Billy Wilder

Started by i/o, April 30, 2003, 03:00:06 AM

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Split Infinitive

Just wondering if anybody has seen The Major and the Minor.  Besides a sharp script and an absolutely dynamite performance from Ginger Rogers, it really set the tone for the rest of his career to follow.  Wilder made a point of making subversive films that were so witty and dynamic that the mainstream audience swallowed it and loved it.  Essentially, his debut skirts issues of pedophilia, making the whole proceedings a bit creepy.  Great movie.  Some of his later, better known films dealth with gender issues, the Hollywood industry, and most especially, extramarital affairs.  Any thoughts on Wilder's subversiveness?  Did he go far enough to truly be considered subversive?
Please don't correct me. It makes me sick.

MacGuffin

Universal is FINALLY delivering a Double Indemnity: Special Edition on 8/29 ( SRP $26.98 ). It's only one of the greatest film noirs ever made, and it's been YEARS since the Image Entertainment DVD went out of print. Thankfully, your patience will be rewarded with a 2-disc set that's part of the Universal Legacy Series no less! Extras are TBA.


:onfire: :multi: :onfire: :multi: :onfire: :multi: :onfire: :multi: :onfire: :multi:
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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modage

thank GOD.  though this has been pushed back indefinitely so many times i'll believe it when i see it.  too bad most of the Legacy cover art is crappy.  and to think, if criterion had done this people might actually watch it.  :yabbse-undecided:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

MacGuffin

Quote from: modage on April 21, 2006, 08:27:07 PMtoo bad most of the Legacy cover art is crappy.



I kinda like it better than the original poster:

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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SiliasRuby

Looks like I might buy Double indemnity again, I love that film. One of the first original great film noirs of it's kind. The apartment and Sunset Boulvard are both pretty fabulous as well, Sunset especially. Can't wait to buy the new SE of Some like it Hot too.
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

MacGuffin

TCM Throws a Wild(er) Party!

Had that blasted pneumonia just left Billy Wilder alone, he would have turned 100 this June 22. (As it was, he made it to 96, which is pretty damn impressive.) In celebration of his centennial, Turner Classic Movies has planned a six-film series, starting on the 22nd with Double Indemnity, arguably Wilder's greatest achievement. The following day will feature five films, among them Sunset Blvd., Sabrina, and The Lost Weekend.

In addition to the mini-retrospective, TCM will also be offering something pretty special: A 90-minute interview with Wilder, edited down from three hours of footage that aired on German television in 1988. The TCM version of the interview is being called Billy Wilder Speaks and is described by the network as "a lesson in filmmaking, an oral history of the movie business and an intimate portrait of one of cinema's most talented masters." According to Variety, the interview footage (Which doesn't appear to have ever aired in the US before) is particularly valuable because Wilder, told that his words wouldn't be available in the US until after his death, was reportedly unusually frank in some of his comments.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

modage

Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Bethie

I am staying home that day.  Wilder is my favourite director.
who likes movies anyway

Pubrick

Quote from: Bethie on May 27, 2006, 12:33:32 AM
Wilder is my favourite director.
i see you've been talking to cbrad again.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

Playing by his rules
Billy Wilder told me which camera angles to avoid, what shoes to buy, what to eat, and to never be boring.
By Volker Schlöndorff, Special to The Los Angeles Times

"Are we boring you?" Billy Wilder turned to ask his rapt Sunday guests, before returning to the saucy conversation he was having with screen legend Marlene Dietrich.

"Your violin teacher, was he before or after the aging actor?" Wilder asked, trying to catch up with her catalog of lovers.

"Before, of course, but there was a woman in between," she responded.

"Fritzi Massary?"

"Yes, I think it was her."

"I'll never get your affairs straight," Wilder said, before turning back to his guests and once again asking, "Are we boring you?"

It was Wilder's First Commandment: Never bore anyone! Neither in front of the camera nor behind it, neither in the screening nor drawing room, not on the phone nor in a restaurant. Wilder on the set — a battered cap perched rakishly on his head, pacing restlessly back and forth, dispatching witty remarks right and left, single-handedly entertaining his entire team: This is how I remember him, from our first meeting in 1976, during the shooting of "Fedora," his second-to-last film.

He was already 70 at the time, vivacious and chipper — and if not quite wise, at least no longer caustic. He did not direct his leads, he performed with them, palavering in French with Marthe Keller, in Berlin dialect with Hildegard Knef, and in Brooklyn slang with William Holden. Rather than acting out a scene himself to indicate what he was looking for, he used ironic exaggeration. It is my hope to someday achieve his seemingly carefree levity. For as different as our personalities and films may be, he has always been my role model.

I still remember how proud I was the day I received a letter from him. He had seen "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" and he wrote, "... simply the best German picture since Fritz Lang's 'M.' " I drafted one reply after another — but, in the end, I was too embarrassed to send anything. Then, one day, I got a chiding call from Wilder's agent: "He sent you a fan letter months ago, which you didn't even seem to feel the need to reply to. Mr. Wilder is in Munich, staying in the Four Seasons Hotel. Come and apologize!"

I did. Then, whenever I could, I went to watch him on the set of "Fedora." Scurrying between the camera and actors, he gave out small lessons in filmmaking. Comedies, he said, are like Swiss clockwork: Just as one gear wheel locks into another, each rejoinder drives the next; the straight line must be delivered clearly before the punch line, then a short pause for laughter, followed by another punch line to redouble the laughter and to keep it going. Nothing is worse than sporadic laughter — only roaring, continuous laughter brings down the house.

As long as he was making jokes, he did not have to talk to anyone on the set. He never wanted to be a confessor, shrink or father-figure. Deflecting every serious moment with a joke, Wilder gained a reputation as a cynic. But for him it was only a question of dignity: The really serious things we should keep to ourselves.

I wanted to learn from Billy Wilder the way he had been inspired by German director Ernst Lubitsch. (As the sign written in large calligraphic letters on the wall of Wilder's office asked, "How would Lubitsch do it?")

But what did I have in common with Billy Wilder? Next to nothing, if you consider our films, except maybe our predilection for journalists as movie characters. And yet, we were friends for 25 years, until his death in 2002. We often discussed films, and he was always full of stories, tricks, rules, answers. He had rules for every situation in life, in a script and on the set: how something should be done, and what should not be done under any circumstances. What shoes you should buy and where. What you should eat. What cut you should never make, and what camera angle you should never use (worm's-eye view or from a chandelier). What an actor cannot express without looking stupid (a sudden realization). What is indecent to show (a close-up of a person who has just learned of a friend's or relative's death).

I had always wanted to make a compilation of all these rules, to put together a little handbook of "Filmmaking According to Billy Wilder." But when I would suggest bringing along a camera, he would talk me out of it.

Until one morning in January 1988, at around 9:30 a.m., I met Mr. Wilder, then 81, on the way to his small office on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was really more of a writer's studio. At the time, Wilder was working on a book with German writer Hellmuth Karasek. I asked if I could join them with a little camera, and he finally agreed. Just as he had wished, my conversations with Wilder remained under lock and key during his lifetime. He gave me permission to show them in the United States only after his death: "Who cares what people think of me then?" he had said.

On the move

BORN in 1906 in Sucha, a section of Poland that was then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Wilder's family moved to Vienna when he was a young boy. Wilder was 19 when he left there, dropping his law studies in the middle of his first semester to follow an American jazz band to Berlin as a self-proclaimed press attaché.

In Berlin, he proceeded to scrape by as a journalist before turning to screenwriting with "Emil and the Detectives," among others. In 1933, he fled first to Paris, where he even directed a film, "Mauvaise graine," but it was such a terrible experience that he rarely talked about it.

Then, at last, he got his chance to leave for America.

Unlike many of his fellow emigrants, Wilder never felt as if he was in exile in Hollywood. To the contrary: It was a dream come true. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the American popular culture, pulp, sports and radio above all. Within months, he was already collaborating on screenplays, the best known being Lubitsch's "Ninotchka" with Greta Garbo.

The action of Lubitsch's American films was always set in Europe, wheras Wilder felt like enough of an American citizen to make American movies right from the start. He had clear, often inconvenient political convictions, partook in community life, made generous donations — and even opened a restaurant in Beverly Hills.

By contrast, Wilder hated hospitals, and cemeteries were his worst nightmare. Even so, he took me to Lubitsch's grave to show me that his secretary really had been buried at the master's feet — "in case he needs to dictate something to her."

Wilder had seen more than enough corpses in 1945, when he had worked with the Allies to document the liberation of the camps. It was extremely important to him, "so that later on no one can claim that those Jews in Hollywood made it up"; and no doubt also because his mother and his entire Austrian family were among those killed.

Wilder made an uncharacteristic film, "Death Mills," a documentary about the German concentration camps, to be shown in that country. Germans, however, did not want to see this unflinching film. Wilder suggested to authorities that they coax people to watch the film before receiving their food stamps. To get viewer feedback, he organized a preview and provided paper and pencils.

"At the end of the screening, there was nobody left in the theater," Wilder recounted, "and all the pencils had been stolen."

Soon, the director himself ironically made light of these attempts at reeducation in "A Foreign Affair" with Dietrich. He was fascinated by her: "She was sharp, deft and practical. Not a great actress, no — it was all in her presence." According to Wilder, the femme fatale with her feather boas, fake eyelashes, high cheekbones and long legs was always just a persona. At home, Dietrich scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees, fried eggs and potatoes, and doctored partners and stagehands with homemade remedies for hangovers and colds. He called her "Mother Teresa, with better legs." And because she was so down-to-earth, she, unlike Marilyn Monroe, became a close friend.What may have connected them most was that they both became Americans because of their democratic convictions. U.S. passport in hand, they became even more adamant in their demand for a better Germany — she dressed up as a vamp, he as a clown.

"Nobody's perfect." The last line of "Some Like It Hot," originally just a provisional punch line, became a virtual motto, Wilder's Weltanschauung in a nutshell.

And while nobody may be perfect, his films are.

Monroe's character, who simply does not understand why everyone keeps ogling her bosom and curves, is a wonderful creature, lovingly and tenderly depicted by the pen of Wilder and his scriptwriter I.A.L. Diamond. It isn't the blond who's the fool — it's the men coming on to her who are. And this even though the director hardly had an easy time of it with her. Monroe had a nervous breakdown on the set, which her husband at the time, playwright Arthur Miller, blamed on Wilder. Wilder retorted that his job was to be a director, not a nurse. Then she miscarried. "I had no way of knowing that she was pregnant," Wilder apologized years later. "He simply should have told me that she was pregnant. I've never been as patient as I was while shooting 'Some Like It Hot,' but I'm not a doctor and a studio isn't a clinic."

"Many actresses were more reliable and had a better grasp of technique — Shirley MacLaine, for example. But no one was as convincing or had better timing."

I was friends with both Wilder and Miller, so I heard both sides of the story. "He was a bastard," Miller told me tersely on the set of "Death of a Salesman," which I shot in New York in 1985. Wilder's response the next time I saw him in Los Angeles was, "How can you stand being with that moralizer?! And that salesman who does nothing but schlepping, complaining and whining, whining...."

"Arthur," I replied, "has a great sense of humor."

"But," Billy shot back, "he's not funny."

Quiet on the set

ACTORS who worked with Wilder loved him — above all Audrey Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Holden. "Never raise your voice on the set," cautioned Wilder. "Don't even let conflicts come up — nip them right in the bud. In every face-off there's always a loser, whether it's the director or the actor. That hurts the film and ultimately everyone involved in it, winner and loser alike."

The laconic Yankee — embodied perfectly by Holden, Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart — became Wilder's alter ego. In his early Hollywood years, during the war, his enthusiasm for the United States was boundless, and he hid his sarcasm under a smooth façade. It was only after the war, when the smugness and bigotry of the McCarthy era gained the upper hand, that Wilder became caustic ("Sunset Blvd."), attacking the press ("The Big Carnival," a.k.a. "Ace in the Hole") and deriding both the bourgeoisie ("The Seven Year Itch," "Kiss Me Stupid") and all the Cold War posturing ("One, Two, Three").

His heroes then became Lemmon and Matthau. In the eyes of most Americans — especially moral and religious watchdogs, women's associations and the respectability-craving nouveau-riche California establishment — this was going too far. Yet Wilder refused to give in.

In Wilder's world, there were the power-hungry and those who were left behind — usually because they chose the good at a critical moment: "In the third act, the hero should have a choice and, hopefully, make the right one."

In "The Apartment," Lemmon's character can either become his boss' accomplice and rise through the ranks or stop lending out his apartment for affairs and be fired. It's inevitable — decency goes unrewarded, no good deed remains unpunished.

To call Wilder a cynic for this would be absurd. He had decidedly moral expectations of himself and of us.

When "Stalag 17" was to be released in Germany, Paramount asked him to change the traitor from German to Polish, just for the German market. Wilder felt so insulted, after all the Germans had done to Poland, that he not only refused but asked for an apology. As none was offered, he packed his things and left Paramount after 18 years of great work. Today, a building there bears his name. But he was proud that he never sacrificed the truth nor spread lies in his films.

That said, he would advise me: "You can't tell the truth flat-out. Dip it in a bit of chocolate."

Art, alongside film and even more than sports and politics, was his passion. Even in his early years in Berlin, he invested money in art, starting with posters, ending up with Picassos. His apartment looked like a museum, and there were even paintings propped up in the halls.

When he auctioned off his collection in the late '80s, it brought in some $33 million. "I earned more in 35 minutes than with all my films over 50 years of work," he remarked and then invited me to join him for dinner on the Upper East Side.

He liked to talk about his films — not to flatter himself but to figure out what made them tick and where the clockwork got stuck. The most important thing is not to "keep making the same film, like Hitchcock," he said. "Make something different every time."

In the end, I managed to "wangle" 30 hours of conversation out of Wilder. He speaks candidly, interrupting himself to answer the phone, scratching his back, whirling around on his swivel chair like Audrey Hepburn in "Sabrina."

In winter 1992, I showed him three hours' worth of edited material. He watched patiently. After a long silence, he asked, "What does this show us?"

"I think it's a wonderful manual for filmmaking and for life in general," I offered.

He retorted: "What this shows us is that you should never give an interview on a swivel chair. Also, you shouldn't talk so much with your hands if you have a mouth. And above all never use a back-scratcher during an interview! It just does not look dignified."

Schlöndorff lives in Germany and has directed such films as 1979's "The Tin Drum," which won the Academy Award for foreign film, and the upcoming "Strajk." This article was translated by Sophie Schlöndorff.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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grand theft sparrow


MacGuffin

Quote from: MacGuffin on May 26, 2006, 04:51:28 PMIn addition to the mini-retrospective, TCM will also be offering something pretty special: A 90-minute interview with Wilder, edited down from three hours of footage that aired on German television in 1988. The TCM version of the interview is being called Billy Wilder Speaks and is described by the network as "a lesson in filmmaking, an oral history of the movie business and an intimate portrait of one of cinema's most talented masters." According to Variety, the interview footage (Which doesn't appear to have ever aired in the US before) is particularly valuable because Wilder, told that his words wouldn't be available in the US until after his death, was reportedly unusually frank in some of his comments.

Reminder: This airs today on TCM @ 8pm and 11:30pm ET/PT
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

modage

Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

MacGuffin

Quote from: MacGuffin on April 21, 2006, 05:54:15 PMExtras are TBA.

The Double Indemnity (Special Edition) DVD will feature the following bonus materials:

Introduction by Robert Osborne
Shadows of Suspense Featurette
Audio Commentary with film historian Richard Schickel
Audio Commentary with film historian/screenwriter Lem Dobbs and film historian Nick Redman.
Double Indemnity TV Movie (1973)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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grand theft sparrow

Quote from: MacGuffin on June 22, 2006, 05:15:00 PM
Audio Commentary with film historian/screenwriter Lem Dobbs

Is he going to spend the whole time bitching about how Wilder changed everything Raymond Chandler had accomplished with the script?