Producer Dino De Laurentiis Dead at 91
Veteran producer Dino De Laurentiis has died in Los Angeles, per reports. He was 91. De Laurentiis got his start over 70 years ago, climbing through the ranks of the Italian film industry before getting into producing in 1940s. He and partner Carlo Ponti collaborated on Fellini classics like Nights of Cabiria and the Oscar-winning La Strada before De Laurentiis spun off to one of the greatest big-budget genre careers in Hollywood history -- including Barbarella, King Kong, Flash Gordon and Dune -- while producing little masterpieces like Blue Velvet and Evil Dead 2 along the way. He produced more than 500 films overall. They don't make them like him anymore. More to come here today... [The Wrap]
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I dread the commemorative retrospective weekend dedicated to him on AMC. That "Dune", "Body of Evidence", "Mandingo" stretch will be a real slog.
I worked for Dino, with my partner Roy Thomas, on the first eight drafts of the movie that became "Conan the Destroyer." He was a charming, interesting man, and the only producer I ever met who actually admitted he was going to screw me before he did. (Dino offered Roy and I the assignment to script "Red Sonja" while we were working on "Conan," but wanted to pay us half what we'd received for writing Conan -- a deal we'd made originally with Ed Pressman, who controlled the rights before selling the project to Dino. When we turned the second assignment down, Dino told us, point blank, "Boys, I want to protect you on Conan, but I can't do that if you don't do this other script for me." On our agent's advice, we turned him down. We were replaced on "Conan" two weeks later.) The odd thing is, despite being "screwed," I respected and admired Dino for being direct and honest, in his own way. Working for him was like working for Tony Soprano. He was an honorable man in a dirty business, who played by the rules of the business he was in, and never looked back. Oh, and he was a great cook. Seriously.
And yes, I know, that should have been "Roy and me." That's what you get for having someone translate something you've written into a second language overnight before it's read by the person you wrote it for. Something that happened to the drafts of "Conan" that Roy and I wrote for Dino -- our scripts were translated overnight into Italian before he read them. Which probably explains a great deal about the difference in quality between Dino's Italian and English-language films, don't you think?
I would have to look at his IMDb page to know exactly how many of his movies I've seen, but I would guess in the neighborhood of one hundred, quite possibly more. Thanks for all of the movies and rest in peace.