E.T.’s father is Italian and has been honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Los Angeles. It always seems to be sunny on the Walk of Fame. The coral-pink stars glisten in the sunlight, workers stroll nonchalantly over the names of those who made cinema great, whilst the occasional tourist snaps photos of their idols, pointing their iPhone at the ground – taking a selfie here is impossible, unless one lies down and risks exposure to unsanitary conditions (this is not exactly the immaculate, sanitised Beverly Hills where smoking is prohibited). Once you have passed the camping tents housing the homeless and the fentanyl users, these streets in the heart of Hollywood resemble a non-alphabetical index of names that you might find at the back of the great book of entertainment – TV, cinema, music… – a game of hopscotch for travellers, hopping between Anne Bancroft and the Beatles, skipping between the stars, challenging yourself to recognise them all. Occasionally, alongside the cover stars of Vogue or People magazine, those behind the scenes are also honoured and immortalised on the pavements of eternity. And now it is an Italian’s turn. We see it written on the big screens of the Pantages Theatre, a long-standing institution that hosted the Academy Awards in the 1950s – “Carlo Rambaldi, a star for a star” – and then again on the façade of the Montalbàn Theatre: “Carlo Rambaldi, Italian genius, Hollywood legend”.

If we ask ourselves what the connection is between Federico Fellini, Spielberg, Luchino Visconti, David Lynch, Dario Argento, Monicelli and Pasolini (as well as the investigations into Pinelli’s death), the answer is: Carlo Rambaldi. To many, this name might mean nothing, but only until one lists his creations, which have had an impact not only on cinema but also on the collective imagination of entire generations – true pop culture icons. A master of special effects, Rambaldi was also a major contributor to the imagery that transcends films and takes on a life of its own. Sometimes you don’t even need to have seen the film to recognise the characters. A native of Emilia, he created the alien E.T., the gorilla in King Kong, and the terrifying face of Alien with its retractable jaw—to name just the most famous, for which he won Oscars (three in total). Rambaldi was a builder of machines, robots and creatures that appeared on screen to the audience as if they were real—more real than realistic. On a sweltering October day, his star was unveiled, and a ceremony was held to reveal for the first time the large plaque that will remain there forever – until the Californian wildfires reach West Hollywood too.

At the star-unveiling event, among the various VIPs paying tribute, there is also Dee Wallace—elegant in a Chinese gown, with icy eyes and a background in Wes Craven’s horror films—who played the mother in E.T. and tells Il Foglio about the first time she saw the alien, arriving on set one morning. “I remember that first day very clearly. I walked into the studios, turned to my right and there were two men standing either side of E.T. I froze and stared at that little creature,” she says, almost getting emotional, “it was so incredible that you could see his soul. And working with E.T. was like working with another person. I have such wonderful memories. Spielberg’s film wouldn’t have been what it was without this creation.”

Rambaldi’s works and creatures were so realistic that in 1971 he even had to prove in court that the scene depicting the vivisection of a dog in Lucio Fulci’s Una lucertola con la pelle di donna – from the golden age of Italian erotic horror – featured robots, not real dogs, because animal rights activists were up in arms. He was responsible for the special effects in Profondo Rosso, as well as in La Grande Abbuffata – he created the mannequin of Mastroianni, frozen to death on the Bugatti – and in Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales – he created the mechanical devil. He also created the anatomical mannequin that, at the request of the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office, was thrown out of a police station window in an attempt to understand how the anarchist Pinelli—wrongly accused of the Piazza Fontana bombing—had died, that is, been killed. The Years of Lead, Italian-style comedy and Steven Spielberg—what a career. Of the great director – for whom he’d also worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Rambaldi said: “He’s a good lad, very cheerful and friendly. Like all Americans.” With Lynch, he’d create the giant worms for Dune; with Mario Bava, the masks for Diabolik.

Born in 1925 in the province of Ferrara and having died in 2012 after retiring to Calabria, Rambaldi learnt to handle tools and mechanisms, to build, fit and manufacture, in his father’s bicycle workshop. Remembering him at the ceremony with great tenderness was his millennial granddaughter, Cristina Lippolis Rambaldi, an actress based between Italy and New York, dressed in a sparkling red-carpet gown. She spoke of when ‘Grandad Carlo’ used to play with her and his other granddaughters, building things, sharing drawings and gazing at the stars through a telescope. His daughter also spoke of how reserved he was – “a quiet man” – but also of how his eyes would light up whenever people asked him about his work.

Special effects, then, before special effects as we know them actually existed, when Hollywood’s avant-garde was still the oldest practice in the world: that of marionettes and puppet theatre, to which animatronics was applied – not just pneumatic mechanics but later electronics too – to open jaws and eyelids, to extend claws, to make reptilian tails thrash. “A pioneer of mechatronics,” they say of him, and the president of Cinecittà, Senator Antonio Saccone, on his arrival in LA, speaks of him as a bridge “between the Italian cinematic tradition and the global audiovisual industry,” because “what could be more beautiful than technology when it is used to create magic? It teaches us that we mustn’t be afraid of the future, but rather embrace it.” And he explains to Il Foglio that, in his view, for Rambaldi, “cinema has always been a great technological revolution, and Rambaldi has left us with the idea of knowing how to harness new technologies and transform them into pure creativity and entertainment”. Thus, a “builder of mechanical actors”, as some have described him, and a source of Italian pride.

Because the Walk of Fame event is also a small gathering of the Italian and Italian-American community in Los Angeles, attended by Little Italy’s president, Anna Manunza, and Consul General Raffaella Valentini, who tells us, “For Rambaldi, this is an opportunity to showcase Italy through its great achievements. And our strength has always been craftsmanship combined with creativity, and in California”, the land of tech, “it seems like a contrast, but in reality it isn’t. This is the place where our way of being Italian finds a new identity”, a meeting of hands-on expertise, dreaming big, and new techniques. “We convey this every day by trying to overcome the stereotypes of a country that looks to the past. We have extraordinary artisans; we want to showcase and promote them, whilst remaining aware that we must look to the future. It is no coincidence that so many films are shot here – and it is not just a matter of tax credits, but because Italy is home to some truly talented craftspeople. Costume designers, set designers, sound effects… a tradition that is widely recognised in Hollywood.” Since taking up her post as consul, Valentini has unveiled two more stars honouring her compatriots: Giancarlo Giannini and Franco Nero. There is talk of another one soon, but that remains a state secret.

The vast debate about technology is the hot topic in the broad world of Californian entertainment. Here too, there is a fear that artificial intelligence – or ‘Superintelligence’, as Donald Trump now calls it – might take away jobs and render workers redundant. We spoke with Matt Winston, son of the late special-effects and animatronics pioneer Stan Winston, whose work on films such as Terminator, Iron Man and Edward Scissorhands built on the legacy of his mentor, Carlo Rambaldi, and his ability to conceal construction techniques from the public eye. “Without his thirteen-metre King Kong, there would have been no T-rex in Jurassic Park created by my father,” says Winston, who, having grown up in the industry, has also acted in series such as Friends and Scrubs.

Artificial intelligence tools are sparking a debate on how to use them ethically, as they ‘steal’ other people’s art. But Pandora’s box has been opened. How can we use AI to elevate artists without replacing them? “We cannot leave all the fun of creating to the machines. My father used to say that whenever a new technological tool came along, everyone thought it was the only one worth using; yet the secret to creating magic is to use all the tools together – both traditional and new – partly because that way the audience has no idea how things were put together and remains in awe.” Winston Junior, together with his family, has set up a school for ‘character design for cinema’, so that these skills are not lost in the great maelstrom of machine learning. Even the granddaughter of the ‘father of E.T.’, Cristina, acknowledges that ‘it’s not a competition with AI, but the Rambaldi Foundation’s mission is also to preserve something that is being lost’.

As a boy, Rambaldi wanted to be an artist. And of course, as is often the case, his family did not agree. He had enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He began out as a sculptor. But it was through cinema that he eventually found his calling, recalls his family, who were present at the ‘star’s’ event, after seeing the 1933 version of King Kong. He went on to direct the 1976 version, entering the orbit of producer Dino De Laurentiis, who took him to America – a country about which he said that, when it came to getting things done, ‘people don’t get bogged down in idle chatter’ – and which, as a pro-European, he commented on by saying that ‘if Europe were to start thinking like a united continent, truly collaborating and without getting bogged down in pointless nationalism, then it could have the same potential as America’.

In addition to his desire to animate inanimate objects and create new things, he was deeply interested in worlds and had a profound passion for space and other universes – it is no coincidence that he later turned his attention to aliens – and he drew and painted. At the Italian Cultural Institute in LA, an exhibition of his drawings and paintings has been organized, depicting distant worlds, lunar and Martian landscapes, galaxies, spaceships, and islands floating in the blackness of the cosmos – and at the exhibition, lined up beneath a display case, are his three Oscar statuettes. At the opening at the IIC – which was packed with Italians, though not exclusively – the playlist featured ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Man on the Moon’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Moonshadow’, alongside pasta with pesto and mondeghili, yet another instrument of the tricolour’s soft power. There was a video appearance by Guillermo del Toro, who calls Rambaldi ‘a worldwide maestro of magic’, and says he is concerned that technology is taking away the marionettes he loves so much; he is fighting to recognise those who create practical special effects, to bring them back onto film sets. The remarks also call to mind Nolan’s *Odyssey*, which set the summer alight – a hollowing out of the Homeric epic, transformed into PTSD – Troy like Vietnam, an Apocalypse Now (perhaps) but with feathered helmets – where, however, everyone, across the political divide, celebrated the fact that Polyphemus was made of papier-mâché and not by computer, and that the transformation of the Greeks into pigs was ‘all real’, that is, achieved through ‘theatrical illusion and animatronics’.

So there’s still room, then, for tangible things – a bit like the return to vinyl. Rambaldi – this Leonardo da Vinci, as Matt Winston called him – had also had the idea of building his own space Disneyland (hence the alien drawings) outside Ferrara, to be called Millennium. His own sci-fi Epcot, a futuristic theme park that was never built – a Gardaland inspired by the imagery of the covers of old Urania magazines. When asked in recent years whether he believed in aliens, Rambaldi would say: “Well, perhaps they exist, but the distance is too great… thousands of light-years. So we’ll never reach them and they’ll never reach us. Therefore, the dilemma will always remain: do they exist or not? And in any case, it’ll be nice not to reveal the answer, because many other stories can be invented.”