Petulant photographers
It’s June 1958. Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, drama critic and occasional poet Ennio Flaiano is writing another film with director Federico Fellini.
They’re chatting about how a society as troubled as theirs, which expresses its frigid will to live more by exhibiting itself than by truly enjoying life, deserves its petulant photographers.
Via Veneto has been invaded by these photographers, snapping shots of celebrities and actors and scandals for news services and press offices. Their film will have an impatient news photographer of its own, an invisible companion of the protagonist.
Fellini has this character very clearly in his mind. He is acquainted with the real-life model - a news agency photographer about whom he tells a quite atrocious story.
This fellow had been sent to the funeral of a well-known figure who had been the victim of a terrible accident. Sent there to take pictures of the weeping widow.
But through some carelessness, the film was exposed to light and the photographs didn’t turn out. The head of the news agency told him, ‘Figure something out. In two hours either you bring me the widow weeping or I’ll fire you and see to it you never find work again.’
He hurried off to the home of the widow and found her just returned from the cemetery, still in her widow’s weeds, and wandering from one room to another in a daze of grief and exhaustion. He told the widow that if he failed to get a picture of her in tears he would lose his position and with his position the hope he had of getting married, for he had recently become engaged.
The poor lady wanted to chase him away, understandable after she had wept so earnestly and for such a long time. But at this point the news photographer gets down on his knees, begins to beg her not to ruin him, to be kind, to just cry for a minute, or even to just pretend!
Just long enough for him to take her picture. It works. The noose of compassion once around her neck, the poor widow ends up getting photographed weeping on the matrimonial bed, at her husband’s writing desk, in the front room, in the kitchen.
Ennio and Federico decide they will have to give this news photographer an exemplary name. Why? Because the right name helps a great deal and indicates that the character will live on.
These semantic affinities between characters and their names drove Flaubert to despair. He spent two years finding Madame Bovary’s first name, Emma.
For the name of their news photographer, the pair didn’t know what to make up until, stumbling upon that golden little book of George Gissing’s titled “By the Ionian Sea,” they discover a hotel keeper called Paparazzo.
That’s it. That’s what the photographer will be called - Paparazzo. He will never know that he bears the honored name of a hotel keeper from somewhere in Calabria, about whom Gissing speaks with gratitude and admiration.
Names have a destiny of their own.