Holla, this one of the post that should be classified under “creative inspiration” or something like that; you get the point.
“By 1987 Scarfiotti was firmly ensconced in Los Angeles, but he returned briefly to Italy for a terrific little picture called Mamba. The plot is a vicious treat: Gregg Henry plays a sneering, self-contained software magnate who elects to punish his ex-lover (Trudi Styler) by penning her within her apartment in the company of a drug-crazed snake. The mamba has the luxurious advantage of an hour in which to puncture its prey before overdosing on venom, but it finds in Styler a resourceful opponent. The loft which Scarfiotti designed for Styler is a riot of postmodern design flourishes in the seriously playful style of Ettore Sottsass, accordingly making merry with conventional notions of architectural syntax. It is a kind of erotic fantasy for subscribers to Blueprint, so much so that, when in the course of her frenetic flight from the mamba, Styler scatters her furniture and tarnishes her pristine floors, the viewer feels a sharp and unexpected pang of sorrow.
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This was no idle threat, so to speak. Scarfiotti’s touchstone for Toys would be the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero, a crackerjack of all trades whose inventions included patterned waistcoats, bolted books, sets for Diaghilev, and covers for Vanity Fair. The choice was inspired. Depero had also been a compulsive maker and illustrator of figurines, and, with Giacomo Balla, penned in 1915 Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, hymning a new world order ’run according to the principles of the Futurist toy’. M Depero’s joyful paeans to fighting dolls (not nearly so grimace-worthy as Marinetti’s conviction that war was a form of hygiene for civilisation) gave Scarfiotti a line straight into the highly coloured whimsy Toys required.
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