“Conversations With Wilder”: Part 6

Billy Wilder is my all-time favorite filmmaker. Consider just some of his movies: Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Stalag 17 (1953), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), an oeuvre that demonstrates an incredible range in a filmmaking career that went from 1929 to 1981.

One of the best books on filmmaking and storytelling is “Conversations With Wilder” in which Cameron Crowe, a fantastic filmmaker in his own right (Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) sat down with Wilder for multiple hours and they talked movies.

Every Sunday for the next several months, I’m going to post excerpts from the book, add a few thoughts, and invite your comments. I trust this will be a good learning experience for each of us. And while we’re at it, why don’t watch some Wilder movies to remind ourselves what a great writer and director he was.

Today’s excerpt comes from P. 33:

CC: There’s a great story you told once, and it is about the very nature of collaboration. I heard that when you were writing Ninotchka, you and Charles Brackett were stuck on just how to accomplish her eventual love affair with capitalism. You’d written pages and pages —

BW: Yeah, pages. We needed a thing to prove in a short, in an abrupt, version that she too fell under the spell of capitalism, that she too is vulnerable.

CC: And you were all stuck on this story point. And [Ernst] Lubitsch didn’t like anything you’d written. Then Lubitsch goes to the can, emerges after a minute, and says, “It’s the hat.”

BW: “The hat.” And we said, “What hat?” He said, “We build the hat into the beginning!” Brackett and I looked at each other — this is Lubitsch. The story of the hat has three acts. Ninotchka first sees it in a shop window as she enters the Ritz Hotel with her three Bolshevik accomplices. This absolutely crazy hat is the symbol of capitalism to her. She gives it a disgusted look and says, “How can a civilization survive which allows women to wear this on their heads?” Then the second time she goes by the hat and makes a noise — tch-tch-tch. The third time, she is finally alone, she has gotten rid of her Bloshevik accomplices, opens a drawer and pulls it out. And now she wears it. Working with Lubitsch, ideas like this were in the air.

I love this anecdote. “Why, Scott. It’s just about a hat.” Ah, you think! Check out the setup of this precious little subplot:

First off, this bit of business with the hat is precisely the type of thing screenwriters face all the time in crafting a story. You’re going along, something doesn’t work, then you hit on a solution which causes you to go back to set something up so you can pay it off here or later. We reverse engineer stories constantly, stumbling into a payoff which requires an earlier setup.

Next: This is a great example of visual storytelling. One’s instinct might be to have Ninotchka express her shift in favor of capitalism through dialogue, but those are just words that drift in one ear, out the other. So much more effective to demonstrate her transformation through an image which the audience can see. The Hat = Capitalism. We know that because Ninotchka has said as much with her first line of dialogue about it. She sees it as decadent symbol of all that is wrong with capitalism. Yet by the third beat in the subplot, when she surreptitiously puts on the hat when she is alone, that says it all. She has bought into capitalism. Picture worth a thousand words — boom!

Then there is the fact that the hat has its own subplot. Movies are filled with subplots, each of them — in good stories — tied to and advancing the Plotline. Ninotchka’s relationship to the hat is one way to trace her metamorphosis.

Finally, there is the Magical Number 3. The idea of Beginning-Middle-End, the foundation of narrative as first elucidated by Aristotle, works not only in terms of an overall story, but also for scenes, sequences, and subplots. And here we have a perfect example:

— Beginning: Ninotchka decries the hat as a symbol of capitalistic decadence.

— Middle: Her “tch-tch-tch” still conveys a generally negativity, but not as firm as before.

— End: She dons the hat signifying acceptance of capitalism.

This is how professional screenwriters think. They confront a problem. They try various solutions. They push themselves to come up with one that really works. And they look for simple, elegant, and oftentimes visual solutions that are always tied to the overall narrative.

It’s not just a hat in Ninotchka. It is creative brilliance.

Tomorrow: More from “Conversations With Wilder.” If you have any observations or thoughts, please head to comments.

Comment Archive

For the entire series, go here.