Scene from Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953)

We’ve all been there. In our salad days, we hung out with our buds in the town of our birth. In Federico Fellini’s case, the town was Rimini on the Adriatic Sea, a fading resort town in Emilia-Romagna. We all admired the leader of our band, who married the cute local girl (Miss Mermaid), but whose eyes kept wandering, even when his daughter was born.

Perhaps La Strada was Fellini’s best film, or La Dolce Vita; but my favorite was I Vitelloni, an Italian term that, translated, means “The Layabouts” or “The Slackers.” We see the band slowly break up. The autobiographical Fellini character, Moraldo, leaves Rimini at the end with no specific destination in mind.

I might be going out on a limb when I say this, but I Vitelloni is my favorite film about surviving one’s youth. I, too, hung out with a bunch of slackers. As I was a graduate student in film history at UCLA, the layabouts I hung out with were all film freaks. We used to get together at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax after a movie and engage in what I called “trading bubble-gum cards.” This involved saying which film was great and which wasn’t. There was seldom any agreement.

In the last few years, I lost two of my vitelloni, Norm Witty and Lee Sanders, who were integral parts of the band. But I left the group long before. I marked my departure by writing an article for the UCLA Daily Bruin entitled “Confessions of an Ex-Film-Freak, or: Slow Death Twenty-Four Times a Second.” Some day I’ll find my copy of that article and put a few quotes from it in a blog post.