John Tracy of International Rescue stands in his famous red uniform at the control console of Thunderbird 5 in its traditional location in a cave next door to the distinctive super-craft, Thunderbird 1. Which is also red.
Welcome to the uniquely strange world of Carlo DiFonzio, the man who – for nearly 20 years – came to define the world of Italian cinema promotional material. Through literally thousands of distinctive portrait-sized “locandinas” and more traditionally landscaped “fotobustas”, DiFonzio consistently mis-represented, mis-interpreted and just-plain missed the filmed image in favor of something far more interesting – a garish alt-universe of his own creation. In recent years, art lovers the world over have rediscovered DiFonzio’s hand-tinted oeuvre, with posters changing hands for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. But who was Carlo DiFonzio, why did he create such unusual imagery and what is his true legacy today?
“My father was a great man, but…he had his problems” It’s noon at a pavement cafe in the quiet central square of the the tiny Italian village of Salviatini, just north of Milan. I’m here to speak to and, as it turns out, enjoy a few drinks with DiFonzio’s son Dino, now a craggy 58, the oldest of 12 children. Its fair to say his memories of his father are conflicted: “He would paint or do his photo montages for the film posters all day and in the evening he would go out and meet with these crazy people, these other artists. They would drive up to the mountain behind the village here, you see the one? They’d go up there and smoke the ayahuaska , you know? That’s the real strong shit! When he’d come back the next morning he’d start work again and none of the colors made any fucking sense…” His voice trails off as he stares into his large whisky. A vivid image of his father, crazed with the insanity of a night at high altitude on mind-bending ayahuasca, is forming in my mind. Suddenly, to my amazement Dino reaches into his trousers and produces a photograph that actually shows his father in the midst of a 1970s drug trip…
“This is one of the few images I have of him” Dino sadly relates “He hated being photographed but this one was taken by a guy who was making a documentary about the origin of locandinas and fotobustas in this region. He waited in the bushes until my father was completely fucked out of his head and took this image of him and his friend Sergio in the full grasp of the drug trip” It certainly is an enduring image, one that goes some way to understanding the bizarrely ersatz versions of familiar film and television properties that DiFonzio reveled in.
In October of this year, a mint-condition copy of DiFonzio’s most famous image, the legendary ‘Red John’ fotobusta for the film Thunderbirds Are Go! (1966) sold at Sotherby’s in London to a private collector for an astonishing £1,375,000. It was the largest single price ever paid for a movie poster. Does Dino wish he’d kept any of his father’s original works? “I did! They’re all over my wall at home, but back to front! I plastered them up face down to make a white background to paint on because at the time I couldn’t afford any fucking wallpaper!” And what does he think of the people who now pay more that the price of a large Italian villa for a single mint condition DiFonzio locandina? “What do I think?!” With this he staggers to his feet, nearly spilling our beers, unzips his fly and does something both hilarious and grotesque with his penis “THIS is what I think! These stupid fucking asshats who pay all this money can have THIS!”
- Another splash of red from the Maestro…
The ‘Red John’ was followed by a string of similarly bizarre, drug-influenced creations. Almost as strange, and recently acquired by George Clooney for £968,000, is the ‘Red 4’, DiFonzio’s unhinged depiction of Thunderbird 4 and the Tracy Island Roundhouse from the same 1966 Gerry Anderson film.
“It’s like something took over his mind to make everything red” muses Dino, calmer now and drawing heavily on a fresh, high-strength cigarette, “He had a thing about red, for sure, but he also had a thing about green. And blue, he also had a thing about blue as well…” Indeed, the cornucopia of rainbow expressionism that flowed from DiFonzio’s tinting studio located in a converted toilet cubicle in a narrow corridor above a bar a few doors down from where Dina and I now sit, seemingly held no bounds. His contract with Italian distribution king Luigi Tagliatelle gave him first choice on any Italian film releases…”And what did he choose to do?” an increasingly emotional Dino splutters as a another round of San Miguels appears at our table, courtesy of Traci, our comely waitress “He chose shit! These fucking English TV episodes all joined up into these shitty movies that weren’t proper movies. He could have done the Fellini posters, the Antonioni’s, but no!” he flings his arms up in he air in a way only an Italian man at the end of his tether can do. “I was at home with him and my poor old Moma in her worn out knickers the night he got a call from the studio to offer him the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He says down the phone ‘OK maybe, but what else you got Luigi?’ They tell him they got some fucking compilations of The Saint, you know, Roger Moore? That cunt?” Dino’s eye’s are now bulging with anger “You know how much he would have gotten paid for the Kubrick movie poster job? Ten times as much! I wanted to go to college! Jesus…Anyway, lets have another pint of this, yes?”
Although its seems an inopportune time to mention it to Dino, the irony today is that the two Saint posters his father produced that year, both featuring his now trademark “red man”, now change hands for many thousands of dollars more than the original Italian 2001 poster.
But its not quite true to say that DiFonzio never worked on any major Hollywood films, in fact he even invested some of his earnings in a film he had high hopes for, as Dino recalls.. “There was a Disney film he had some money invested in, he really thought it was going to be a big success, it was called Monkey’s Go Home! He did the poster and fucked up all the colours and everything but it was a turkey. I don’t know why but they never show it it on TV. But he would jump up and down with excitement whenever he heard the name”.
But there would be one other, incredible, brush with big-time Hollywood movies and it all came about through a mis-understanding, as Dino recalled to me over another brace of foaming Miguels…”By the late 1970s my father was spending most of his time fucked out of head on drugs and doing posters for just a few things he liked. He liked The Persuaders, he liked Space: 1999, he really – I mean REALLY liked that show with the girls with the tits and the purple wigs (Gerry Anderson’s UFO) but that was all he’d do, you know? Just TV shit that got shown out here in the provinces. People out here will watch any old shit! Anyway, one day in 1977 he agreed to do the poster for what he thought was a new Gerry Anderson movie compilation. That’s what the studio had told him. But it was a trick to get him to do the poster for Star Wars!”
Replete with his trademark tinted weirdness, it would prove the final work of DiFonzio’s career. Not that the story ends there…
“My father disappeared with his friends from the mountain camp, the drug people. They all took off and we never heard from him again.We heard about him sometimes, but never from him. I’m not sad though. My father, you know…” For a moment, as Dino stares down into his seventh San Miguel, I see the little boy DiFonzio left behind “…was an idioti, a fool. He was a….a loser. But he was still my father”
In a quiet square in a small village near Milan, a very drunk man begins to cry.
Of all he great artists of the late 20th Century, Carlo DiFonzio is perhaps the most enigmatic. With just one confirmed sighting since 1977, we can only guess at the lifestyle he now leads. But in that single 2006 image of DiFonzio doing his shopping in Ealing, West London, we can still see something in his eyes.. the artist, the fool, the man who saw in red…the King of the Fotobustas, walking tall.
The Man in the Elegant Room 
I thought that he was higher than a king (depending on what he drank) as he’s the only one to get away with a blue FAB1, another fotobusta had a pair of red Thunderbird 2’s in the same shot (or was he just seeing double?)
But then it wasn’t just Carlo who had his bad days – one of his tinted fotobustas to ‘TAG’ doesn’t show any thunderbirds, no Traceys – it doesn’y show anyone or any thing except for a few houses, did this make more people want to go and see the film?