Decades before Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, the world had Anita Ekberg.

The Swedish actress shocked the public with her racy behaviour, manipulated the press into following her every move and, perhaps most importantly, inspired Federico Fellini, who cast her in his 1960 classic La Dolce Vita. The scandalous starlet instantly gained screen icon status.

Their collaboration is one of the many subjects explored in Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions, a summer exhibit by TIFF, opening Thursday.

Opening with a motion-detecting mural that turns visitors into paparazzi-fodder, the show surveys the Italian filmmaking legend's career and his explorations of celebrity culture, fame, scandal, artifice and fantasy.

The former caricaturist-turned-filmmaker was a sponge, soaking up the lively, romantic movie culture that thrived in Rome during the 1960s, a time when Hollywood and its stars flocked to the city.

"Any celebrity you can name found their way to the Via Veneto," Noah Cowan, artistic director of TIFF Bell Lightbox, told CBC News. "And what happens when you have a lot of stars in one place? You have a lot of celebrity photographers, of course. You also have a lot of bad behaviour"

Fellini is credited with coining the term "paparazzi," after he named La Dolce Vita's celebrity-chasing photographer Paparazzo. The filmmaker was a keen observer of celebrity culture, also depicted in his latter masterpiece, 8 ½.

Fellini "provided us with a very sophisticated frame with which to view [celebrity culture] and a very prescient one. He understood where our culture was moving and provided a really playful, but oddly scholarly lens with which to view it," Cowan said.

"Now, something that seems obscene without context or something that seems nearly obscene when it crops up — like Jersey Shore — actually becomes eminently understandable when one watches a Fellini film."

Cowan compares the infamous MTV reality show about crass, vacationing Italian-American youth to Fellini's early neorealist film I Vitelloni, which involves "a bunch of ruffian young boys and how they behave on the streets of Italy."

"[Fellini] puts it through this context of art and culture and the history of visual arts," he said, helping us comprehend "the excesses of the culture around us."

Celebrity central

The Toronto exhibit recreates Rome's famous avenue Via Veneto — a noted celebrity hangout in Fellini's time — in neon, plywood and scaffolding. In the 1960s, the city was the "cheapest place to make movies in the world," Cowan said, and drew stars from around the globe.

'All the great art cinema of the post-war period is becoming less well known here [and] there's a certain militancy we feel about reminding people of the importance of these films and filmmakers'— Noah Cowan

Photos, archival newspapers and magazines, news reels and video footage recreate the era, including one of its biggest tabloid scandals — and the inspiration for a key scene in La Dolce Vita.

During a party at the Italian restaurant Rugantino, Swedish actress Ekberg decided to heat things up by kicking offer her shoes, hiking up her skirt and delivering a sultry dance performance for her fellow trattoria patrons. An unknown Turkish dancer — unwilling to be outdone by the Swede — followed with a public striptease, with photos of the raunchy evening plastered onto the next day's newspapers.

Soon enough, the woman dubbed La Turca publicly pledged her repentance, Cowan said.

"The media loved the entire circus of it. The celebrity track of bad behaviour, followed by religious repentance, has now become a rather standard issue formula, but this was the first time we really saw that happen."

Paparazzi partnership

One wall of the exhibit is devoted to covers of Ekberg, the buxom former model-turned-actress and master media manipulator who became known for her strategic use of scandalous behaviour. She staged faux skirmishes with the photographers hounding her or purposely cavorted, partially clothed, in the Trevi Fountain — all to her advantage.

Although the partnership between actors and the paparazzi was cordial at first, the former's opinion of the latter soon turned to frustration and then violence. The Lightbox exhibit includes Marcello Geppetti's inspired image of Italian actor Franco Nero in the process of thrashing paparazzo Rino Barillari, prominently on display above a red, 1953 Moto Guzzi motorbike that was favoured by the insistent photographers as well as Fellini himself.

An annex to the show also explores two of the period's most influential photographers: Geppetti, whose celebrity snaps include the infamous shot confirming an affair between Elizabeth Taylor and her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton (she was married to Eddie Fisher at the time, he to movie producer Sybil Williams), and Arturo Zavattini, whose backstage access to La Dolce Vita made him a pioneer of on-set photography.

Other sections of Spectacular Obsessions delve into Fellini's regular collaborators, his use of music in his films and his Book of Dreams — in which he chronicled his vivid and colourful imaginings as per his psychotherapist's recommendations.

The Fellini exhibit was "jammed" when it debuted in Paris and also well-attended in other cities where it has toured (including Bologna, Madrid, Barcelona and Moscow), Cowan said. It has been somewhat redesigned for its display at TIFF Bell Lightbox with the goal to recreate the show in a North American context, he added.

"As it was first put forward, it was a less defined experience and more immersive right away. It also dealt with material that we either don't have access to or it just isn't very well known here," like Fellini's television work that aired in France and Italy, he said.

"All the great art cinema of the post-war period is becoming less well known here [and] there's a certain militancy we feel about reminding people of the importance of these films and filmmakers. We absolutely redesigned the show to make it as accessible as possible for people who are interested in Fellini and interested in how he might affect our culture today."

Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions runs to Sept. 18.