‘Shoe Shine Caddie’ Documentary Humanizes the Homeless Experience While Taking Director Back to His Italian Cinema Roots
variety.comSteven Gaydos Executive VP of Content When first-time documentary director Leonard Manzella premieres his award-winning “Shoe Shine Caddie” at the Portobello Film Festival in London on September 16, it will represent a kind of return to the former actor’s roots in the international film scene.
A professional family therapist for the past 30 years in California, Manzella’s earlier career began when the native Angeleno left Los Angeles for Rome in 1968 “when everything was burning.” In his early 20s and armed with “no contacts and about $50 bucks in my pocket,” a fortuitous introduction to American actor Brett Halsey got Manzella into movies, first as an extra and eventually as a leading man.
Halsey, who landed in Rome in the ‘60s and worked steadily in Euro crime thrillers and in the burgeoning spaghetti western scene, often toiled under the moniker Montgomery Ford and Leonard Manzella became famous as Leonard Mann. “I went to Rome to study political science, but a friend in L.A.
told me to call Halsey, and through him I got my first job in film, working ten days as an extra. On my first movie, ‘Youth March,’ there was a young cinematographer named Vittorio Storaro and we were both coming up,” recalls Manzella. “This was 10 years before he started winning Oscars!” In his early days in Rome, Manzella also met most of the legendary Italian auteurs of the era, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, whose early Italian neo-realist masterpiece “Umberto D” would prove to have a decisive influence on Manzella.
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