Sergio Donati is best known for having, at the request of Sergio Leone (1929-1989), taken over the screenplay from Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) written by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone himself. He considered it dense, too long, full of film references, slow and rhetorical. He fleshed out certain characters and above all added a fluidity to the events described that were lacking in this first version. The whole thing would result in the masterpiece that we know. The career of the Italian Sergio Donati would not, however, be limited to this feat. A gifted, prolific screenwriter, with nearly eighty titles to his name, and extremely renowned, Sergio Donati died in Mentana, a town near Rome, on Tuesday 13 August, at the age of 91.
It was in Rome that he was born, on April 13, 1933. After studying law, he turned to a career as a crime novelist, and it was because some of his books interested producers that he came into contact with the world of cinema. He would abandon literature to move to Milan and become a producer of television advertising films.
Sergio Leone, with whom he had become friends, wanted to bring him back to Rome. In fact, in 1963, he prepared his first western, For a Fistful of Dollarsreleased in 1964. Donati, however, refused his offer to participate, coming up with the idea of making a western remake of the Yojimbo (The Bodyguard1961) by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa totally absurd. He would obviously change his mind later and collaborate on the writing of Leone’s second western, And for a few dollars more (1965), without being credited in the credits. Leone, from then on, would not let him go and had him write, correct, and rewrite the scripts for all his films except the last one, Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Constant invention and energy
Sergio Donati would again distinguish himself in the western genre by signing, in 1966 and 1967, the scripts for the films of Sergio Sollima (1921-2015), Colorado (co-written with Franco Solinas) and The Last Face-to-Faceintense westerns mixing political theory and operatic lyricism.
His career alternated between ambitious films and serial works with constant invention and energy. He worked in particular for Sergio Corbucci, Duccio Tessari, Fernando Di Leo, Giuliano Montaldo. In 1972, he was to direct a very political screenplay himself, co-written with Goffredo Fofi, denouncing the ideological role played by a certain press, with little concern for the truth, at a time of major social upheaval in Italy. However, he did not get on with the main male star, Gian Maria Volonte (1933-1994), and had to abandon the idea of directing it. The film, Rape on the front pagewill finally be directed by Marco Bellocchio.
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