Brunello Rondi to work with Federico Fellini as artistic director on "La Strada" (1954) and "Nights of Cabiria" (1957). His most prized collaborations were on the film scripts of "La Dolce Vita" (1960), "8½" (1963), "Juliet of the Spirits" (1964), "Orchestra Rehearsal" (1978), and "City of Women" (1980), all co-written and directed by Fellini. On the writing of "La Dolce Vita", Rondi helped build up the character of Steiner, the intellectual who kills his wife and children. As a Fellini intimate, Rondi also played a crucial role in the early stages of "8½". In a letter dated October 1960, Fellini outlined his
La Dolce Vita because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." Credit for the creation of Steiner, the intellectual who commits suicide after shooting his two children, goes to co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli. Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950. This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand