Once Upon a Time in Italy

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Full title: Once Upon a Time in Italy : The Westerns of Sergio Leone

  • Author: Christopher Frayling, Autry National Center's Museum of the American West
  • Format: ?
  • Language: English
  • Pages: 240
  • ISBN: 0810958848
  • Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
  • Publication date: text
  • Series: ?
Once Upon a Time in Italy

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Description:

From Amazon: In the mid-1960s an unknown Italian film director named Sergio Leone was given $200,000 and some leftover film stock, and he went to make a Western. With an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood and a script based on a samurai epic, Leone wound up creating A Fistful of Dollars, the first in a trilogy of films (with For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) that was violent, cynical, and visually stunning. Along with his later masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, these films came to define the "Spaghetti Western," a genre that has influenced such contemporary filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino.

Written by the preeminent Leone scholar, this is the first illustrated book to focus on his Westerns, illuminating his visual style, offbeat sense of humor, and sophisticated, elliptical way of telling stories. Augmenting the text are a wealth of visual materials, as well as interviews with Leone, Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Bernardo Bertolucci, composer Ennio Morricone, designer Carlo Simi, and others. The book accompanies an exhibition with the same title opening in July 2005 at the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

About the author

Sir Christopher Frayling is perhaps the most wide-ranging cultural historian of our times: the author of numerous publications on subjects ranging from vampires to Westerns; the writer and presenter of successful television series, whether on advertising, the Middle Ages or Tutankhamun. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was Rector of the Royal College of Art, London, from 1996 to 2009, where he remains Professor Emeritus of Cultural History. His many public appointments have included Chairman of Arts Council England; Chairman of the Design Council; and the longest-serving Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

He is probably best known for his early championing of Italian Westerns as worthy of academic study and often attends events on this genre as a keynote speaker.

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