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The Cinecittà Miracle
Rome - (Ign) - A few people have started to talk of the "Cinecittà miracle". This because, while in other parts of the world the movie industry was abandoning the big, costly and not always efficient "studios", preferring more flexible solutions, at the outskirts of Rome, the largest movie production structure in Europe and the second largest in the world, after giants such as Los Angeles (www.cinecittastudios.it), restarted operating at full speed. To the point of becoming once again one of the principal reference points of the movie industry on a worldwide scale, actually widely surpassing the numbers and successes obtained during the Sixties. Many others, instead of talking about a "miracle", simply mentioned a great entrepreneurial success, where managerial intelligence was added to the capability of inventing and proposing - to a constantly changing market - new solutions capable of responding ahead of time to the demands placed by the entertainment world.
On the other hand, Cinecittà's heritage certainly could not be left abandoned. Created in 1937 to become the biggest movie production site in the world, the great machine that was built on the outskirts of Rome never stopped being one of the great reference points of the movie industry. Up until the Seventies and Eighties, when the creeping crisis that for years thwarted the world of the great productions exploded in almost the entire West, acutely showing itself in Europe and in Italy. The Cinecittà structure, colossal with its 40 thousand square meters, 22 studios, one of which, the Theatre 5, with its 3200 cubic meters, is the biggest in the world, fell into decline, together with many other European realities of the sector: in France and in Germany above all, but also in the United States and even in Hollywood, where many great movie companies chose to reduce structures and budgets. After more than 4 thousand films and almost 50 Academy Awards, Cinecittà risked hosting only television productions for the Italian national market.
In 1997, the comeback. A group of private entrepreneurs, coming from industrial sectors far from the movie and entertainment world, purchased the structure, while a quota of 23 percent was reserved to public capital. A courageous and important investment: over 40 million euros allocated to refurbish the structures, to reorganise and increase the value of the workers considered to be among the most valid and expert on a world wide scale and, above all, to technologically revolutionise all of the infrastructures, opening the doors to digital technology at least three years in advance with respect to the other large international competitors. An immediate positive reaction from the great worldwide movie market followed. First of all Mel Gibson for his "The Passion of Christ", then "U-571", and finally "Gangs of New York", and also the colossal Anglo-American fiction "Rome", with 36 episodes, made by Hbo and Bbc, or the Disney labelled colossal "The Life Aquatic", inspired to the life and undertakings of Jacques Cousteau. Without counting the made in Italy films that have finally rediscovered their natural production site.
The sole production of "Gangs of New York" was worth 70 million dollars for Cinecittà. And thus the turnover started growing again, together with the investments, reaching almost 50 million dollars, with a development growth rate of 20 per cent per year, which has been constant for over a decennial and made possible by the massive return of the international productions, mainly American. Today Cinecittà "exports" more than one third of its movies, attracting foreign productions thanks to professionalism considered unique in the worldwide panorama and to an innovative technological effort in the sector of post-production digitalisation that knows no rival. All of this, united with the glamour of a sacred site of world cinematography. When a journalist asked Martin Scorsese why he didn't use a computer to reconstruct the settings of "Gangs of New York" he replied: "No computer will ever allow me to evoke the masterpieces of Fellini, De Sica and Rossellini".
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