I know I just wrote a series of articles about my trip to Los Angeles but there’s one more thing I saw there that I wanted to share.

If you’ve ever been to Walt Disney World in Florida, you may recognize the sculpture in the above picture. That statue is called The Cameraman and it was sculpted by a man named Andrea Favilli. A little backstory: Favilli is an Italian sculptor whose father and mentor Aldo Favilli was an art director at the famed Italian film studio Cinecittà in Rome, which had first been in use to produce Italian films back in the thirties but in post-WWII years has been a production location for such films as Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and a number of films directed by people like Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese among others.

Aldo Favilli moved to California when Andrea was seven years old and when Andrea grew up, he would end up studying art himself at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Andrea Favilli would eventually be hired by Disney as an Imagineer and lead concept designer for the theme parks Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney/MGM Studios and Disneyland Paris. Among his most famous works is the Disney Legends Award which he sculpted out of bronze (the actor Fred MacMurray won the first one of those in 1987). The Cameraman is another one of Favilli’s most famed sculptures, and while the picture at the beginning of this article is the most widely seen version over at the hub of Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida, that was actually a duplicate. The original lesser known version of the statue was first sculpted back in Burbank and I managed to see it in person and take a picture of it.

The ten-foot bronze statue was commissioned by Roy E. Disney as a way to celebrate filmmaking and it was first unveiled in 1992 at the Media District near Warner Bros. Studio, two years before the more iconic one in Florida was introduced. As you can see on the plaque, both Aldo and Andrea worked on the statue as a father-son sculpting team. And the quote above their names reads “… He envisioned dreams that others might share.” The quote is attributed to someone named M. Vignali, who would most likely be Imagineer and concept artist Marcelo Vignali.

Can’t think of a better way to end my Los Angeles trip than to show one last picture and offer one last piece of trivia that both center on a statue that celebrates the art of making movies and reminds us that filmmakers like the one this statue depicts are not only a big part of the reason why I was so excited to visit L.A. and Universal Studios Hollywood but also the reason why this blog you’re reading even exists in the first place. Here’s to the film industry and all the artists and creators out there who continue to entertain and inspire, the best of whom aren’t just making entertainment but also sharing their dreams with the world.