Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 7]

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:

Q: Mr. Wilder, have you found the dual role of producer and director too much for one man?

Wilder: It is too much if it’s just the two of us. But within a big studio — let’s say Universal with the black tower Knesset — all their executives and executive executives have to contribute, too. I’m not going to go through contracts with actors and conditions. Let them worry about that. That is not producing. There have been some creative producers — I mean Selznick, Goldwyn, Thalberg, and now, I imagine, Bob Evans. But nowadays a producer is usually a man who knew a second cousin of a reader who got hold of an unfinished book at Random House about a big fish off Martha’s Vineyard, and for some reason or other his brother-in-law gave him $10,000, and he put it down, and now suddenly he had the rights for Jaws, and owning that he became a producer.

Q: What was your role as producer in Some Like It Hot?

Wilder: I had the final say on the making of the picture, the cutting, the casting, and whatever. There was one less nose sticking in my pie. I would be perfectly willing to welcome a producer who added to the picture, but there are very few. Most producers make you feel that if they weren’t quite that busy and not quite that involved in six enormous projects which were going to revolutionize the cinema, they could write the movie better, they could direct it better, they could possibly act in it, they could compose. The truth is that if they can’t write it, can’t direct it, don’t know how to write a note of music, can’t act, can’t do anything, then they become the overseer of it all.

Diamond: It’s much easier to make six pictures at a time than just to make one picture, because you have no real responsibility. You talk to somebody for an hour and you say, “Go and develop it.’’ Someone is left with the mess to clean up while you’re busy with something else.

Wilder: And it’s even easier, if you’re the head of the studio, to make twenty pictures. It’s as if you were standing around the roulette table, and you’ve got twenty chips. One or two of those chips are going to be winners. Now, we have one miserable chip, and we play it and if that doesn’t come off we are just out for a year and a half. We are there with egg on our face.

I once talked to a top executive at Columbia, a friend of mine, who said, ‘’You always look at me with a kind of peculiar glance. You always wonder how the hell I deserve $5,000 a week.” And I said, ‘’Sam, that’s right. It has crossed my mind.’’

He said, ‘’Look, the trick is the following: The studio executives will send down to my office ten projects that they are planning to do. They’re not quite sure whether or not to do those ten projects. And I’ll say, ‘No,’ to every one of them. Always ‘No,’ because nine out of ten are going to be stinkers. One will be a big hit, but the executives will be so ecstatic about that one they will forget that I said, ‘No,’ to it, too. So I just go on and say, ‘No,’ because how wrong can I be by saying ‘No,’ when ninety percent of the pictures lose money?”

Q: You mentioned Some Like It Hot. How did the idea of dressing up two men as women develop?

Wilder: Very early in the structure of that picture my friend Mr. Diamond very rightly said, ‘’We have to find the hammerlock. We have to find the ironclad thing so that these guys trapped in women’s clothes cannot just take the wigs off and say, ‘ Look, I’m a guy.’

It has to be a question of life and death.” And that’s where the idea for the St. Valentine’s Day murder came. If they got out of the women’s clothes they would be killed by the Al Capone gang. That was the important invention. When we started working on the picture I had a discussion with David O. Selznick, who was a very fine producer, and I very briefly told him the plot.

He said, “You mean there’s going to be machine guns and shooting and killing and blood?” I said, ‘’Sure.” He said, ‘’It’s not going to be funny. No comedy can survive that kind of brutal reality.’’ But that’s what made the picture. The two men were on the spot, and we kept them on the spot until the very end.

Q: Did you have problems casting those two roles?

Diamond: The first person we wanted was Jack Lemmon, but he was then under contract to Columbia, and the first actor we actually signed was Tony Curtis because we felt he could play both parts in an emergency. United Artists felt that we needed a big box-office name and that Lemmon wasn’t big enough. They suggested that Mr. Wilder see Frank Sinatra. He made a lunch date with him and Sinatra never showed up, which may be one of the luckiest things that could have happened to us. At this point we got Marilyn Monroe, and the studio no longer felt the need for another big name. Then we signed Jack.

Wilder: If you hit on a thing, which works, there’s that snowball effect of laughter. You get the audience in that rare mood when everything is funny, and you don’t need big stars. The best example of a similar picture to Some Like It Hot is M*A*S*H. There were no big stars in M*A*S*H then. It’s just one of those pictures that lends itself to two hours of increasing fun. The audience doesn’t have a chance to sober up. The picture just keeps going and going.

Q: One critic has discussed what he called the underlying homosexual motifs in Some Like It Hot. Are there any?

Diamond: The whole trick in the picture is that, while the two were dressed in women’s clothes, their thinking processes were at all times a hundred-percent male. When there was a slight aberration, like Lemmon getting engaged, it became twice as funny. But they were not camping it up. They never thought of themselves as women. Just for one moment Lemmon forgot himself — that was all. The rest of the time, Curtis was out to seduce Monroe, no matter what clothes he was wearing.

Wilder: But when he forgot himself it was not a homosexual relationship. It was just the idea of being engaged to a millionaire. It’s very appealing. You don’t have to be a homosexual. It’s security.

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.

Tomorrow: More from the dynamic writing duo.