Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 8]

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: This raises a question of the handling of delicate themes. What problems did you have in The Seven Year Itch?

Wilder: It was a nothing picture, and I’ll tell you why. It was a nothing picture because the picture should be done today without censorship. It was an awkward picture to make. Unless the husband, left alone in New York while the wife and kid are away for the summer, has an affair with that girl there’s nothing. But you couldn’t do that in those days, so I was just straitjacketed. It just didn’t come off one bit, and there’s nothing I can say about it except I wish I hadn’t made it. I wish I had the property now.

Q: You can be more explicit today, but at what point would you part from very explicit filmmakers?

Wilder: One can tackle more daring themes, and one can write dialogue without a straitjacket whereas once if you wanted to call someone a son of a bitch you would have to say, “If he had a mother, she’d bark.” But I don’t think that we would ever write an out- and-out porno picture. The dialogue, for instance, in Shampoo — I don’t think that our minds work that way.

Diamond: But it’s also, especially in comedy, almost gratuitous. I think nudity hurts laughs. If you’re watching somebody’s boobs, you’re not listening to the dialogue. I don’t think that any of the Lubitsch pictures or, say, Philadelphia Story would be any better or funnier if you saw Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in the nude.

Wilder: Hepburn? Big laugh.

Q: What about Avanti!? Was there a straitjacket problem?

Wilder: Yes. Too mild, too soft, too gentle. We missed on that. The picture was fifteen years too late, if it should have been done at all.

Diamond: I think if Peter Bogdanovich had done it it would have been called ‘’A Tribute to Lubitsch,’’ just like What’s Up, Doc? was a tribute to Howard Hawks. But if Howard Hawks had done What’s Up, Doc?, everyone would have said, “It’s old- fashioned and predictable.’’

Q: Was Ace in the Hole too late?

Wilder: Too early. Somebody once said about showmanship: ‘’Showmanship is to know what the audience wants before the audience knows what it wants.” You can miscalculate.

Q: Was there a miscalculation with One, Two, Three?

Diamond: I think it was a flop because it was released after the Berlin Wall incident: I think people suddenly no longer considered that subject very funny. The problem we ran into was that right in the middle of shooting the picture, the border was suddenly closed.

Wilder: The Communists started shooting people who wanted to get in and out of East Berlin, and it all ceased to be funny.

Q: Was there any consideration of scrapping the picture?

Wilder: None at all. The studio had to recoup some of the money. There was no such thing as scrapping. Now there is. They ran into trouble with Robert De Niro on Bogart Slept Here, and they just walked away from it.

Q: You worked for Lubitsch. Were you influenced by his style?

Wilder: Certainly I was. But he died so young, and I only worked for him on two pictures. I wish I had had more time and that I could have studied under him for a longer period because he was a great director. He took the secret with him to his grave. People keep saying, not about me, but about other directors, ‘’This is just like Lubitsch,’’ but it’s not Lubitsch.

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.

Tomorrow: More from the dynamic writing duo.