Edoardo Romani: Filmmaker Turned Restorer

Crammed with furniture, heated by a woodstove, edged with orderly ranks of tools, polishes, and shellacs, Edoardo Romani's hugger-mugger of a workshop in Noyac feels as if it's in an 18th-century time warp. Computer-driven America is a million miles away.

In the only clear spot in the room, Mr. Romani, a filmmaker turned furniture restorer, is rejuvenating a 19th-century writing desk. The sad frame stands on a table. Braces secure its rickety legs, clamps retain strips of peeling veneer, the damaged inlay is gray and lusterless with neglect.

Photo by Morgan McGivern

Frankly, it doesn't look worth the effort.

Resurrection

But then he removes a cloth from the desk's top, which he has finished. The oiled and polished surface glows like a conker fresh from its shell, a delicate spiral star of pale golden inlay at its center.

It is a shock that such a dry, dusty corpse could be resurrected to such sensual beauty.

While nothing about Mr. Romani's life has been dry and dusty, in recent years it has undergone almost as radical a transformation as the desk.

Italian Cinema

He was born in Venice, and retains the easy warmth of a city where everyone knows everyone else's business and "if two people are arguing in the street, anyone who comes along feels they can join right in."

When he left Venice's Academy of Arts in 1967, the Italian cinema was at an artistic peak. Mr. Romani, determined to join it, secured a job as assistant cameraman on a Franco Rossi film.

Like others before him, he at first spent more time making cappuccino than celluloid, but before long he was working for Vittorio de Sica on "The Long Voyage" and then, in Rome, for John Huston on "The Kremlin Letter," starring Pat O'Brien and Orson Welles.

Working For Huston

"I was in love with John Huston," said Mr. Romani, who speaks French and Italian but whose English is a little idiosyncratic. "For the first time, I was jumping from the Italian attitude to the American. It was very exciting, very new. He was a fabulous director."

Parts of the movie had been shot in Russia, and when it was over the producer, Dino de Laurentis, mentioned that there was a chance to go back there to work on Sergei Bondarchiuk's "Waterloo."

Mr. Romani, who was still only 19, jumped at the chance. Armed with 50 kilos of pasta and not a word of Russian, he spent three months in Moscow behind the camera.

Dubbed From Mongolian

By then he knew that what appealed most to him about film-making was editing. Back in Rome, he worked for the next 12 years with Franco Arcalli, Bernardo Bertolucci's editor and scriptwriter, who became his mentor.

The movie that cemented his relationship with Mr. Arcalli was Akira Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala." The film had to be dubbed in Italian from Mongolian and Russian, a task further complicated by the difficulty of communicating with the enigmatic Kurosawa, who spoke no Italian.

Mr. Romani bribed the night porter at the studio to let him into the editing room in the middle of the night so that he could study the rushes until he was completely familiar with them, enabling him to anticipate Mr. Arcalli's every request.

Cut To Measure

When his mentor died, Mr. Romani moved to Italian television and became a documentary editor.

"People think that editing is just joining action and sound without a concept," he said. "But a film editor must be a tailor, a chef, who sees all the defects of a film and cuts and fits to measure. When you have synchronicity and rhythm, the film becomes elastic, fits."

His TV documentaries - on the Pope, the neorealist painter Renato Guttosi, crime in the Bronx, Irish terrorism, Tibet, David Bowie, life in the Camargue, a seven-hour series called "Magic Africa" - had him crisscrossing the globe in the 1970s and '80s.

British Reserve

His exuberant warmth helped him out in unfamiliar situations.

In 1984, for example, he was sent to London to edit newscasts for Italian television. Every morning he commuted from the suburb of Brixton to the center of the city. After a while, he realized that he was travelling with the same people, in the same carriage, at the same time every morning - and no one ever spoke a word to anyone else.

After two months Mr. Romani, on a one-man mission to melt the iceberg of British reserve, got into the train and said, "Good morning, everyone." The passengers hurriedly raised their newspapers and ignored him.

The next morning, he tried again.

"Good morning, everyone. This is the second day of the second month we are all here together. How are you all?"

This time, one or two people sheepishly acknowledged him. After that, it wasn't long before everyone was greeting each other, swapping stories, and even, he said, getting together for drinks after work.

At about this time, Mr. Romani decided to make his own film. The inspiration for the movie was a major milestone in his life - his girlfriend was going to have a baby.

"I was interested how a pregnant woman softens, becomes gentle, and makes gentle the people around her."

Tragedy

Having traveled around the English canal system on a barge doing research - as a Venetian, he had been entranced to discover England's canal system - his script and story boards were ready.

In this unrealized film, a young pregnant woman takes refuge in the barge of a dour old sailor, having decided that she will have her baby there and together they will sail the secret waterways of England, isolated from the world beyond.

But the film was never made. While still in infancy, Mr. Romani's son died.

Starting Over

He found some consolation in Buddhism, but the relationship broke up. Doubly traumatized, the filmmaker decided to abandon his turbulent life in Europe and start again in America.

On and off during his peripatetic life Mr. Romani, who believes that all artists love furniture and people, had studied gilding and refinishing. It proved a good investment when the moment came for introspection, and he turned to the tranquil existence of a restorer.

His first job, the restoration of a six-paneled mother-of-pearl and ivory screen for the Smithsonian Institution, led to a long project in Chicago restoring 36 pieces of Bugatti furniture that came from a collection belonging to Elton John.

Sound Of Silence

Since then, specializing in Gio' Ponti, Bugatti, Biedermeier, and Le Lain Julen furniture but taking on practically any project, he has worked for Sotheby's and Christie's, the estates of Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos, and a number of foundations.

Three years ago, after falling ill with Meuniere's disease, Mr. Romani moved to Sag Harbor.

"The silence here is so exaggerated that it almost has a sound," he said. "It talks to you."

Natural Materials

He works only with natural materials, he said, and as a demonstration coated a small area of sanded wood with shellac, which, unlike varnish or polyurethane, allows wood to breathe rather than sealing it completely.

Some of the furniture crammed into Mr. Romani's low-ceilinged workshop is waiting to be restored for clients, other pieces he has found himself at sales or accumulated during the five years he lived in SoHo before moving east.

When these have been lovingly resuscitated, he will hold a sale and then start all over again.

Behind The Door

And then there are the pieces he has made himself from scratch - a folding bookstand, a tilting mirror, a gilded frame.

The peace has obviously been therapeutic for the restorer, as has the quiet, contemplative work.

"I opened my jungle door," Mr. Romani said, gently sanding away ugly varnish on a strip of wood to reveal the clear grain beneath. "It's so beautiful, so mysterious."