If a director tried to film the events that took Wolfpack forward Mario Faranda from his birthplace in Peru; to his grandfather’s picturesque, seaside hometown in Chiavari, Italy; to prep school and his first love in Bay St. Louis, Miss.; to playing basketball in New Orleans for Loyola, audiences would shake their heads and say, “Only in the movies.”

So it’s a good thing that the finance junior has loved films since he was eight, when he’d ditch his buddies and cozy up next to his grandfather and watch them on late-night Peruvian television.

But nothing compares to the theater in Elmwood, a 10-minute ride from Cabra Hall down the Earhart Expressway, where Faranda says he’d live if they let him.

If only ticket stubs to “Glory Road,” “Sideways,” “Star Wars: Episode III” and 39 others that were in a shoebox under his bed, priced $5.50 a trot, were valid currency for a cot in one of the projector rooms.

It’s just something about the way moviegoers who don’t know each other come together and cry in front of each other, or make a movie funnier or scarier because of their reactions to moving pictures in a darkened room, Faranda says.

The scene where the father, marching off to his death, makes his little boy chuckle one last time to mask the gravity of the situation at the end of “Life is Beautiful,” his favorite movie.

The “A Whole New World” magic carpet ride in “Aladdin,” the first movie he remembers seeing in a theater.

They get him every time.

And why wouldn’t they? Basketball, wanting to make his parents Aldo and Antonella’s (still in Chiavari) efforts to get him to the United States worthwhile and wanting to be an example for his kid sister Luciana opened one up for him.

But it wasn’t just a whole new world, he sheepishly grinned. It also snagged him Ashley Ladner – his first leading lady.

ACROSS THE POND

One day during his freshman year in high school, Faranda sat in a study hall in St. Stanislaus, a boarding school in Bay St. Louis. The room was quiet as students concentrated on their work, but Faranda couldn’t process a word of what was before him on his desk – his mind and heart were across the Atlantic, and he’d just about had enough of being in Mississippi.

Life was beautiful in Peru – not in the loneliness of Stanislaus’ dorms, where in his first year living in America he “had no close friends that could take (him) out.”

In Peru, on every Sunday without fail, generations of Farandas would flock to a long table in his grandfather’s house for an afternoon brunch.

They’d chatter about Universitario – his grandfather’s favorite soccer team – or they’d listen to the Faranda patriarch recount tales of World War II bombings that expelled him from the seaside haven he was from to seek refuge in Peru.

Or how he’d denounce Peru’s politicians as crooks.

“Of course, in Peru, most of them were,” Faranda joked.

So much so that they weakened the country’s economy, spooking Aldo and Antonella into seeking safer jobs and a more secure existence in Italy, taking Mario (age 11) and Luciana with them.

Life was beautiful in the Italian seaside haven, where Mario spent his days at school, or playing soccer at the park with his friends or with his aunts, carousing atop the beachfront’s cobble boardwalks, bumming on the sands, gazing at verdant hilltops lining Chiavari’s horizon; and where he spent his nights watching (of course) movies or playing basketball for a club in Repalo, Italy.

It was basketball that got him noticed by the Italian junior national team.

The 6-foot-4 kid had the post prowess of someone 6-foot-9 – he somehow played bigger than he was, a role he still revels in.

And that team took him yards away from the glass pyramid outside of the Louvre in Paris during a tournament, a whole new world.

But even then, life wasn’t beautiful enough to allay the allure of the American dream, of chiseling a name out on U.S. wood floors, of convincing Aldo and Antonella to unbridle him and his pursuit for another whole new world.

“We found a Catholic boarding school we looked up on the Internet. Because my parents were Catholic, they liked its discipline, with 150 years of history associated with the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. So they sent me there,” he said.

There, to Bay St. Louis – a whole new world.

TREKKING ON

Faranda snapped up from his desk, storming out the classroom to the phone in the hallway.

He dialed his parents in Italy, not sure of what he was going to say. He knew he couldn’t go home, not after all the trouble it took to ship him to Mississippi, not after his parents spent up to $350 on school uniforms alone.

But basketball season was over. There was no rush from playing in games – just studying and movies.

Maybe he just needed to hear their voice.

“I just talked to them. I never told them I wasn’t okay where I was to not make them worry. I told them I was all right,” he remembered.

Faranda treasured that his parents told their friends in Italy about their son chasing the American Dream.

He knew one day Luciana would run into a hard class in college, or an unreasonable professor once she was older, and Faranda wasn’t about to show her that he resolved adversity by quitting.

So he hung up the phone and refocused, deciding to hang around Stanislaus long enough to become a star forward by his junior season.

“Bay St. Louis is a small town. So people started to recognize me.”

Among them was Ashley Ladner and she, like any all-American dream girl, made the loneliness oh-so-bearable.

THE LEADING LADY

Faranda once grew an Afro so Amazonic that the Stanislaus coach told him, “You’re not playing with that thing unless you cut it.”

Always a team player, Faranda did – while his team loaded the buses for a game, Faranda sped across a parking lot into a Supercuts and got a “two-minute haircut.”

“It was all uneven and terrible. Just terrible,” he said, chuckling.

So his coach allowed him to take the floor, and Faranda made the most of it.

But what caught the eye of Ashley Ladner, cousin of Faranda’s teammate Philman Ladner, wasn’t the rebounds he ripped down or the baskets he finished.

It was the two-minute haircut.

“She told Philman, ‘Hey, did Mario get a new haircut? Tell him I said hi.”

And then she wrote him a note: “Hey, you played a really good game the other night. Maybe we should talk sometime.”

So they did, and Faranda was hers.

“We talked on the phone everyday. On weekends, I’d stay at Philman’s house in Kiln (Miss.) so I could spend time with her. She made me completely forget about homesickness.”

Crawfish boils. Jet-skiing on the Jordan River. Barbecues in the Mississippi spring with his arm around his dream girl. Prep basketball stardom. Stanford, then No. 1 in the NCAA, seeking his services as a post-player via telephone. A letter, personally written and signed by Penn State assistant coach Hilliary Scott, wishing him a Merry Christmas and concluding: “I’m looking forward to seeing your game tapes. Good luck with the season and we will talk soon.”

“Man, for a while, I remember thinking that my life was perfect,” he said.

PLOT TWIST

Mario Faranda recorded a perfect start against Gulfport High School his senior year.

Two minutes into the second quarter, he’d amassed 11 points and five rebounds against Stanislaus’ fiercest rivals.

Inspired, he zealously chased a rebound from a missed Gulfport shot.

“My ankles were taped really tight, so when I landed, my knee gave out,” he said.

His spill silenced the gym and sickened him.

“It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. It was disgusting. My knee was destroyed.”

It made the homesickness seem like a breeze.

So, cutting to the next scene, Faranda found himself mired in rehab, thoughts of a senior season ending in a nightmare haunting him.

He wanted his movie about the American Dream, about prep school in a whole new world, to end just right – so he turned down No. 1 Stanford’s courtiers and respectfully denied Penn State’s offer.

He was going to return to Stanislaus for a second senior season – an administrative error enrolled him as a sophomore instead of a freshman when he transferred from his school in Italy, so he opted for another year in Bay St. Louis.

Faranda was going to end it right – by winning a Mississippi state championship as a thank-you to his coach and to his parents and for Bay St. Louis and to make his beloved Luciana proud.

“That killed my chances for a scholarship,” Faranda admitted.

The problem was, Stanislaus athletics regretfully told him he couldn’t play two senior seasons.

THE BIG EASY BECKONS

Faranda flew home to Italy for the summer after his senior year, uncertain of the future. He knew he still cared about Ashley and that he still needed to play basketball, both of which were in America.

But he’d turned away marquee NCAA suitors and they’d long since filled their vacancies.

His parents had the mind to enroll him in Italy, thus waking Faranda up from his American Dream prematurely.

Until a gentleman by the name of Michael Giorlando, in charge of a tiny NAIA program for a small school in New Orleans, phoned Chiavari.

“I didn’t want to live in Italy after living here, and I was still with Ashley, so I absolutely wanted to come back,” Faranda remembers.

“Coach (Giorlando) said he was new at Loyola and that he had one scholarship left. And I took it right away.” Anything to end the movie right.

He implored coach Giorlando to fax his commitment papers to his mother’s restaurant, residence of the only fax machine the Farandas owned in Italy. Giorlando, eager to lock up a post player of Faranda’s caliber, concurred.

“I signed the papers in the kitchen of my mom’s restaurant. My mom’s cooking in the background, and I’m filling out the paperwork. I had never even visited Loyola.”

And the rest, he says, “is history.”

Faranda flew from Chiavari once more – to a suite in Cabra Hall with teammates Luke Zumo (who drives Mario to the movies in his car) and Bear Wurts (who says Mario loves movies so much he knows what trailers will run beforehand, from what studio and grows irate whenever they miss them) to taking classes in Miller Hall and playing basketball in The Den on the fifth floor of the Freret Street garage.

THE PERFECT ENDING

Mario Faranda’s filmed some trying scenes since he’s been here: He had to overcome a torn anterior cruciate ligament his freshman season the very first time he scrimmaged his new teammates, thus undergoing a grueling six-month rehab – leg presses, lunges, medicine balls.

On top of rehab, the struggles of adjusting to freshman year in college (new people, an overwhelming course load and no transportation out of the city) drove him and his leading lady apart.

And Faranda admits he’s undecided on the ending.

“Ideally, I want the Wolfpack to win a national championship,” he professed in a tone of utmost sincerity and intent.

When Faranda talks about filming the alternate one, however, he does so in the same tone.

He’d live somewhere in an Italian villa on the lake, like the one he just saw in “Casino Royale,” the husband of someone he loves and the patriarch of another generation of Farandas.

“It was always amazing to me that because I could put a rubber ball in a hoop, it’s gotten me to high school in America, to college here, opportunities all over the world and probably my first girlfriend,” he reflected.

Putting a rubber ball in a hoop, he hopes, might give him one more opportunity: “As soon as the goal of making my parents proud is done, whenever that is, I want to make my sons or my daughters proud.

“You know how, if your dad can do something, you thought he was the greatest thing? I hope that if my son saw me dunk it just one time, one time,” he said, before he paused. “He’d be like, ‘Oh God. My dad’s friggin’ amazing.'”

Fade to black and roll credits.

Ramon Vargas can be reached at [email protected].

Chiavari, Italy (Photo Courtesy of Mario Faranda)

Movies have been basketball star Mario Faranda’s favorite off-cout activity since he was 8-years-old. When he lived in Peru, he’d watch them on late-night television with his grandfather. (Steve Kashishian)