Word: grimaldi
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Happily, American moviegoers will soon get an opportunity to judge 1900 for themselves. For many months the film's future has been jeopardized by a dispute between its director and Producer Alberto Grimaldi, who could not come to terms over its running time. Bertolucci has now cut 1900 from 5½ hours to four without substantially altering its impact or scope-or for that matter, remedying its built-in weaknesses. Last week, on the eve of the new version's premiere at the New York Film Festival, Paramount Pictures announced that it would distribute the briefer movie nationwide...
...most eagerly awaited films of recent years, and already his troubles over Last Tango look like tiddlywinks. The new picture is a year late, $5 million over budget, and-with a running time of five hours, ten minutes -a full two hours beyond the contractual limit. Producer Alberto Grimaldi has forcibly taken it out of Bertolucci's hands. The U.S. distributor, Paramount, is balking at releasing it. The dispute has turned into a three-cornered fusillade of multimillion-dollar lawsuits. No wonder Bertolucci has been suffering of late from a series of psychosomatic ills that he calls...
Marxist Bias. "It's all Bertolucci's fault," said the dapper Grimaldi, 52, while on a visit to New York City last week. "I think Last Tango went to his head. He has become an egomaniac, a very sick man." Bertolucci, biting his knuckles in his Rome apartment, charged Grimaldi with censorship and, half seriously, with putting "a kind of curse on me-a macumba." In Hollywood a top film executive suggested that after the succès de scandale of Last Tango, the big studios probably invested in Bertolucci without scrutinizing his plans. (In addition to Paramount...
Publicly, however, the epic length of 1900 is the major sticking point. Bertolucci took a year to shoot it, and expenditures zoomed from the budgeted $3 million to $8 million. Grimaldi says he protested but did not want to risk offending the Communist sympathies of the film crew and Italian workers in general. Says he: "If I had tried to stop production I would have had a terrible mess -riots, maybe." Bertolucci's first cut, which ran five hours, 30 minutes, was shown at last year's Cannes festival, with extremely mixed reactions. He trimmed another 20 minutes...
Bertolucci's best hope seems to be his unfinished four-hour, 25-minute compromise cut-if it exists. Grimaldi contends that the only usable negative of it has been destroyed; Bertolucci disagrees. A small U.S. distributor with friendly ties to Bertolucci, Caribou Films, is now pressing Grimaldi to bring forth the compromise cut so it can negotiate for the rights. If that does not work, says Bertolucci, "I may have to break into the studio where Grimaldi has locked it up, steal it and circulate it underground...