On March 21st, Mount St. Mary’s alumnus and movie producer Zachary DeCarlo, C’82, returned to his alma mater and hosted a screening of the award-winning film Cabrini. A month later, he granted the Brownson Record an interview, sharing tales from his time at the Mount and the production of the film.
Mr. DeCarlo, could you please give a brief introduction about yourself to the Brownson Record?
As regards to Mount St. Mary’s, I’m an old guy. I went to Mount St. Mary’s in September of 1978 and I graduated in May of 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, with a minor in fine arts and psychology. I absolutely loved my time at the Mount. I made lifelong friends that to this day are some of my closest friends, and many of us have spouses that went to the Mount. My wife is one of them. We began dating long after the Mount, 10 years after the Mount, but married and raised three children. Again, I owe that to the Mount. I owe the love of my life to the Mount, so it was a very special place, and is a very special place to me. For instance, to come back to the Mount a few weeks ago to do the screening was very special to me.
So after the Mount I went back home into Reading, Pennsylvania and worked my way into a corporate career of technology services. I started out in the business of selling voice systems, and then that went into voice data which then migrated into technology services. I spent 30 plus years doing that. I came out of that in 2016 and started a consulting practice in that arena.
In 2020, in the heart of COVID, the executive producer Eustace Wolfington, who is my father-in-law, called me into his office and sat me down and said “I’m going to do this movie, and you’re Italian and I need a good Italian on my team”. I said “What does that mean?” I said “Yes, I’d love to help.” And so the rest is history. It’s been a journey now for some almost five years with the reproduction and fundraising because we are a full 501c3, so everything we do is with the momentum to raise funds for the benefit of charity, including paying the debt of the movie.
My journey continues, our mission, her mission, Mother Cabrini’s mission, keeps us quite busy, and that mission has taken off into an interesting path. What happened in March of last year, a local Catholic Philadelphia philanthropy foundation whose mission it is to give Catholic education in the archdiocese, came to us and said, “We love the movie. We’d like every high school student in the archdiocese to see this movie”. And they brought another foundation along with them, so the two foundations funded, taking almost 20,000 students to a theater over a course of a number of days last March, busing them to and fro. That just was an amazing, eye-opening event, and so we realized that we needed to do that at scale across the country, and so that’s one of the things I’ve been working on since then and we’ve been to a number of different dioceses.
How did you avoid it being marked as just a religious film? How did you navigate not trying to present it as simply that?
Well, it was a very conscious decision on the part of the executive producer, Eustace Wolfington. He wanted to make a universal film, a film that touches everyone, a film that appeals to everyone. There’s a film called Gandhi, played by the great Ben Kingsley who won an Oscar for his role as Gandhi. He didn’t have to be a Hindu to appreciate the man or the movie. That was our mission: to make this movie across the board universal, so we tested our thinking in front of Muslim audiences and Hindu audiences and Hebrew audiences and agnostics and atheists and Catholics and Protestants, of all walks and so forth, different demographics, ages, genders, and political affiliations. It has a uniquely similar reaction by everyone because the goal was to not preach, not to throw it in your face that it’s a Catholic woman. This is an amazing entrepreneur – tenacious, audacious, with love in her heart and soul for the Sacred Heart, her love of humanity – who happened to be a nun.
There’s 2 percent of the contrarian view that said, “We didn’t pray enough,” and “There weren’t enough signs of the cross,” and “There wasn’t enough of her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” 2 percent, but the other 98 percent of those of us that believe said, “Listen, the Holy Father saw it, and he liked it, so I think that puts a stamp to it.” But most importantly, the rest of the non-Catholic world has embraced it because it is a humanitarian story. We like to say, Dominic, her life is a homily. There is a poem by Edgar Guest, and it goes like this:
I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day;
I’d rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
The eye’s a better pupil and more willing than the ear,
Fine counsel is confusing, but example’s always clear;
And best of all the preachers are the men who live their creeds,
For to see good put in action is what everybody needs.
I soon can learn to do it if you’ll let me see it done;
I can watch your hands in action, but your tongue too fast may run.
And the lecture you deliver may be very wise and true,
But I’d rather get my lessons by observing what you do;
For I might misunderstand you and the high advise you give,
But there’s no misunderstanding how you act and how you live.
There’s a business side that would say, “No one would see it.” No one would go to see it because there wouldn’t be anybody that would distribute it. Our mission is not only to get a hundred million eyes to see it, but our mission is to impact lives so that those lives can impact the world that they live in. So that might mean filling the pews, it might mean more service focused in your daily life, it might mean a vocation, it might mean more volunteerism, so if we can do those things by this vehicle then we’re doing well.
Some themes in this film are obvious to the viewer, such as resilience through prejudice and leadership. From what you have seen, what elements of the film are viewers likely to miss?
I could probably have an hour-long conversation with you on that, but the easiest one is that we have her look at the camera three times. The first time she looks at the camera is when she’s walking with her sisters in a very dark section of Five Points. She turns around and looks at the camera and says, “See everyone, this is who we came to serve.” The historical fact of that is that they were from Northern Italy and that demographic was not familiar with the poverty that existed in Southern Italy and certainly were not familiar with the poverty that they experienced when they got to the ghettos at Five Points. So these women who happened to wear veils were very appalled and scared, so we look right in the camera and tell them, “See everyone, everyone counts, this is who we came to serve.”
Another classic is in the boardroom, where she’s raising the idea to get the hospital. Behind her on the wall is a picture in a round frame of the father of our country, George Washington, our first president, and of course she is the first American saint. As the camera pans back, the reflection on the shiny table top is her reflection with the halo of the frame of the Washington portrait behind her. Some folks catch it… very intentionally done.
Speaking of other themes, especially in this more politically turbulent time, how did you navigate the more progressive themes such as women leadership and immigration with a potentially more conservative, Catholic audience?
So, you used a great word, we absolutely focus on women leadership because the other word with the “E” (empowerment) has political tones to it, it was not about being political. She was absolutely a pantheon of women’s leadership, every hospital she opened, every orphanage she opened, every school she opened, she put women in charge of those. Again, it was a great sign that women could indeed be leaders, that doesn’t mean you have to be politically active, or political activists.
Today we are in the midst of a story every day, story after story of immigration. Well, she is the patron saint for all immigrants across the globe. We like to say she was about the immigrant, not about the immigration, not about the policy, because there really weren’t those policies back in the late nineteenth century. What mattered to her was the care for the individual at the time she encountered them, so care for the immigrant. That’s very timely, it’s timely that we’re talking about healthcare in today’s world where healthcare is such an issue, we’re talking about education being such an issue today. Those tenets that she brought to education, healthcare, leadership, immigrants, they are all very timely conversation topics.
In 1973, Martin Scorcese and Loretta Young wanted to make this movie and they didn’t get it done. In the 50’s Sophia Loren and her husband Carlo Ponti wanted to make this movie and they didn’t get it done. Why were industry folks not able to get it done, but we’re not film makers and we did get it done? We truly believe that God Himself wanted the movie to be made at this time, for this time, so that people in this time could witness this story. At least that’s what helps us sleep at night.
How did the production of the film attempt to make it authentically Italian?
One of Eustace’s concepts was that it had to be authentic. It had to be a period piece that was authentic and real, that looked great and sounded great. Our music is fantastic. In the movie our score, our composition, our opera, and our pop music they wrote is fantastic. The reality is that a third of what is going on was in the spoken Italian language, so 35% of our dialogue is in Italian to make it authentic. Everyone but one actor that speaks Italian in our film is Italian and we had to bring them in from Italy which was also a Herculean effort during COVID.
In your panel at the screening at the Mount, you mentioned 10 days filming in Rome. Could you explain more about that and how that experience was?
I wasn’t blessed enough to make the trip in December of ‘21, but I will tell you that Rome was experiencing a number of weeks of bad weather prior to that. Shooting began on December 5th, it was the first day without rain. They wrapped on the 20th, and it was the last day of nice weather, and then it began to rain again. Mother Cabrini gave us a wink and kept Rome dry for those two weeks.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
