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Over the course of working on his documentary about pioneering banker A.P. Giannini, filmmaker Davide Fiore says he has come to regard the man like a grandfather. And given the important local projects that Giannini helped finance, he might also be described as one of the grandfathers of the Bay Area. Among those projects: the Golden Gate Bridge and providing capital to the founders of Hewlett-Packard.
But Giannini’s story isn’t as widely known as one might expect for all of the projects he touched. That’s what spurred Fiore to make a documentary about him.
Fiore’s film, “A Little Fellow: The Legacy of A.P. Giannini,” which chronicles Giannini’s unusual approach to business and his local and national impact, will screen March 13 at the Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival.
After Fiore, who is from Italy, moved to the Bay Area, he had been seeking a subject for a short film to demonstrate his work to the American market as he waited for his work permit. But the subject he stumbled upon quickly grew into a larger project.
He originally learned of Giannini’s story from a plaque on a building on Montgomery Street in San Francisco commemorating it as the headquarters of the Bank of Italy, the institution founded by Giannini that would later become Bank of America.
“The whole idea came out of the fact that I was curious, and I was looking for more news about him. I went to the library, got a lot of books, and I was just reading. Then I said, ‘OK, I want to see a documentary. I want to see a movie about him.’ And I couldn’t find anything,” Fiore recalled.
“It all started very small. To be fair, it was just a proof of concept for me to show what I was able to do. And really the moment I got to work … the project became bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Amadeo Peter Giannini was born in 1870 in San Jose to Italian immigrant parents. He lived in San Francisco before moving to San Mateo in 1905, where he would live until his death in 1949. His San Mateo home, Seven Oaks, still stands and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
“Even my producers — they are all Americans — when they heard (his) story, they were like, ‘Why don’t we study this guy (in history class)? Because we studied J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and we don’t study this guy that actually was very important for the American economy, because he introduced branch banking.’ There was no branch banking before him,” Fiore said.
Giannini was the first in the U.S. to popularize offering satellite branches of banks in various cities. But the title of Fiore’s film highlights what made Giannini’s work as a banker particularly unusual. Giannini worked for a time at a San Francisco bank where his father-in-law had ties, but he decided to leave and start his own financial institution when his fellow bankers balked at his idea of doing business with the area’s growing community of immigrants.
Soon after, in 1904, Giannini founded the Bank of Italy, which aimed to serve immigrants and other working people who hadn’t typically been welcomed by banks — including women, Fiore noted.
“He used to say that he was helping the little fellow all the time. When you read his biography, when you read his speeches, the people he helped were the little fellow. These are his words,” Fiore said, pointing out that Giannini was the first to implement innovations for the time such as printing brochures in other languages to better accommodate his immigrant customers and offering “women’s departments” staffed by female workers at a time when it was unusual for women to even have a bank account.
Right after the 1906 earthquake, Giannini quickly moved Bank of Italy deposits and records from San Francisco to his family home in San Mateo — concealing them in farm wagons to protect from theft, the story goes — and was able to begin operating again ahead of the city’s other banks. The move also gave him a head start on offering loans to local businesses looking to rebuild in San Francisco.
The Bay Area played a significant role in Giannini’s work, Fiore said.
“I think the region was very important, partially for the melting pot that the Bay Area has always been – so the fact that you had people from everywhere coming to this region to be part of something bigger. So it’s always been a very multicultural community and that was something very important to him,” Fiore said.
“Of course, the other side was the landscape of the Bay Area. The agricultural business was a very good business that wasn’t developed already. It was a wealthy area because of the gold rush. But they weren’t reinvesting that wealth into agriculture yet, and the land was very good for agriculture, right? So that played a big role.”
Fiore spent seven years working on “A Little Fellow” part-time, with the COVID-19 pandemic delaying the project. He combed through libraries and archives, including the Library of Congress, and found historians who could speak to Giannini’s legacy.
“Giannini became my Italian-American grandpa, because I went deep into these families, into archives, meeting a lot of people that knew him when they were kids,” Fiore said of his research.
He also was eventually able to contact Giannini’s family, and interview two of his granddaughters.
“They shared a lot of documents that were pretty impressive, because, literally, they had letters from Roosevelt. They had pictures with the Kennedys. It’s so funny that they went on a vacation with the Kennedys,” Fiore said, noting that these mementos included photos of President John F. Kennedy as a child, playing with young members of the Giannini family.
Even so, rubbing shoulders with bigwigs wasn’t really what Giannini was known for, Fiore points out, as the film title emphasizes.
“People commented that the thing for him was that you had to be a hard worker. They say that he checked the calluses on your hands. So if you were a hard worker, he gave you a loan,” Fiore said. “I think that he was looking at people, not as numbers, but as human beings.”
“A Little Fellow” shows March 13, 7:10 p.m., at Hammer Theatre Center, 111 Paseo De San Antonio, San Jose, as part of the Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival. Tickets are $14 per person and available at tickets.cinequest.org. The Cinequest festival runs March 11-23 at various venues in downtown San Jose. For more information, visit cinequest.org.
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