“I have to make a very honest confession: those two days that I was in the studios where this town is permanently built, I enjoyed them very much-I’m envious of my colleagues who make these types of films. ©Kinos Klan (Cortesía de Chumilla-Carbajosa) A moment during the filming of Fellini's Western in November of 1967, in the set built in the now-defunct Helios studios in Rome. Classic “spaghetti” Western titles such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly were filmed in Almería, southern Spain, but permanent sets of towns from the American West were erected at the Elios studios in Rome, to be used for this type of filming. These appear to be the only visual testimonies of this unique Fellinian incursion into a genre that, in the mid-1960s, was experiencing a boom. In addition to the forgotten photographs, they found a report on the filming of the movie, broadcast by RAI in November 1968. In the documentary search process, the Spaniard turned to Leopoldo Santovincenzo, a journalist from Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) who is also an expert in the director’s work. His passion for the Italian filmmaker prompted him to document the ghost sequence that was never included in the film, which represents Fellini’s only foray into the Western genre. Since his student years, Chumilla-Carbajosa has been obsessed with this Fellini film, which some scholars consider to be one of his fundamental works. The film is very loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, Never Bet the Devil your Head. The film tells the story of Toby Dammit: an attractive and sinister English actor, who travels to Rome to receive an award and meet some producers, who are linked to the Vatican and have hired him to star in the first Catholic Western flick in history. The 46-minute short-which makes up a part of the film titled Extraordinary Tales-is a Franco-Italian co-production starring Terence Stamp. When he developed them, he also saw a stagecoach drawn by white horses, an actor dressed as a cowboy… and a very young Terence Stamp waving from a car, in the middle of a set filled with gangsters.Ĭhumilla-Carbajosa, who studied at the Italian capital’s Experimental Film Center and has long been in love with the Italian filmmaker’s work, was quick to associate these images with the deleted sequence from the final montage of Toby Dammit, a film that was shot by Fellini in 1967. Holding them up to the light, he thought he could make out Federico Fellini wearing a cowboy hat in a town in the Wild West. At the start of 2020-a couple of weeks before the pandemic-the Spanish filmmaker Juan Manuel Chumilla-Carbajosa bought nearly 200 black and white negatives in an old bookstore in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere.

Federico fellini 8 12 final scene