The Lost Legacy of Tony Gaudio
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Documentary
Commonly, it is remembered as the first Oscar won by an Italian, that of 1947 to Vittorio De Sica for "Sciuscià".But already ten years earlier another Italian had won the Academy Award, a lesser-known man whose career was just as significant: a cinematographer, Gaetano "Tony" Gaudio, who emigrated in the early 1900s from Cosenza to Hollywood, in pursuit of the American dream.There he became a pioneer and innovator of lighting and cinematographic shooting techniques, laying the foundations for what would later become the image style of modern cinema.A man acclaimed by the American press in the first half of the 1900s, awarded the title of Knight of the Kingdom in his home country by Victor Emmanuel III (honour he refused to underline his distance from the Italian fascist regime) and soon became a point of reference for the great Divas of the time, such as Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Norma Talmadge."The Lost Oscar", therefore, is a documentary that wants to tell the journey that brought Tony Gaudio from Calabria to the 1937 consecration by the Academy of motion pictures, also investigating the mystery behind the disappearance of his statuette, the first Italian Oscar.
