Grand tale, grand tale, grand tale: Franco Cozzo to be immortalised in doco

To Melburnians of a certain age, they’re words etched on the memory like gold leaf on a rococo chair leg: “Grand sale, grand sale, grand sale. Where? In Brunswick and Footscray.” And now, the man who has uttered them countless times in countless late-night TV commercials since the early 1980s is set to be immortalised with a feature-length documentary in his honour.

Palazzo di Cozzo this week received production funding from Screen Australia that will help writer-director Madeleine Martiniello and producer Philippa Campey bring the story of the 83-year-old furniture salesman Franco Cozzo to life with all the pomp and grandeur it demands. But it won’t just cover his journey from penniless Sicilian immigrant in 1956 to millionaire father-of-10 today.

Furniture salesman Franco Cozzo is the subject of a documentary being made by young filmmaker Madeleine Martiniello.Credit: Vincent Lamberti

“It’s partly a biography of Franco Cozzo, but I’m also really interested in looking at the broader cultural ideas around furniture and migrant home life,” says Martiniello, a 30-year-old graduate of VCA film school. “There are going to be portraits in the film of people who have bought Franco Cozzo furniture over the years, showing the evolution of the clientele and the styles of people’s houses. So there will be these beautiful cinematic scenes that present the furniture in its full glory, in context.”

Martiniello grew up in Melbourne, with Italian immigrant grandparents, and her parents own some Cozzo pieces. But she only discovered the cult of Cozzo thanks to YouTube, where many of his trilingual ads (in English, Italian and Greek) live on.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one broadcast on television,” she says. “But he really was embedded in my psyche.”

And she’s not alone, it seems. “Whenever I speak to people my age about this they’re really excited.”

Martiniello insists her film is no exercise in irony, though. “I am very attracted visually and aesthetically to the furniture, and I think there’s a nice parallel between Franco’s larger-than-life character and the style of the furniture itself,” she says.

Nor will it traffic in the popular myth that the stores full of heavy, expensive, elaborately decorated furniture are merely fronts for some other sort of business.

“I think that’s a sort of racist interpretation of this style of furniture and this style of business – it’s just the Sicilian thing that leads to those sorts of rumours I suppose.”

But Martiniello promises her film will not be mere hagiography either.

“The bigger ambition is to kind of show how a public personality like Franco Cozzo can bring people together or connect different communities,” she says. “I want this to be a portrait that goes beyond Franco himself to post-war migration to Australia, and the similarities and differences between different waves of immigration.

Filmmaker Madeleine Martiniello with her subject.Credit: Vincent Lamberti

“His customers have actually evolved in line with migrant waves. Originally they were the post-war European migrants but today most of his customers are the newer migrants, people from African communities and south-east Asia. They’re the ones who now want to buy this kind of furniture.

“It’s a unique way of telling Australia’s post-war migrant story,” she says, “of going into the really sacred space of the home, which often gets left out of the larger narrative.”

Follow the author on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin