Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 9]

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: In your visual style, you very often seem to concentrate on one particular object. For example, the filing cabinets in A Foreign Affair or the whiskey bottle and the light in The Lost Weekend. Is that element there from the very inception?

Wilder: Sure, sure. When we constructed The Apartment, we knew we needed a scene in which Jack Lemmon realizes that Shirley MacLaine is the dame his boss, Fred MacMurray, does it to in his apartment. So, we go back and plant the little makeup mirror that he finds. When he has the promotion and buys himself the young executive black bowler hat, she lets him see himself in the mirror, and he suddenly realizes that’s the girl. But surely none of those things are improvised. It’s all calculated and planted.

Q: Is there a source you care to pinpoint for your humor — your families?

Diamond: No. My children are funny. I don’t think my parents were particularly funny.

Wilder: And my brother is a dull son of a bitch.

Q: When you worked in Germany, was the studio arrangement at UFA the same as its American counterparts at the time?

Wilder: No, it was very different. The studio itself was about ten miles outside of Berlin in what is now the eastern side of Berlin. But they had some smaller studios around town. The big company was UFA, but there were twelve other companies. There was no such thing as writers or directors under contract. There was no such thing as being on the set as a writer while it was happening. It was too far out of town, and you didn’t have a car in those days. It was all quite different. It was all in the hands of Erich Pommer, who was the Thalberg of the UFA company, and there were some outstanding directors: Murnau, Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, and G. W. Pabst. It was a director’s medium there.

Q: Closer to home, how did the script of Sunset Boulevard come about?

Wilder: I was working with Mr. Brackett then, and he had an idea of doing a picture with a Hollywood background. I think originally we wanted Pola Negri or Mary Pickford. Once we got hold of a character of the silent picture glamour star who had had it, a kind of female John Gilbert, whose career is finished with the advent of talkies but she still has the oil wells pumping and the house on Sunset Boulevard, then we started rolling. The characters of the writer and the director came after. Soon we had Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim, and we had a whole slew of the old stars, H. B. Warner and Buster Keaton.

The part of the writer, Joe Gillis, who becomes the gigolo there, was written for Montgomery Clift. But about two weeks before we started shooting, he sent his agent in, who said, ‘’Mr. Montgomery Clift, the great New York actor, will not do the picture, because what would his fans think if he had an affair with a woman twice his age?’’ You would expect that from a Hollywood actor but not a serious actor. We were then confronted with what to do. It was too late to shelve the picture. So we took William Holden, who was playing second lieutenants in comedies at that time.

It had also been difficult to find stars to play in Double Indemnity — especially to find a leading man who would play a murderer. We went all the way down, actor after actor, until I finally wound up with Fred MacMurray, who told me, “For Christ’s sake, you’re making the mistake of your life. I’m a saxopho ne player. I can’t do it.’’

Q: Were you concerned in Sunset Boulevard about having a dead narrator?

Wilder: Yes, but that was the only way out. I shot a whole prologue, a whole reel — that and another reel of the ending to Double Indemnity have never been shown. The prologue was very well shot and quite effective. A corpse is brought into the morgue downtown — and I shot it there, too — and it’s the corpse of Holden. There are about six other corpses there under sheets. Through a trick we see through the sheets to the faces, and they are telling each other the events leading to their deaths. Then Holden starts telling his story.

We previewed the picture, with the original first reel, in Evanston, Illinois, right where Northwestern University is. The picture started. The corpse is brought in on a slab, a name tape is put on the big toe of the corpse, and once the tag went on the toe, the audience broke into the biggest laugh I ever heard in my life. I said, “Oh, my God,” and the picture just went straight down. It was a disaster. So that whole sequence went out, but we kept the notion of a man telling of the events, which led to his demise.

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.

Tomorrow: More from the dynamic writing duo.