Gianfranco Clerici (; born 29 July 1941) is an Italian writer of numerous screenplays for Italian film and television productions. He has collaborated with several directors of exploitation cinema, including

Lucio Fulci Lucio Fulci (; 17 June 1927 – 13 March 1996) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor. Although he worked in a wide array of genres through a career spanning nearly five decades, including comedies and Spaghetti Westerns, he ga ...

and

Ruggero Deodato Ruggero Deodato (born 7 May 1939) is an Italian film director, screenwriter, and sometime actor. His career has spanned a wide-range of genres including peplum, comedy, drama, poliziottesco and science fiction, yet he is perhaps best known f ...

. Many of his scripts went on to become controversial films.

Biography

Clerici was born in Bergamo. He began his career writing genre films, such as spy thrillers (popularized by the

James Bond The ''James Bond'' series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have ...

series) and

spaghetti westerns The Spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's film-making style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most of ...

. As genre films fell out of favor with audiences, he moved on to writing

giallo In Italian cinema, ''Giallo'' (; plural ''gialli'', from ''giallo'', Italian for yellow) is a genre of mystery fiction and thrillers that often contains slasher, crime fiction, psychological thriller, psychological horror, sexploitation, and, ...

films, including ''

Don't Torture a Duckling ''Don't Torture a Duckling'' ( it, Non si sevizia un paperino) is a 1972 Italian giallo film directed by Lucio Fulci, starring Florinda Bolkan, Tomas Milian and Barbara Bouchet. The plot follows a detective investigating a series of child murde ...

'' and later ''

The New York Ripper ''The New York Ripper'' ( it, Lo squartatore di New York) is a 1982 Italian ''giallo'' film directed by Lucio Fulci. The film is about a police lieutenant who is tracking a sadistic killer who slashes women with a switchblade and straight-razors ...

'', both directed by Lucio Fulci. He also wrote several crime films, including ''Blazing Magnums'' and ''Weapons of Death''. Toward the end of the nineteen seventies, Clerici began to write scripts for more exploitative films, such as ''Emanuelle Around the World'' and ''Nazi Love Camp 27''. Also around this time, Clerici began his famous collaboration with director

. He wrote the scripts for '' Last Cannibal World'' and '' The House on the Edge of the Park''. Another Deodato collaboration, '' Cannibal Holocaust'', became his most famous screenplay due to the controversy the film caused upon its release. Ten days after its release, the film was seized and Clerici, Deodato, the film's producers, and a representative of the distribution company were arrested for obscenity. Deodato was later charged with murder after claims had been made that actors were genuinely slain for the production. When these charges were proven false, all defendants were fined and received a four-month suspended sentence after being convicted for obscenity. Clerici continued writing screenplays throughout the nineteen eighties for both theatrical and television productions. His last projects were television movies and several television series.

Filmography

References

External links

* Italian screenwriters category:1941 births Living people People from Bergamo Italian male screenwriters Year of birth missing (living people) {{Screen-writer-stub