During his fifth year with the police, Mangiamele studied journalism at Rome University, 'learning to see the essentials, to use the minimum of words', a principle he was to apply to his Australian filmmaking.
The released version of The Spag won an Honourable Mention in the 1962 AFI Awards, the judges calling it 'a remarkable attempt at creative filmmaking'.
Ninety Nine Per Cent blends the influences of Italian stage farce and the knockabout comedy of silent era and silent-influenced films including the 1940s–1960s features of French director-actor Jacques Tati.
Clay employed a mixture of Australian and European-born actors in a story of a man on the run from police who falls in love with the woman who shelters him.
[7] Mangiamele continued to earn a living as a portrait and event photographer, and worked as a cinecameraman for Tim Burstall, shooting 13 episodes of the Sebastian the Fox (1963) TV series, and documentaries on the artworks of Gil Jamieson and Matcham Skipper.
Mangiamele met his first wife, Dorotea Hofmann (born 20 May 1922, in Leipzig, Germany), at the Rushworth Migrant Camp in Victoria after migrating to Australia in 1952.
Mangiamele married occupational therapist (and later, abstract painter) Rosemary Cuming (born 19 October 1943, in Melbourne) in New Guinea in 1979, a year after they first met in Carlton.