In memoriam: Sergio Donati (Telegraph 20/08/24)

Sergio Donati, who has died aged 91, was an Italian screenwriter who served among the architects of the spaghetti Western genre with his work on Sergio Leone’s Dollars sequels and the monumental Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); later, he helped chisel muscular newcomer Arnold Schwarzenegger’s screen persona with the action thriller Raw Deal (1986). 

Donati provided uncredited rewrites on For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), where he was instrumental during a lengthy editing process. For Once Upon a Time in the West, Donati developed Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento’s story outline into a 420-page screenplay, written like a novel: “Leone explicitly asked me to spell out every character’s emotional state, to facilitate the actors’ task of penetrating their minds.”

The resulting epic proved a spaghetti highpoint, powered by searing star turns, dynamic direction and terse, witty dialogue (“People scare better when they’re dyin’”) that survived the necessary overdubbing. Donati became known as a Western specialist, with credits on such lively second-string artefacts as Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown and Face to Face (both 1967). But after a disagreement with Leone over Duck, You Sucker! (1971) – Donati saw it as a tight thriller, Leone a rambunctious epic – he branched out into other genres with mixed results.

He was set to direct his own script for Slap the Monster on Page One (1972), only to row with lead Gian Maria Volonte, who had Donati replaced by Marco Bellocchio. Pairing with prominent producer Dino De Laurentiis boosted Donati’s bank account but not his reputation: there were only brickbats for the Jaws rip-off Orca, the Killer Whale (1977) and Raw Deal, which starred a post-Terminator Schwarzenegger as a sheriff pursuing the Chicago mob.

Though Variety called the latter’s script “irredeemably awful”, Donati maintained he was attempting something new: “We were the first to make a Schwarzenegger film with a little irony… Schwarzenegger made three or four films prior to that but was also very serious. Dino gave us some videos of his earlier films and we said, ‘Hey, it’s funny!’ That terrible English with that German accent. It was funny. So we wrote for him and that was the beginning of his success.”

Born in Rome on April 13, 1933, Sergio Donati studied law at the city’s Faculty of Law before finding success as a crime writer; his 1956 novel Il sepolcro di carta was filmed by Tinto Brass as I Am What I Am (1967). It was during this period that he met Leone, who hired Donati to write an Alpine crime thriller, yet after the project petered out, a disillusioned Donati relocated to Milan and began copywriting.

Leone, however, wasn’t giving up: “[He] kept calling me saying, ‘What are you doing in Milan? Come back to Rome and make films.’ One day he called me and told me to go and see a Kurosawa film, Yojimbo. When I asked him why he said that we could do it as a Western. I told him he was crazy. I said to my wife that if a man named Leone calls to say that I wasn’t home. That is why I didn’t write A Fistful of Dollars.”

Later Western-adjacent undertakings included the first adaptation of A.J. Quinnell’s novel Man on Fire (1987) and period piece North Star (1996), with James Caan and Christopher Lambert. Yet from the millennium, Donati worked exclusively within Italy. His final credit came on The Sicilian Girl (2008), a torn-from-the-headlines drama about a daughter who testified against her Mob boss father.

He penned a memoir, Once Upon a Time in the West… I Was There Too, in 2007, but otherwise maintained a droll gunslinger’s wit about his relative anonymity: “A script is like a spermatozoa. When the movie comes out it is like they are baptising the child and it is in bad taste to talk about that night, nine months before, when the child was conceived. That night was the script. But nobody talks about it.”

Sergio Donati, born April 13, 1933, died August 13, 2024.