There is this little five-year gap in the career of Dino De Laurentiis, and presumably many of the other European filmmakers of his generation. Oh, American, too, to a lesser extent. But in Italy, you were probably not getting exemptions for doing essential war work, and even if you were, I’m not sure producing would have counted. Fellini did his best to avoid the draft, but not everyone was so lucky—and even Fellini wasn’t entirely successful.

Still, the war ended, and De Laurentiis went back to work at one of the most fruitful times in the history of Italian cinema. And he worked with the greats. Fellini, of course, famously producing La Strada and Le Notti di Cabiria. However, he also produced films by Roberto Rosselini and Vittorio De Sica. By 1956, he was one of the producers on King Vidor’s War and Peace, and while he would primarily work in Italian film for a while later, that’s an impressive beginning to his English-language film career. It is also considerably closer to where his Hollywood films would go than Europa ‘51 was.

Because now, when you think Dino De Laurentiis, you don’t think L’Oro di Napoli and its Neapolitan slice of life. You think, you know, King Kong. Conan the Barbarian. Poor sod, he’s one of the producers of Maximum Overdrive, directed by Stephen King in his Sentient Pile of Cocaine days. One thing you think of De Laurentiis films as being, it’s big. Now, he wanted them to have emotional weight; he wanted you to cry when King Kong died. Still, no one ever accused Halloween III: Season of the Witch as having small ideas, and Army of Darkness is definitely the most splashy of that trilogy.

So it’s a little odd to consider that he also, in addition to Dune, produced Blue Velvet. Among his King adaptations is The Dead Zone, one of the quieter of King’s works. Death Wish but Serpico. And he produced the Wachowskis’ first two movies, both Assassins, which they wrote, and Bound. I’m certainly not going to dispute that De Laurentiis produced some terrible, terrible movies. Does anyone even remember Roman Polanski’s Pirates, starring Walter Matthau? But he also produced Ragtime, which I have likewise never seen but which I hear considerably better things about.

I feel as though the public knows very few producers who exclusively produce. De Laurentiis has seven acting credits on IMDb, none more recent than 1941. When you talk to the public, though, I feel as though the only time most of them have heard of producers is when they are also directors, or when they are also actors, or things like that. Only a handful of full-on producers have made their way into the public consciousness as celebrities. Dino De Laurentiis was definitely that. He also founded something of a dynasty; I wonder what he’d think—he who chose not to work in his father’s pasta factor—if he knew that his granddaughter the TV chef was probably the most famous member of the family.

If you contributed enough to my Patreon or Ko-fi, I’d probably even give you a producer credit!