The only problem with the cinema of Fellini is that it reduces your pleasure in other films. It tells you everything you need to know about the way we live today. More to the point, these British films are period pieces La Dolce Vita is not. La Dolce Vita makes supposed classics such as Blow Up (1966) and Darling (1965) look derivative, just as his 1950s films like I Vitelloni ("The Overgrown Calves", a raw portrait of shiftless youths) puts British imitations from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) to This Sporting Life (1963) in the shade. In fact, he thought of everything first.įellini made the greatest film about the 1960s before the 1960s began. If Warhol anticipated today's famous-for-15-minutes culture, the director of La Strada (1954), 8 (1963) and Roma (1972) anticipated it first. All Tomorrow's Parties would make an even better anthem for Fellini than for Warhol. They even liked the same freaks: Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita features the fantastic flat Germanic laugh - "hah hah hah" - of the model Nico, later to be forced by Warhol on the Velvet Underground, for whom she chanted All Tomorrow's Parties in the same stentorian tones. Whatever the truth or otherwise of this 1960s anecdote, Fellini's influence on Warhol is not in doubt. You can see it in your mind: the dancing girls, the enormous hats, the Papal fashion show. Somehow, the Italians formed the impression that this camp underground poet and actor was a huge star in his own country, and so Federico Fellini staged a dazzling reception for Mead at Cinecittà. I n a bar in lower Manhattan, Taylor Mead, a star from Andy Warhol's Factory Films, told me that to escape Warhol's power he fled to Italy.