CINECITTA STUDIOS, ROME

   Cinecitta Studios was primarily responsible for the large numbers of Italian Westerns produced in the 1960s and 1970s. The studio had been specializing in epic action films (such as the 1950s Steve Reeves Hercules movies) before they entered the Western market and issued a lengthy series of spaghetti Westerns (such as the Django, Sartana, and Stranger series) —all playing upon the popularity of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. Cinecitta’s productions were invariably low-budget affairs with “flimsy sets, variable colour matching, and the inadequacies of the Techniscope process” (Frayling 1981, 121). Since the days of spaghetti Westerns, Cinecitta Studios has become the dominant production company in Italy.