ALL THINGS small

In the back streets of Old Rome, near the famous Bernini monument, The Fountain of the Four Rivers, La Dolce Vita turns from sweet...to sour. A naïve American tourist gets involved with poets, the Mafia, an opera singer, a movie star, and a film being shot at Cinecittà.

In the grand tradition of Mark Twain, Norman B. Schwartz recounts the comic misadventures of an innocent abroad—neither an Ugly American nor a Quiet one—but someone young who soon learns that within the Eternal City one cannot stay that innocent for long.

In the late 1950s NORMAN B. SCHWARTZ was working as an assistant film editor at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood when he heard that the studio was making a series of films in co-production in Rome. He left the states on his own and headed to Italia, where as his buona fortuna would have it, he found work and stayed for ten years.

In Italy the first picture he worked on was the Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation classic Jason And The Argonauts (1963). When he was not working in the Roman studios, he went south and beachcombed in old fishing villages like Positano on the Amalfi coast. He learned to speak Italian and live as Italians do: Dolce fa niente, “the sweetness of doing nothing.”

In the 70s Mr. Schwartz returned to Hollywood, eventually to collaborate on the sound tracks of such Oscar-winning feature films as The Exorcist and E.T. the Extraterrestrial. He became the first ADR sound editor and director ever admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He also taught writing, directing and acting for 20+ years in the U.S.A., France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Nigeria and the UAE.

He is the author of three comic novels: ALL THINGS small; Don Juan in Space; and Hollywood Below and Beyond (an illusory memoir).