03/25/2001

By Jane Sumner / The Dallas Morning News

This year, Oscar's Oscar, a k a the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, goes to a bigger Comeback Kid than Bill Clinton. Only Dino De Laurentiis is no kid.

But at 81, the son of a Naples pasta maker is still doing what he's done with passion for 61 years – producing films. His latest is the $151 million-grossing hit Hannibal.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' highest honor commemorates the 1920s and 30s wunderkind, who supervised more films than anybody in Hollywood.

Voted on by the academy's board of directors, a bronze bust of the production tycoon is presented for "the most consistent high level of production achievement by an individual producer."

Actually, De Laurentiis' level hasn't always been tip-top. His 200 some films include such turkeys as Orca, The Bible (Leonard Maltin recommended reading the book instead), Hurricane, Tai-Pan and (errgh!) Dune.

But in post-war Italian cinema, the feisty risktaker was a vital force, producing such gems as Bitter Rice, La Strada and The Nights of Cabiria.

Later, he would produce cult faves Blue Velvet, Barbarella, Conan the Barbarian and Manhunter, a kind of prequel to The Silence of the Lambs.

These days he oversees one or two films a year with producing partner-wife Martha, whom he met on the set of Ragtime, where she was New York production accountant.

At 17, the movie-crazy would-be actor left home to go to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the film school created by Mussolini in Rome. By the time he was 20, no longer enamored of acting, he produced his first film L'Amore Canta in Turin.

Back from the army after World War II, he returned to producing with the erotic "neorealistic'' hit Bitter Rice, starring sultry Silvana Mangano, who became his first wife in 1949.

With Carlo Ponti (Sophia Loren's hubby), he formed a company in the `50s that produced the Federico Fellini masterworks La Strada and The Nights of Cabiria. Both won foreign-language Oscars.

After the partnership with Ponti dissolved in 1957, he built Dinocitta ("Dino City''), a huge studio center near Rome, and launched such overblown Hollywood-star spectacles as Ulysses, War and Peace and Anzio.

But in the early `70s economic problems forced him to close the film center, sell it to the government and move to the United States. He blames his withdrawal on legislation requiring government-subsidized films to hire all Italians, thus putting an end to his international productions.

At first he flourished in the States with thrillers such as Serpico, Death Wish and Three Days of the Condor, but a series of big-budget bombs, such as King Kong Lives, which cost $21 million and took in less than $2 million, undermined De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) and its 32-acre studio in Wilmington, N.C.

Finally, in 1988 he was forced to resign as DEG board chairman. Not long afterward he filed for bankruptcy, and his estranged wife Mangano filed for divorce.

But he surfaced again with Dino De Laurentiis Communications, producing a string of no-starters but hitting it big with Assassins starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas in 1995.

The legendary producer, who says he'll go on making films until he dies, won't be content to sit on his Thalberg. Even now he's working with Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs) on adapting Red Dragon, the Thomas Harris book that introduced man-eating Dr. Lektor, now known as Lecter.