Interview transcripts: final draft
Christian speaks
Here is the final draft of the edited transcripts of the cinepanettone interviews which were excerpted in the previous seven posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). This puts all those transcripts together, or the most interesting bits, and is the draft - all 18,500 words of it - I hope to include in the project monograph. I have tried to do something formally satisfying as well as informative with the material Luca Peretti and myself got in our conversations with fans, actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, composers, critics, scholars and sceptics - all of whom I have tried to grant an equal authority in a discursive collage. I have attempted to retain something of the feeling of a verbal exchange, even to the extent of annoying at least two of our interviewees who objected to their informal representation in the online transcripts (I was obliged to modify their contributions). The chapter in the book will have an introduction, and perhaps I’ll rearrange some of the sections below, but if readers agree the following is lively and engrossing I don’t intend to edit it any further. (But see here for information about a change I did make…)
Interview transcripts (2): parlano alcuni sceneggiatori (Borsatti, Brizzi, Marciano, Martani)
Parlano alcuni sceneggiatori, del cinepanettone e no
Continuing from the previous post, here are some more edited transcripts of the interviews myself and Luca Peretti have done about the cinepanettone, in this case of two screenwriters historically involved with the filone, Fausto Brizzi and Marco Martani.
Brizzi and Martani established with Neri Parenti the formula that is considered the cinepanettone doc, and which led to the films’ created success in the last decade.
We also spoke to Cristina Borsatti, a script doctor, writer and teacher, about an article she had written in Film TV which deals with product placement in Natale in Sud Africa (she had actually worked on product placement in Natale in Crociera -for the press office associated with the cruise ship company that had allowed the use of ship), and the shortcomings of the film’s script.
Finally, I include here excerpts from my conversation with Francesca Marciano (above), a very experienced screenwriter who has worked with Carlo Verdone and Wilma Labate among others (Francesca heard about the project and asked to meet).
In transcribing the interviews (all of which took place in Rome in December 2010 and January 2011), we decided to maintain the natural pauses and hesitations characteristic of ordinary speech, but this has been done below inconsistently, which may give the impression the men were less hesitant than the women. This will be cleaned up in the final edit, which will have to be much shorter. Questions are signalled with an ‘A’ for Alan and ‘L’ for Luca. Readers are warmly invited to suggest what elements of the conversations they find most interesting.
A Week of Interviews
Carlo and Enrico Vanzina
A belated post (I’m back teaching in Leeds) to report a series of interviews in Rome last week. Thanks to the indefatigable Luca, we managed to get to speak to a series of people with an interest in the cinepanettone, from critics to stars. I’ve talked about the rationale behind these interviews in a previous post (which I can’t link to), and some of the problems related to interviewing in another. What I hope to discern in the interviews is the process of discursive construction of the filone: how it is produced by the ‘talk’ around it even before any individual film is seen. The interviews will, I hope, also be useful in gleaning information about the production of the films themselves.
