Tullio Pinelli died on Saturday in Rome. He had a prolific screenwriting career including a long partnership with the director Federico Fellini, with whom he wrote many of Fellini’s best-known works, including “I Vitelloni,” “La Strada,” “La Dolce Vita” and “8 ½."
Working as an attorney in his hometown of Torino, Mr. Pinelli's life changed one day in 1946. He was standing in the Piazza Barberini in Rome, reading a newspaper at a kiosk, when he began a conversation with a young man reading the same paper. It was Fellini, then a young screenwriter, and they immediately fell into a discussion of films, each expressing a desire to infuse poetry and lyricism into the political neo-realism then in vogue in Italian cinema.
He told a Fellini biographer, Tullio Kezich. “We spoke the same language from the start. We took a walk and ended up at his house on Via Lutezia.” He went on: “We were fantasizing about a screenplay that would be the exact opposite of what was fashionable then: the story of a very shy and modest office worker, who discovers he can fly, so he flaps his arms and escapes out the window.”
