Celebrity Biographies
Luciano Vincenzoni
“You look like someone worth $2,000,” says a fearsome gunslinger. “Yes, but you don’t look like the one who’s going to collect them.” The author of this sentence of “The good, the bad and the ugly”, Luciano Vincenzoni, screenwriter of the film among many others, died in Rome at the age of 87, on September 22, 2013.
Born in Treviso on March 7, 1926, Luciano Vincenzoni studied Law in Rome and Padua. But he never practiced, as he soon began writing for the movies. He made his debut with the comedy They have stolen a tram , co-directed and starring Aldo Fabrizi .
After titles like The Great War , by Mario Monicelli , His Best Enemy, by Guy Hamilton and others, he was hired by Sergio Leone to co -write Death Had a Price , the second installment of the Dollar Trilogy, after For a Fistful of Dollars . Vincenzoni was a key player in the film’s success, as he was very well connected to the film industry, and managed to sell the film to United Artist, through its vice president for Europe. He asked him and Leone during the negotiation if they had another job going, because he also wanted to buy it. Vincenzoni was quick to say yes, and invented a title on the fly, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly., and an argument. Leone also drew on him for Duck, Damn , from 1971.
Over the years, Vincenzoni became a script doctor, specializing in fixing scripts that don’t quite work. He got into the production business, with Orca the Killer Whale , for which he had written the script, and wrote a little of everything, from a film by his compatriots Bud Spencer and Terence Hill ( Miami Supercops ) to some title of Giuseppe Tornatore ( Malena ). He also wrote the script for the producer Dino de Laurentiis that would lead to Executioner , one of Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘s first films .