Trivia / Sergio Leone

• Common Knowledge: Two persistent, but false pieces of trivia involve Creator Cameos by Leone in his work:
  • Christopher Frayling's biography Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death, claims that Leone has a supporting role in Robert Hossein's Cemetery Without Crosses. Although Leone did direct at least one scene of the movie at Hossein's request, he does not act in the movie; the character of "Hotel Desk Clerk" is played by Spanish actor Cris Huerta.
  • Leone is also said to play the ticket seller in Once Upon a Time in America, who's actually played by an uncredited American actor who bears a passing resemblance to Leone.
  • Leone did make a few onscreen appearances in his early work as assistant director, including Bicycle Thieves, but his only cameo in his own movies was a voice-only role as the whistling bounty hunter in the opening scene of For a Few Dollars More.
• What Could Have Been: At the time of his death, he was working on his next project after Once Upon a Time in America called Leningrad: The 900 Days, which was going to be a film adaptation of the Harrison Salisbury non-fiction book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad.
  • Other unrealised projects include a Civil War epic called A Place Only Mary Knows, Don Quixote, Colt, a remake of Gone with the Wind that would have been closer to the book, a film adaptation of The Phantom^note Not related to the 1996 film adaptation. (with the follow-up being a film adaptation of Mandrake the Magician) and a film adaptation of Journey to the End of the Night, which elements were used for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Duck, You Sucker!.
  • He was an early choice to direct Flash Gordon. A fan of the original comic strips, Leone turned down the offer to direct as he felt the script didn't resemble the source material.
  • Leone was an early choice to direct The Godfather, largely because Paramount hoped that an Italian director would head off image problems with Italian-American viewers. Leone disliked the novel and turned it down; he later said that he regretted missing the potential in the flashbacks to Vito Corleone's youth, but that the bulk of the story didn't interest him.
  • At one point Leone talked about remaking M with Klaus Kinski as Hans Beckert, but Kinski wasn't interested and the project never came off.
  • Early in his career, Leone wrote a screenplay called Viale Glorioso about his childhood growing up in Rome under fascism. In interviews, he described it as similar to Federico Fellini's Amarcord but less absurdist and more focused on the child characters. Whether Leone ever intended to seriously make it after his big break is unclear, though at different times he suggested that it would be his next project. He did rework some of the material for the flashback scenes of Once Upon a Time in America.

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