My big Italian movie: marketing Big Mamma’s Boy

Big Mamma’s Boy’s Matteo Bruno and Franco Di Chiera had the challenge of marketing a rom-com set in Melbourne’s Italian community two ways, to the cultural minority and the mass majority. Colin Delaney reports.

“For me it’s a romantic comedy and that’s it,” says Franco Di Chiera, director of Big Mamma’s Boy about an Italian-Australian career man by day, jazz singer by night who falls for a non-Italian girl, while still living with his mother.

Yet, despite the fact the film is a rom-com at heart, Di Chiera, producer Matteo Bruno and lead actor/writer Frank Lotito are well aware Big Mamma’s Boy could easily be passed off as another Australian ‘wog story’.

And what would be wrong with that? Comedies about the ‘wog’, be them Italian, Greek or any other wonderful ethnicity slapped with that all-encompassing title have been widely successful across multiple platforms: Acropolis Now and Fat Pizza on television; The Wog Boy films; Wogs Out of Work and Il Dago on the stage. And many of the actors are originally stand-up comedians.