziata come to receive him at the central hotel in Naples where he will sleep that night. He greets them briefly, ignoring them. He has other ideas in his head. He wears giant sunglasses, his skin is very dark. He is no longer young, but he dresses as if he were. Aurelio Di Laurentiis returns to his father’s land to buy Napoli, the football team that has just gone bankrupt. The idyllic movie scene of the childhood of his father and uncle is being transformed into an easy-going comedy, full of curious characters. Di Laurentiis, in fifteen years, has returned Naples to the elite, but he has also become a kind of firefighter, fighting with the City Council, punishing players in a closed hotel or chasing through the locker room tunnel an arbitrator with a cornicelloa Neapolitan amulet against bad luck.

Naples, despite being so beloved, was born relatively late, in 1926, thanks to the merger of different clubs under the initiative of the industrialist Giorgio Ascarelli, a member of the Jewish community of Naples. Ascarelli, the deputy mayor, negotiated with the fascist authorities for the club to find land for a new stadium and be admitted to the First Division in its first year. At the time, many fascists were Jews, unable to imagine that Mussolini would end up persecuting them. Ascarelli died earlier. He didn’t get to see it. Nor could he see any success from Naples, which in its early years became an elevator club, between ups and downs. In the shadow of Vesuvius, everything seemed possible. The Neapolitans liked to remember that their city was built on the ruins of a Greek colony, which is why they inherited the ability to turn everything into a tragedy or a comedy. Or both at once. A trend towards exaggeration that would reach its peak in the 1980s, with the arrival of businessman Corrado Ferlaino, who signed Maradona and changed history, because the club finally won the league. Then came the economic downturn and in 2004 Napoli finished in the Third Division. And here Aurelio Di Laurentiis came into action, who refounded the entity by naming it as Napoli Soccer, in the American style. Although a few years later the historical name of the entity was recovered, of course.

Di Laurentiis was then a well-known businessman in Italy, although he lived in the United States for many months. His arrival in the world of football was a revolution. And that the first year of the new club could not even rise to Second, because in 2005 he lost the promotion promotion against Avellino. But little by little, thanks to its management, Naples is once again big and is now living its second season with more titles in history: three Cups and a Super Cup between 2012 and 2022. And all in all, thank you to a man who grew up far from stadiums … and near movie theaters.

Di Laurentiis is the heir to a film empire, the producer Filmauro, founded with his father in the 70’s. A company that has always worked hand in hand with the company created by his uncle, Dino, when he to move to the United States, where he died in 2010 at his home in Beverly Hill, Los Angeles. Dino went to Rome at a very young age to be an actor, but he realized that he did not have enough talent in front of the camera. He had it behind him, as a producer. And he quickly recruited his brother Luigi, who acted as a lawyer as his parents wanted, to create a company that would revolutionize the European and American markets, because Dino was the great expert on the presale of human rights. films in different countries: he, the owner of the rights to a film, sold them for a period of five years to a different partner in each country, getting to have many traveling companions to make large productions.

In the difficult post-war years, Dino di Laurentiis produced some of the most famous films in Italian cinema, such as Bitter rice by Giuseppe De Santis i Anna by Alberto Lattuada, starring Silvana Mangano, who would marry the producer. Ready as a ferret, he negotiated with banks and businessmen to receive money. And he convinced Hollywood producers to shoot films in Europe, because it was cheaper. He first took them to Italy, but in the 1960s he would take a few to Spanish stages. The Di Laurentiis produced such iconic films as The road by Federico Fellini, who would win an Oscar. In total, 181 films have been produced, to which must be added more than 350 as co-producers, sometimes with traveling companions such as Dino and Mangano’s daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis. With Cabiria nights from Fellini came a second Oscar.

Then, movies as well known as the great war by Mario Monicelli and the first foreigners with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, John Huston, Sydney Pollack, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Altman and Milos Forman. The Di Laurentiis were key to Sofia Loren’s career and the best years of Italian neorealism, but in the 1970s Di Laurentiis left for the United States, where she produced iconic adventure films such as Conan the barbarian of John Milius and adventures as Blue Velvet by David Lynch. Filmauro’s list of awards and prizes is as long as the list of well-known actors and actresses who collaborated. He also worked with great Neapolitan actors and creators, such as Eduardo De Filippo, the popular Totó, one of the most beloved actors in Italy. He may have lived in California, but he never stopped being Neapolitan.

But the heir, Aurelio Di Laurentiis, has preferred to make money and forget that cinema is art. His films usually have a lot of viewers, because he bets on the easy comedies that fill the theaters just before Christmas. Doubtful quality films full of easy jokes, of women showing very long legs and the same comics that they endure, as surgery is performed to continue looking young, like Nero Parenti, known for a series of comic films where he spent Christmas in a different city, such as Ibiza and New York. And look, Aurelio, as a young man, had come to produce films by Roman Polanski and Ettore Scola, but little by little he has chosen to seek economic success. And he has decided to star in his films himself, with the adventure in Naples.

With his wife Jacqueline and their children Luigi, Valentina and Edoardo on the club’s board of directors, he has quarreled with the City Council over his plan to remodel the municipally-owned stadium to remove the stadiums. athletics. Unable to carry out the project, he has threatened to take the matches to other cities, such as Caserta and the distant Bari, because two years ago he also bought Bari, which plays in the Italian Third Division. Controversial, Di Laurentiis has fought with the City Council and with half of Naples. He accuses the city’s wealthy families of “abandoning it and preferring to move to other towns rather than take care of the beauty of Naples,” he said. your sexist comments. “I like food and women. I always want to find out their secrets,” says a man who two seasons ago, angry with the team, wanted to concentrate them four weeks away from their families. When Napoli were eliminated in the Europa League semi-finals a few years ago, they blamed the French. “They dominate UEFA, Platini still rules. It’s his thing, they don’t want to see some Neapolitans triumph.” He has twice been investigated for tax fraud and has never been convicted. And he continues to sign players and coaches, with a single goal: to give Napoli what would be their third league title.

A year ago he was criticized again, because he traveled all over Italy, meeting dozens of people, despite having a fever in the middle of the third wave of covid-19. Always temperamental, he states that he has a better plan to create a Superliga than Barça and Madrid, while announcing the signings of Napoli on social media before the club. At the moment, coaches such as Ancelotti, Reja, Donadoni, Sarri and Rafa Benítez have not succeeded. Now he tries it with Spalletti, the new actor in Di Laurentiis’s great film, who always explains that “running a club is like a movie: you never know how it ends.”