Il Natale della vergogna (Christmas at the Varriale house)

The end of the seventies constitutes the springboard for domestic video recording which, first with color television and then with the diffusion of the Betamax video recorder, spread rapidly. Precisely in those years Mario Altieri enters in the nascent domestic audiovisual market dedicating himself to the clandestine distribution of pornographic films. His activity as a producer began at the end of the seventies with the production of home movies made in Amsterdam and destined for the Italian market. After a long apprenticeship, in 1984 he set up the company "999 Black & Blue Productions" in Naples with which he officially began his career in the porn industry with the idea of developing an Italian-style product in an industry until then dominated by USA and Northern Europe. Precisely in that circumstance Altieri decided to replace his surname with that of art of Salieri, inspired by the famous Italian musician eternal rival of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. From that moment begins the rise of the Neapolitan director who will reach its peak in the first half of the nineties. The great international success lasts until 2008, the year in which the home video market definitively gives the baton to the internet. Salieri immediately sensed that radical changes in terms of style and organization were necessary to face the new market and created an internet network. He moves to Budapest and sets up the company "Idea Trade Tre" with which he produces and directs a fair amount of thematic scenes. It also replaces his classic shooting style, made up of static shots skilfully illuminated by the historian and inseparable cinematographer Bruno De Sisti, with a documentary and dynamic cut that offers the actors greater capacity for action. However, the artistic imprint remains intact because everything is always dominated by the rigor and creativity of Salieri who prefers eroticism to pornography. Salieri's long career is linked to numerous scandals, some of international proportions. In 1998 he produced Il confessionale, directed by Jenny Forte; the film was made almost entirely in the church of San Vincenzo di Gioia dei Marsi with the regular authorization of the parish priest of the time. When the high ecclesiastical authorities become aware of the fact through some reports, they order the cancellation and subsequent rehabilitation of all religious celebrations carried out in that church (weddings, baptisms, funerals) arousing disbelief and bewilderment all over the world. In 2006 Salieri made a series in three episodes entitled Salieri Football: the fiction tells of corruption and the massive use of doping drugs in the world of professional football and ends with an interview with Carlo Petrini, a former footballer of the first Italian series. The facts narrated in the series anticipate an investigation by the Italian judiciary by a few months. In 2017 he produced a remake of Ciociara inspired by the novel by Alberto Moravia which unleashed the wrath of the president of the Moroccan victims' association, with the consequence of a parliamentary question and several letters of indignation addressed to the Italian Prime Minister of the time, Paolo Gentiloni. Since 2019 Mario Salieri has also been making films for television with a new style that revisits the Italian sexy comedy.