.png){kind=logo}
Oscar-winning Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso,” “Ennio”) is set to direct “The First Dollar” a biopic of Bank of America founder Amedeo Peter Giannini who, besides pioneering modern banking, supported Hollywood’s emerging film industry.
Born into a family of Italian immigrants in San Jose, California, Giannini in 1904 started the Bank of Italy in San Francisco that later became Bank of America. He became known for pioneering modern banking practices such as branch banking and loan financing for everyday people.
Tornatore will shoot the Giannini biopic in English using a cast of Italian and international actors. The high-end film is being produced by Italy’s RAI Cinema and Kavak Film, the Rome shingle behind the works of revered auteur Marco Bellocchio (“The Traitor”) and other prominent Italian helmers.
“The First Dollar” will mark Tornatore’s fourth English-language work after Tim Roth-starrer “The Legend of 1900,” art world thriller “The Best Offer,” with Donald Sutherland, and 2016’s “Correspondence” with Olga Kurylenko and Jeremy Irons. Tornatore more recently helmed hit Ennio Morricone doc “Ennio,” in 2022, and the 2025 docufilm “Brunello: The Gracious Visionary,” about Italy’s “king of cashmere” Brunello Cucinelli.
Tornatore is currently in the process of finishing the screenplay of “The First Dollar” which will delve into how Giannini “revolutionized the banking system by putting credit at the service of ordinary people: immigrants, workers, women, and families who had previously been excluded,” according to promotional materials.
“His life spanned several symbolic moments in American and world history,” the materials add, such as the reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, “when he reopened the bank amidst the rubble to restore confidence in a wounded city,” as well as his support for the birth of the great [Hollywood] film industry “financing works by Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, and Frank Capra.”
In 1923, Giannini created a motion-picture loan division that backed Hollywood ventures, including Mary Pickford’s and Charlie Chaplin’s United Artists in 1923 and financed hundreds of films including classics such as “West Side Story,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” and Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
In 1937, when Walt Disney was struggling to complete his first full-length animated film, Bank of America is said to have stepped in with a loan that allowed him to complete “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
“I enthusiastically accepted the producers’ proposal to resume a project I had worked on a few years ago: the story of Amadeo Peter Giannini, the Italian who revolutionized the American banking system,” Tornatore said in a statement, calling the biopic’s subject matter “an almost legendary story that seems to have been born precisely to be told on film.”
Commented RAI Cinema CEO Paolo Del Brocco: “Entrusting this story to Giuseppe Tornatore means focusing on a vision capable of combining memory, emotion, and epic scope, conveying the moral coherence of a man who proved how economic success can go hand in hand with social responsibility.”
Kavac Film chief Simome Gattoni added: “Bringing this work to the screen is an act that contributes to preserving memory, but also represents a message for the present: the story of an Italian-American who changed the world without ever losing sight of people, embracing ethical capitalism.”
English (US) ·