Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 10]

A 10-part series with the writers of The Apartment and Some Like It Hot.

More excerpts from a sit-down interview with writer-director Billy Wilder and longtime screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond:

Wilder: In Double Indemnity I had a final scene with the character in the gas chamber. There are pellets dropping and the bucket and the fumes, and outside is Eddie Robinson watching. They are two great friends, and there is something going on between them, an exchange or whatever. It was very good but just unnecessary. The picture is over when he tells him, ‘’You can’t even make the elevator,” and he tries and collapses. In the distance you hear the siren of the police, and you know what’s going to happen. That was the end of it. I added a postscript, which was totally unnecessary.

Q: Have you seen the made-for-TV version of Double Indemnity? Wilder: Yes. Q: What did you think of it?

Wilder: I threw up. Universal bought out all the old Paramount pictures, of which this was one. They own Double Indemnity, just as they took another picture I directed, Stalag 17, and made a whole series, ‘’Hogan’s Heroes.” They took the script of Double Indemnity — and the movie itself represented the height of censorship — and shot exactly that script. The TV picture was terrible. It was miscast. The sets were wrong. Everything was bad.

Q: Are the blockbuster pictures, the disaster pictures that are popular now, affecting the direction you want to go in?

Wilder: If you want to make a picture in that direction, but we don’t think in that direction. Also, we are old hands at disasters. But those pictures compete with each other.

Q: Is there an audience for just a good movie, without a $9 or $10 million budget?

Wilder: Certainly there is. One thing for sure is that you can do a lot of things on the screen that you still cannot do on television. Let us say that somebody were to make Dog Day Afternoon for $1 million or $2 million. You couldn’t do that on television because the subject is taboo. But you can do it in pictures. American Graffiti is another example of a picture that can be done without competing in size. You know, the peculiar thing about movies is that you’re going to be charged just as much at a theater to see American Graffiti as you would be to see, let us say, The Poseidon Adventure. One picture cost $700,000 and the other cost $11 million, but you still pay $2.50 or whatever.

Diamond: It is getting tougher now to approach a studio with a project, which seems either small or mild. Naturally, everybody is looking for the blockbuster. It’s human nature. Before The Exorcist opened, William Blatty, the author of the novel, was going around making speeches that this was a picture about the persistence of evil in modern society. But when the picture opened people were not going around saying to each other, “Hey, let’s go see that picture about the persistence of evil.” They were saying, “Hey, there’s a picture where the girl throws up green and masturbates with a crucifix.” That’s what the picture was about from the audience’s point of view, not what Blatty may have thought it was about.

Wilder: And the audience went for the 360-degree turn of the head and the goddamned sound effects. All the osteopaths must have cringed. But it was very effective. People had to see it. It was totally impossible to go to a picnic or a dinner party in Albany without having seen certain pictures: The Exorcist, Jaws. Now, those pictures are, technically, beautifully done. I think Spielberg’s picture was just phenomenal, really beautifully engineered. But as long as we know that this is Grand Guignol, that we know what kind of merchandise we’re getting, it’s fine. It’s just a very effective piece of celluloid, and it keeps you there. You may get up and say, ‘’Well, I didn’t like it,’’ but you certainly paid attention to what was happening.

Q: You think there was a difference in the author’s intention and the director’s? Wilder: I think the direction was rather subtle. The book was just a real smack on the nose — very effective, too, but not a great novel.

Diamond: People have forgotten, because the picture was such a big success, but before it opened Blatty was about to sue Friedkin because had thrown him off the set because of the disagreements about what was going to be cut out and what was going to be left in. I think Blatty wanted the more signficant talk stuff left in, and Friedkin realized what kind of picture he was making. He just cut all that out and stuck to where the money was. Now they’re great friends.

Wilder: But I do respect a director such as Friedkin who suddenly is confronted with a scene of a party going on and an eight-year-old girl joins the party and pees on the carpet. That’s what you have to shoot. That’s just a day’s work. Where do you put the camera? It is not easy. I can do a chase sequence. I can do any goddamned thing. But an eight-year- old girl peeing during a party, that’s a new one. It requires a different technique. It is this kind of never-seen-before that makes for this kind of enormous box office. But I think The Exorcist is good, riveting picturemaking. I also think that once you make up your mind to make a picture like this you’ve got to give it both knees, because it is not going to be in great taste or very subtle. I you do it, then do it. That’s Sam Peckinpah’s technique, the man who gives it three knees.

Q: What film are you working on now?

Wilder: We very probably will retire, like Secretariat, to stud. No, we’ve just come back from a location-scouting trip to France and Greece, though we may be shooting in Italy because we didn’t find what we wanted elsewhere. We’re doing the first novella in Tom Tryon’ s new book, Crowned Heads. It’s called Fedora. We had been kicking around Hollywood picture ideas when along came the galleys of this book. Diamond: It’s about a retired old film star who lives in Europe, but except for one flashback it has nothing to do with moviemaking.

Q: What’s the schedule for the film?

Wilder: It’s eighty percent plotted and thirty percent in screenplay form. We’ll be through in plenty of time to fiddle with it and manicure it. I think we’ll start shooting some time at the beginning of next year, and the picture will be out some time in the middle of next year.

Q: Does the film present any special writing problems?

Diamond: It’s a departure for me in that I’ve never really done a serious picture before. It’s a picture with no jokes, or few jokes.

Wilder: It’s very Grand Guignol. It’s a mystery but it’s not a Hitchcock picture. Actually first serious picture I’ve been connected with since Sunset Boulevard.

Part 1 of the conversation with Wilder and Diamond here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

Part 8 here.

Part 9 here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series with one of the greatest filmmaking teams of all time: Wilder & Diamond.