Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Nino Rota, Public Domain via Houston Public Media

December 3, 1911– Nino Rota

At 14-years-old and feeling highly romantic, I couldn’t have been more captivated by the Franco Zeffirelli film version of William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet (1968). Most assuredly, the memory of the sight of the naked backside of Leonard Whiting meant lots of crumpled tissues under my bed when I was a teenager. I also totally fell in love with the score for this film. At the time, I was studying improvisational piano with an amazing, inspiring teacher who coached me through working on playing the theme from Romeo And Juliet, which brought me much happiness.

This version of the Shakespeare play was my first encounter with the music of Nino Rota, and the beginning of my love for all things Italian. At that point I had yet to see a Federico Fellini film. That would not happen for another four years when I saw Satyricon (1969) at a revival house in Boston… while on acid!

Rota was a pianist, conductor, noted academic, and one of the most important composers in Film History. Popular and prolific (171 films), Rota wrote some of the most memorable and loved film scores, including The Godfather Parts I and II (1972, 1974), The Leopard (1963), Zeffirelli’s other popular Shakespeare films, nearly all of Fellini’s output, along with more than 140 other Italian films.

Yet, his music does not quite work in the way that we have come to assume music in film scores work. His music does not seek to draw the audience in, or to overwhelm and excite. His music is lovely, yet reticent, at once comic and touching, with a direct relation to what is going on onscreen. Rota’s musical scores are close and affectionate towards a film’s characters and story lines, but restrained, not detached, but ironically attached.

Born Giovanni Rota Rinaldi in Milan, part of a large family of musicians, Rota and household moved to Rome while he was still a kid. He studied music at the prestigious Conservatory Of Santa Cecilia, graduating when he was only 17-years-old. Rota was an “enfant prodige”, famous both as a composer and as an orchestra conductor while still a teenager. His first oratorio L’infanzia Di San Giovanni Battista, was performed in Milan and Paris in 1923, when he was just 12-years-old. His lyrical comedy, Il Principe Porcaro, was composed in 1926. From 1930 to 1932, Rota lived in the USA, after he won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he studied composition and orchestration, taught by composer Fritz Reiner.

Rota returned to Italy and earned another degree, this one in World Literature from the University Of Milan. In 1937, at 26-years-old, he began a teaching career that led to becoming the Director of the Bari Music Conservatory, a title he held from 1950 until he left this world in 1979.

After his childhood compositions, Rota began to write operas and ballets. He also composed hundreds of works for orchestra that are still performed by symphonies all over our pretty planet. In 1944, Rota was commissioned for his first film score by director Renato Castellani for Zaza (1942). The result brought him significant success, and Rota worked again with Castellani on Father, My Son (1946).

Rota is probably most noted for his work with Fellini. He began his relationship with the director in 1952, producing a brilliant, exciting score for The White Sheik (1952). A score for I Vitelloni (1953) followed and then La Strada (1954). Roto described these collaborations with Fellini as ones that were always meant to exist, that when the two of them worked together, everything fell in place in a perfect semblance. They continued to work together for decades, producing close to 70 scores.

He also composed the music for films by other directors: Luchino Visconti, Zeffirelli, Francis Ford Coppola (Rota won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather: Part II (1974), King Vidor, and René Clement. He also did the music for many theatre productions by Visconti and Zeffirelli. In 1995, he founded The Nino Rota Foundation at the fabulous Fondazione Cini in Venice, specializing in the study and archiving of the works of 20th century Italian composers.

Fellini on Rota:

“He was someone who had a rare quality belonging to the world of intuition. Just like children, simple men, sensitive people, innocent people, he would suddenly say dazzling things. As soon as he arrived, stress disappeared, everything turned into a festive atmosphere; the movie entered a joyful, serene, fantastic period, a new life.”

“He was the most precious collaborator I have ever had. The connection between us was immediately, a complete, total, harmony. He had a geometric imagination, a musical approach worthy of celestial spheres. He thus had no need to see images from my movies. When I asked him about the melodies he had in mind to comment one sequence or another, I clearly realized he was not concerned with images at all. His world was inner, inside himself, and reality had no way to enter it.”

Rota was openly gay, but very quietly so. My research points to no boyfriends or longtime attachments. His best friend was prolific Italian screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico, who did the screenplay for the classic The Bicycle Thief (1948). He had a close, loving, lifelong friendship with composer Igor Stravinsky, and he was very chummy with gay composer Aaron Copland while studying at the Curtis Institute, in fact it was Copland who inspired Rota’s interest in writing music for film. But, I can’t find anything that definitively shows that they might have been lovers.

Rota took his final bow in his apartment in Rome in 1979, taken by a heart attack at 67-years-old.

“If anyone reckons that all that I am attempting to express in my music is a little nostalgia and lots of humor and optimism, well then, that is exactly how I would like to be remembered.”

amsel-hello-dolly

There are two 20th Century American illustrators that I have long admired the most: J.C.Leyendecker and Richard Amsel. The two artists lived and worked in different decades and their experiences are very different. Leyendecker was born in Germany in 1874 and he trained in Chicago and Paris, producing hundreds of works of enormous influence and popularity. He is most known now for his covers for The Saturday Evening Post and his iconic Arrow Collar advertisements. For his time, Leyendecker was able to be out of the closet and so was Amsel decades later.

Both artists enjoyed a close friendship and career rivalry with the great Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was a truly great American illustrator with a career that spanned over half of the century. Amsel was great also. His work is evocative of earlier eras but infused with a modernist’s wit and self-conscious sense of style, but his career lasted just 15 years.

Leyendecker and Amsel both had careers at a very young age. When Leyendecker was studying at the Chicago Art Institute, his work was so mature that his professors felt that there was little to teach him. Amsel was already having real success while he was still a student at the Philadelphia College Of Art. In 1968, 20th Century Fox held a nationwide contest for a poster for their big Barbara Streisand vehicle, Hello, Dolly!. Amsel’s submission won and his career was jump-started at just 22-years-old.

Amsel had a wonderfully singular quality to his illustrative style. He could perfectly provoke nostalgia for a certain period. His posters for The Sting (1973) and McCabe And Mrs. Miller (1971) are now iconic. No matter the project all his graphics bear his instantly recognizable style. Not to mention his very cool signature:

amsel

His work pays affectionate tribute to the past, but his style is timeless and his attractive use of warm, glowing colors adds an even greater modernity to his evocations of times and styles from the past.

Amsel wrote:

“I’m interested in uncovering relationships between the past and the present, and in discovering how things have changed and grown. I don’t see any point in copying the past, but I think the elements of the past can be taken to another realm.”

A young singer/songwriter/accompanist/arranger named Barry Manilow, who was working with a new outrageous entertainer in cabaret clubs and piano bars, was drawn to Amsel’s work. Manilow introduced him to the new singer, and it was agreed that Amsel would do the cover art of her first album to be released on Atlantic Records. His cover for Bette Midler’s The Divine Miss M is now considered a classic.

amsel-bette

In the crazy 1970s, Amsel continued doing album art, and he provided the posters for some of the most prestigious and popular films of the 1970’s: Chinatown (1974), Julia (1977), The Last Picture Show (1971), Murder On The Orient Express (1974), Nashville (1975), and The Shootist (1976) are just a few. In a nice through-line The Sting poster pays homage to Leyendecker.

For someone who left this world so young, Amsel’s career was certainly prolific. By the end of the 1970s, his film posters exceeded the creative output of all his contemporaries. But, Amsel was much more than just an artist who did movie posters.

His Time Magazine cover of Lily Tomlin is in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Because of the industry’s tough deadlines, Amsel’s portrait of Tomlin was created in just two days.

amsel-lily

Amsel had a long association with TV Guide. In 1972, they commissioned a cover featuring the Duke and Duchess Of Windsor, for a story about a biopic about their fabled love affair. In the next decade he produced 37 published covers, a record Amsel holds to this day. Not unlike Leyendecker’s record for The Saturday Evening Post.

The Amsel covers are now c0nsidered collector’s items. Among his portraits are: Mary Tyler Moore, John Travolta, Elvis Presley, Ingrid Bergman, Johnny Carson, Tom Selleck, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and Katharine Hepburn. Plus, Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh for television debut of Gone With The Wind (1939) and the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Amsel’s portrait of Lucille Ball for the magazine’s July 6th, 1974 issue honoring the Ball’s retirement from series television is probably his most famous.

Amsel:

“I did not want the portrait to be of Lucy Ricardo. I wanted it to have the same timeless sense of glamour that Lucy herself has. She is, after all, a former Goldwyn Girl. I hoped to capture the essence of all this.”

The portrait impressed Ball so much that it was used in the opening credits of a two-hour television tribute, CBS Salutes Lucy: The First 25 Years (1976).

The 1980s brought a dramatic change to film marketing campaigns with photography favored over original art. Yet, Amsel somehow was able to receive commissions, his signature style was widely recognizable magazine covers and movie posters, including my favorite of his film pieces, the poster for Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981).

amsel-raiders

Amsel’s artwork brought him many awards, from the New York and Los Angeles Society Of Illustrators, a Grammy Award, a Golden Key Award from The Hollywood Reporter, and the Philadelphia Art Director’s Association. The Academy Awards doesn’t give Oscars for posters, but if they did Amsel would be the Meryl Streep of graphic artists.

Lauren Bacall, details from one sheets for “Murder On The Orient Express” (1974) and “The Shootist” (1976).

His last film poster was for Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, the third of George Miller’s apocalyptic action films starring crazy antisemitic Mel Gibson. His final completed artwork was for a November 1985 issue of TV Guide, featuring news anchors Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather. He was gone than three weeks later. He was diagnosed with HIV in September and 11 weeks late the plague got him. He was just 37-years-old

His obituary in Variety was callously brief:

“…illustrator for numerous Hollywood film print campaigns as well as portrait artist for many TV Guide covers, he died November 17 in New York of pneumonia, it has been learned.”

There were no tributes, no eulogies, no sweet reflections. I thought a lot about him when I went searching for that original Bette Midler graphic which was all over Boston as a poster in the autumn of 1972. It has never failed to fill me with wonder and bring me back to that time, those crazy, sexy 1970s. At last, Amsel, Illustrator Of The Lost Art, a new documentary film by Adam McDaniel with narration by Bruce Vilanch, is slated to open in early 2018.