Billy Wilder

Samuel Wilder, known as Billy Wilder (Sucha, Austro-Hungarian Empire, June 22, 1906 – Hollywood, United States, March 27, 2002), was a American film director, screenwriter and producer of Austrian-Jewish origin, six-time Oscar winner (one as producer, two as best director and three as best screenwriter).

The undisputed master of American comedy of the 1950s and 1960s, Billy Wilder was able to impose a self-righteous and caustic style. He invoked controversial themes in his comedy films and attempted to challenge mainstream opinion and Anglo-Saxon puritanism. His talents are not limited to comedy, he also excels in film noir and period films.

Biography

Childhood and years in Europe

Samuel Wilder (Hebrew Shmuel Vildr, שמואל וִילדֶר‎), German pronunciation: /ˈvɪldɐ/; in English /ˈwaɪl dər/) was born on June 22, 1906 in the bosom of a Polish Jewish family in Sucha Beskidzka, a small town that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Eugenia (maiden name Dittler) and Max Wilder. His name is & # 34; Billie & # 34; she took it from his mother (and that he changed when he came to the US). His older brother, William Lee Wilder (1904–1982), was also a screenwriter, producer, and director. His parents ran a renowned restaurant in the Sucha railway station. She tried to convince him to join the family business but to no avail. Soon after, the family moves to Vienna, where Wilder went to school. During his course at the University of Vienna, Wilder launched into journalism. His first job was as a columnist for the Austrian newspaper Juranek. In 1926, jazz band leader Paul Whiteman was on tour in Vienna, when he was interviewed by Wilder, a fan of the band. Whiteman took a liking to the young Wilder and took him with him to Berlin, where Wilder made contacts with people of show business. There, before succeeding as a writer, he worked as a dancer in Berlin, where he became fond of cinema, after seeing various films that deeply impressed him.

After writing crime and sports stories for different local newspapers, he was offered a regular job at a Berlin tabloid. But he was still interested in cinema, so he started working as a screenwriter for the Universum Film AG (UFA).^{[citation needed]} He collaborated for illustrious directors of the moment but also for "newbies" who would eventually also be important (as Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak) in his film Menschen am Sonntag (Menschen am Sonntag) in 1929. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1931 adaptation of the novel by Erich Kästner, Emilio and the detectives. In 1932 Wilder collaborated with the writer and screenwriter Felix Salten on the screenplay for "Scampolo".

After Adolf Hitler came to power, Wilder was forced to leave Berlin, due to his Jewish ancestry. His mother would die in the Auschwitz concentration camps. He was in Paris, where he made his directorial debut with Mauvaise Graine (1934) and that same year he emigrated to the United States, along with actor Peter Lorre.

Her time in Hollywood

Wilder and Lorre shared an apartment, hunger and very difficult times for a while. He even had to be in Mexico for six months when his visa expired, an episode that he carried over into the script he wrote for Mitchell Leisen in 1941 Si no amaneciera .He became a US citizen in 1939.

He began working as a screenwriter for Paramount, and had the opportunity to collaborate with Ernst Lubitsch, his great teacher. The latter's funeral was attended by, among others, Wilder and his colleague and friend William Wyler. When leaving the same, both commented: "We have run out of Lubitsch". "Worse still, we have run out of Lubitsch films". 1939. This romantic comedy starring Greta Garbo (an actress best known for her dramatic roles) was acclaimed by critics and audiences. With the hook of & # 34; Garbo laughs! & # 34;, it gave Garbo the possibility to take another direction to her career. This earned Wilder his first Oscar nomination, which he shared with his partner Charles Brackett. From 1938 to 1950, Wilder wrote many of his screenplays with him. Ninotchka was followed by a string of commercial successes such as If It Didn't Dawn and Ball of Fire, as well as his Hollywood directorial debut, i>The major and the minor.

Wilder (in the middle) with Charles Brackett and Doane Harrison on the shooting The sun and the smallest (1942)

His third film as director, Doom (1944) was his first major success. A film noir , for which he earned his first Oscar nomination for Best Director and Screenplay, which was co-written with novelist Raymond Chandler, who was making his debut as a screenwriter. Their relationship was never good. As Wilder said,

Chandler couldn't see me. First there was my German accent, which he detested. Second, I knew better the tools we had to use. I was young and I was dating pretty girls. All that made him mad. (...) Because that was the first vase he moulded and I had already made thousands of pieces."

Doom not only established conventions for the noir genre (such as lighting "venetian blinds" or voice-over narration), but it was also a milestone in the battle against Hollywood censorship. James M. Cain's original novel Double Indemnity featured two love triangles and a matter to collect insurance money. Although the book was a bestseller, it was deemed impossible to film under the Hays Code, because adultery was the central theme of the plot. Double Indemnity is considered by some to be the first true exemplar of film noir, combining the stylistic elements of Citizen Kane with the narrative elements of The Maltese Falcon (1941).

During the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, the Psychological Warfare Department (PWD) produced a propaganda documentary directed by Billy Wilder. The film known as Death Mills, or Die Todesmühlen in German, was intended for German audiences to teach them about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. For the German version, "Die Todesmühlen," Hanuš Burger is credited as the writer and director, while Wilder supervised editing. Wilder is credited for the English version.

Two years later, Wilder won his first Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay for his screen adaptation of the Charles R. Jackson story Days Without a Footprint (1945), one of the most better films that describe the problem of alcoholism, a subject that he returned to in Hays Code.

The 50s: Wilder's most inspiring time

In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the dark and cynical Twilight of the Gods, starring rising star William Holden and half-forgotten veteran Gloria Swanson. Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a former silent film star who lives in seclusion in her mansion, with delusions of her grandeur of a bygone era and dreams of an artistic comeback. Holden plays an aspiring screenwriter who can't make ends meet and becomes something of a gigolo to her. It was critically acclaimed and marked the end of Wilder's long writing partnership with Charles Brackett. In 1951, Wilder followed with The Great Carnival, a story of media exploitation of a spelunking accident. The idea for the film had been raised by telephone with Wilder's secretary Victor Desny. Desny sued Wilder for breach of implied contract in the California copyright case Wilder v Desny , eventually settling $14,350 in damages. criticism, his reputation has grown over the years.

In the early 1950s, Wilder directed two Broadway adaptations, the prisoner of a war drama Traitor in Hell (Stalag 17) (1953), a role in which William Holden won the Best Actor Oscar for the play based on Agatha Christie's short story Witness for the Prosecution (1957). After this, Wilder became interested in making movies in slapstick comedies. He first considered, and turned down, a project to star in a Laurel and Hardy film. He then had some talk with Groucho Marx about directing a new Marx Brothers comedy, tentatively titled 'A Day at the UN'. This project was abandoned when Chico Marx died in 1961.

In the second half of the 50s, Wilder focused especially on comedies. He would start this series with a romantic comedy Sabrina and another more spicy one like Temptation lives upstairs (1955), where he works for the first time with Marilyn Monroe and where he creates one of the most iconic images in cinema with Monroe lifting her skirts through the air on the Lexington Avenue subway. Wilder then switched registers for more sardonic humor with Ariane (1957), in which an innocent young woman (Audrey Hepburn) pretends to be a married woman seeking extramarital fun with a playboy (Gary Cooper). The film was Wilder's first collaboration with writer-producer I.A.L. Diamond, a partnership he continued until the end of his career.

In 1959, United Artists released Skirts and Crazy without the code seal of approval, which had held it back for the film's blatant sexual comedy based on cross-dressing. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play musicians who disguise themselves as women to escape persecution by a Chicago gang. Curtis's character woos a singer played by Marilyn Monroe, while Lemmon is wooed by Joe E. Brown setting up the final gag of the film in which Lemmon reveals his character is a man and Brown gently replies "Well, nobody is perfect". The film was a box office success. Although it was considered a light comedy, its critical reputation grew prodigiously.

This film is especially remembered for the bad relationship that existed between Wilder and Monroe during filming. Wilder remembered that

What I was desperate was the fact that I was always too late and that I could only retain his texts with a lot of difficulty. These elements of insecurity can be counted. What you can't count on is insecurity within insecurity. (...) The scene where Sugar is disappointed and sad, goes to Curtis and Lemmon's hotel room and desperately wants to drink again. And I just had to say "Where is the Bourbon?" We had to roll it 65 times. (...) And we begin to write to him the sentences at the door. We'd put paper on each of the drawers. "

Despite that, their relationship became cordial again although he would never work with her again. In fact, Wilder commented of her that

There are more Marilyn books than World War II. There's a certain similarity between you and me. It was hell but it was worth it."

His last big hit of this decade was The Apartment in 1960. A hit with audiences and critics alike (although some critics, such as Brendan Gill of The New Yorker he thought it scandalous that a character who left his apartment for a brothel for bosses would be praised). In fact, he was the first filmmaker to win three Oscars for the same film (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay).

Rights and wrongs in the final stage

Plate dedicated to Billy Wilder in Berlin.

In the 1960s, Wilder's slow decline would begin. Although she could have certain blockbusters, these alternated with flops (some of them quite high-profile). In 1961, he would shoot One, Two, Three, a frantic political satire of a Berlin-based American Coca-Cola sales director (James Cagney) watching his boss's daughter secretly marry a fanatic. young communist from East Berlin. The filming curiously coincided with the raising of the Berlin wall on August 13. For this reason, the shots that Wilder planned to shoot at the Brandenburg Gate were eventually filmed at the Bavaria studios in Munich, where a replica of the monument was built. In any case, the film would not attract audiences to the rooms and it was a total failure. Cagney was also very disappointed, who withdrew from the world of cinema and would not return until twenty years later.

Wilder cast his two favorite actors from his big movie three years ago (Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine) as the lead pairing of Sweet Irma, a musical comedy that the director cut all but one of its musical numbers. The film became a box office success, although the Legion of Decency, which gave it a B rating, considering it indecent. That success was not repeated in his next film: Kiss me silly . The title role began with Peter Sellers but he suffered a heart attack and was replaced by Ray Waltson. But neither Waltson, at that time a very renowned comedian for the series My favorite Martian nor Kim Novak nor Dean Martin nor Wilder's own style could revive this film in the eyes of the public and critics.

In 1966, Wilder would unite for the first time one of the most identifiable comedic couples in film history. He once again chose his fetish actor Jack Lemmon to share the lead with Walter Matthau, who had already unsuccessfully tried to make him be Monroe's partner in Temptation Lives Upstairs , in On a Silver Platter . The role of both characters would be a constant in the later comedies by Lemmon and Matthau with Wilder or other directors. Lemmon's is always described as an insecure, unhappy or naive character who is attracted to the poise and cheeky verbiage of the character played by Matthau who always borders on fraud, excessive ambition or crime. The chemistry between the actors and the director was so incredible that not only did they repeat projects together (such as Primera flata or A friend here ) but according to Wilder's words, it was forged a great friendship. He saw Matthau a couple of times a week and Lemmon usually came too. In addition, On a silver platter would give him his last Oscar nomination (in the Best Original Screenplay category).

Billy Wilder (right) with Richard Brooks, Bo Goldman and Gore Vidal on the Guild of Guionists strike in 1981

The 1970s consolidated Wilder's loss of influence both critically and at the box office. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is an example of a non-comedy film from this period by Wilder, which was a true box office flop. It was followed by What happened between my father and your mother? (1972), Primera flata (1974) and Fedora (1978), the latter a frustrated attempt to recover the plot of the setting of a star impregnated in The twilight of the gods.

In 1981, he directed his last film, Here, a friend. From then on, insurance companies no longer wanted to insure his films, due to his advanced age.

Last years

In Wilder's later years, the movie world once again recognized him for his contribution to the industry. In 1986, he was recognized with the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. Two years later, he was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Award and in 1993, he received the National Medal of Arts and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Wilder became known for having one of the best and most extensive art collections in Hollywood, mainly modern art. As he described it in the mid-1980s,

"It's a disease. I don't know how to stop. Call it bulimia if you want, or curiosity or passion. I have some Impressionists, some Picassos of all time, some Calder. I also collect small Japanese trees, glass clips and Chinese vases. Name an object and collect it."

Wilder's artistic ambitions led him to create a number of works of his own. By the early 1990s, Wilder had accumulated many plastic and artistic constructions, many of which were done in collaboration with artist Bruce Houston. In 1993, art dealer Louis Stern, an old friend of his, helped organize an exhibition of Wilder's work at his Beverly Hills gallery. The exhibition was titled "The Marché aux Puces de Billy Wilder" and the segment "Variations on the Theme of Queen Nefertiti" It was well received by the public. This series featured busts of the Egyptian queen draped "à la" Christo, or peppered "à lo" Jackson Pollock, or sporting a Campbell's soup can as a tribute to Andy Warhol.

Billy Wilder's stone in Westwood Memorial, with the text: "I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect" ("I'm a writer, but no one is perfect").

He died in 2002, at the age of 95, at his Beverly Hills residence of pneumonia. His remains are in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

Her style

Wilder in 1989

In a famous essay on Wilder, Stephen Farber comments: "Wilder's main contribution to American cinema is intelligence," which allows him to combine the corrosive and the maudlin and integrate paradoxes, ironies into the plots and amazing twists. Sometimes respected individuals emerge as scoundrels: the American soldiers in postwar Berlin in A Foreign Affair (1948), the intelligence chief in Traitor in Hell (1953) or the solemn director of an insurance company in The Apartment (1960). And sometimes an apparent villain turns out to be a whole being. He thought that people are usually neither as good as they appear on the surface nor as bad as they fear they are on the bottom. This vision of reality earned him numerous honors (twenty-one Oscar nominations and six statuettes), but also controversy.

He includes in his films what film scholars have come to call "levels of knowledge discrepancy": when the audience knows more about what is happening in a scene than at least one of the characters, he feels comfortable, ready, pays closer attention and captures the subtleties. Comedic and dramatic ironies occur. When there is a greater discrepancy between what the audience knows and what more than one of the characters knows, the dramatic possibilities multiply. Wilder, in fact, was a virtuoso at swapping discrepant levels of consciousness, a tactic that puts the audience in a prime position from which to follow the story. A clear example of this can be found in The apartment. First, the public sees how Jack Lemmon lends the key to his apartment to the most flirtatious executives at work so they can meet up with his friends. Second, check out Lemmon's shy affection for Shirley MacLaine, the elevator operator. Third, watch as the boss played by Fred MacMurray, a married man, calls Lemmon to reproach him for pimping him, but surprises him by asking for the key. The audience, as unprepared as Lemmon, is less prepared for Fourth, the scene in which MacMurray meets his friend, who turns out to be MacLaine. As they head to the apartment, the film introduces a shot of Lemmon alone outside the theater where he had planned to meet MacLaine. This causes intensity, more than sentimentality, and due to film combinations such as the one explained, it is considered that no one in the history of cinema has better orchestrated the possibilities of argumentation than Billy Wilder.^{[citation required]}

Legacy

Wilder cartoon

Wilder occupies an important place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of subjects acceptable to censors. He is responsible for two films from the film-noir era such as Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard . Along with Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers, he leads AFI's 100 Years...100 Smiles list with five of his films included on this list and led by Some Like it Hot. Also featured in it are The Apartment, The Seven Year Itch directed by him and Ball of Fire and Ninotchka as co-writer. The American Film Institute also included four of his works on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list: Sunset Boulevard (no. 12), Some Like It Hot (no. 14), Double Indemnity (no. 38) and The Apartment (no. 93). On the tenth anniversary of this list, the AFI moved Sunset Boulevard to number 16, Some Like it Hot to number 22, Double Indemnity to number 29, and The Apartment at 80.

The Spanish director Fernando Trueba said in his speech when he received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1993 for Belle Époque: "I would like to believe in God to thank him. But I only believe in Billy Wilder... so thank you, Mr. Wilder." According to Trueba himself, Wilder called him the next day to tell him: "Fernando, I am God."

French director Michel Hazanavicius also thanked Billy Wilder in his 2012 speech when he received the Best Picture Oscar for The Artist when he said "I wanted to thank the following three people, to Billy Wilder, to Billy Wilder and to Billy Wilder."

Filmography

Within his filmography, you can find works as a director and as a screenwriter, both his own works and those of other directors:

As director

• 1934 - Dangerous curves
• 1942 - El mayor y la menor
• 1943 - Five tombs to Cairo
• 1944 - Loss
• 1945 - Unmarked days
• 1948 - Berlin West
• 1948 - The waltz of the emperor
• 1950 - The twilight of the gods
• 1951 - The Great Carnival
• 1953 - Traitor in Hell
• 1954 - Sabrina
• 1955 - The temptation lives above
• 1957 - Prosecution
• 1957 - Ariane
• 1957 - The lonely hero
• 1959 - With skirts and crazy
• 1960 - The Apartment
• 1961 - One, two, three
• 1963 - Irma the sweet
• 1964 - Kiss me, you fool.
• 1966 - In silver tray
• 1970 - Sherlock Holmes' private life
• 1972 - What happened between my father and your mother?
• 1974 - Front page
• 1978 - Fedora
• 1981 - Here a friend

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Cannes International Film Festival

Venice International Film Festival