In the summer of 1877, a disgruntled employee shot Luigi Giannini over a couple dollars, gunning him down in Alviso, California. Giannini’s seven-year-old son, Amadeo Pietro (A.P.) Giannini, witnessed the murder. The incident forever shaped him.
The young Giannini was born in the Swiss Hotel on Market Street in downtown San Jose, right where a parking garage now sits. After his father’s death, he eventually came under the wing of his stepfather, Lorenzo Scatena, who raised him in the produce industry of San Francisco.
After Giannini took over his stepdad’s business, he expanded his entrepreneurial ambitions by founding the Bank of Italy in 1904, which later morphed into Bank of America, eventually at one point becoming the largest bank in the world.
In his lifetime, Giannini pioneered branch banking and prioritized cheap-interest loans to immigrants, fishermen, dockworkers and everyday working-class grunts, infuriating the fat cats of his day. As the son of immigrants, he wanted to help other immigrants.
He always retained a fellowship with the little guy—precisely why another Italian immigrant, Davide Fiore, will present his new film on Giannini’s life at Cinequest. A Little Fellow: The Legacy of A.P. Giannini screens at Hammer Theater on March 13.
‘Too Good to Be True’
Several biographies and various articles over the decades have tried to reassemble Giannini’s life, often with contradictory dates and details. When Fiore, originally from Torino, first wandered around San Francisco and discovered the plaque on Montgomery Street where Bank of Italy was once located, he realized a film was necessary.
“It happened when I moved from Italy to United States,” Fiore said. “I landed in San Francisco and I had the visa, but I was waiting for the work permit, and I was just walking around the city, and at some point, I saw the plaque. And then I started looking for books and I got obsessed because this story is too good to be true.”
Fiore needed a project to show off his skills and introduce himself to the film industry in California. The Giannini story felt perfect. At first, he imagined a small project, but after he started talking to more and more people, the story got bigger and bigger.
“It took me seven years to make it,” Fiore said, emphasizing that he needed to work on other films in the process, which gave him additional experience and connections. He worked on shows in LA and directed a few shorts, but never gave up on Giannini.
“It all really started from a plaque and from the fact that I was curious,” he said.
Over the course of those seven years, Fiore interviewed old acquaintances of Giannini’s and his granddaughters. He spoke to representatives from Italian historical institutions and even a few Bank of America executives. A former San Francisco Italian Consul General appears in the film, as do authors, academics and current politicians.
Giannini’s trajectory paralleled California’s transformation from a Wild West outback to a WWII-era powerhouse. Juxtaposed with interview footage, we see historic photos and newspaper clippings. We see fantastic imagery of what San Jose looked like in the nineteenth century, as a well as the glory of San Francisco and Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century.
Even though Giannini rose to prominence in San Francisco, his San Jose beginnings, his San Mateo homestead, and his establishment of the first branch outside of San Francisco—the still existent Bank of America building in downtown San Jose—all made him a Bay Area-wide kind of dude. (Read more about the San Jose building.) He rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 Earthquake and helped bankroll the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. He donated lots of money to Stanford and Berkeley. He also helped finance the Hewlett-Packard Garage, effectively starting what came to be known as Silicon Valley.
The Wild South Bay
In the process of unearthing the details of Giannini’s life, Fiore learned a lot. Not just about the banker, but also about his own adopted state of California.
“When we think about the United States at the beginning of the century, we think about New York, Chicago, that kind of developed city,” Fiore said. “California wasn’t like that. It was developing, but it was much smaller. Giannini grew up in a town. He didn’t grow up in a big metropolis like New York.”
Fiore infiltrated the archives at History San Jose, where he found plenty of photos, including those of a young Giannini. He wanted to use images depicting how rough and wild the South Bay really was in those days.
“I still have in my mind, I still see this little guy, the little Giannini, when he was five, six years old, looking at ships going from Alviso, from San Francisco, and what he had to see, what was the world back then? If you think about that, in a lifetime, it’s a lot of changes that you have to experience, and that he experienced, and the whole Bay Area experienced. They went from horses to flights in a lifetime.”
That little guy later became a towering figure, an imposing character, first in North Beach and then up and down the coast as he transformed the banking industry. Much of what bankers nowadays take for granted—branches on every corner, home mortgages, installments, or even car loans—can be directly traced back to initiatives Giannini pioneered.
The film takes us through his whole story, including his battles with the fat cats in New York, who did not want branch banking to exist. Even after Giannini had retired, he had to come back from Europe and help fight other bankers who simply didn’t care for his New Deal-ish attitude of emboldening the wealth of little folks. He could have been a billionaire, but he didn’t keep his money. He donated his pile whenever it became unwieldy. Even though he was always set for life, Giannini died with less than $500,000, as was his philosophy.
The People’s Banker
When reflecting on his journey to articulate the life of A.P. Giannini, Fiore pointed back to his subject’s humble beginnings in San Jose and Alviso. It became easy to see where his reputation as the people’s banker came from.
Thanks to the horrific experiences of his youth, Giannini understood the ill effects money can have on certain people.
When Giannini’s dad ran the Swiss Hotel, he housed other immigrants who needed work. He transformed that income into land and decided to grow vegetables. At one point, Luigi Giannini owed a few bucks to one of his employees, or maybe just a friend. The guy killed him over it.
As a result of witnessing his dad’s murder, the young Giannini could have easily descended into a life of crime, but he didn’t. Ultimately, said Fiore, the results were constructive. He’d seen the evils of money first hand, exactly what led to his now-famous statement that no one should ever be allowed to have more than $500,000.
“Instead of becoming a criminal, and revenge, he decided to work hard,” Fiore said. “And when it was time, when he was old enough, he decided that money didn’t have to affect him. And so he was very open to the workers from the fields, the fishermen, miners, all the categories that he was able to help.”
One can even say Giannini had two dads. After the death of his biological father, his stepdad, Lorenzo Scatena, influenced the young A.P. even more.
“[A.P.] listened to him very carefully,” Fiore said. “He was really into that. He cared about [Scatena’s] opinion. And one of the things that Scatena said was, treat everybody the same way. You treat well the rich, you treat well the poor. That was his idea.”
Fiore is living proof that wandering the streets with curiosity is a productive act. The entire Bay Area, and Cinequest, can be thankful for that plaque in San Francisco.
Another good read. Thanks, Gary.