NINOTCHKA SHOOTING DRAFT SCRIPT (1939) Written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder & Walter Reisch. Based on a story by Melchior Lengyel [Student Loose Leaf Edition]
(NINOTCHKA SHOOTING DRAFT (1939) Written by Charles Bracke...)
NINOTCHKA SHOOTING DRAFT (1939) Written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder & Walter Reisch. Based on a story by Melchior Lengyel [Student Edition, 192 pages] LOOSE LEAF UNBOUND EDITION NO BINDER..
The Lost Weekend (1945) movie screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. Based on a novel by Charles R. Jackson. (script) [Student Loose Leaf Edition]
Samuel "Billy" Wilder was a Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist whose career spanned more than five decades. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. With The Apartment, Wilder became the first person to win Academy Awards as producer, director, and screenwriter for the same film.
Background
Samuel Wilder was born on June 22, 1906 to a family of Polish Jews in Sucha, the son of Eugenia (née Dittler) and Max Wilder. He was nicknamed "Billie" by his mother (he changed this to "Billy" after arriving in America). He had an elder brother, William Lee Wilder (1904–1982), who also became a screenwriter, film producer and director. His parents had a successful and well-known cake shop in Sucha's train station and unsuccessfully tried to persuade their son to join the family business. Soon the family moved to Vienna, where Wilder attended school.
Education
Instead of attending the University of Vienna, Wilder became a journalist. To advance his career, Wilder decided to move to Berlin, where, before achieving success as a writer, he allegedly worked as a taxi dancer.
Career
More scripts for a variety of German and French films followed over the next four years, but when the Nazis took power in 1933, Wilder, like so many other Jews in the arts, fled. In Paris he codirected Mauvaise Graine (1934) with Alexander Esway before continuing on to the United States, after a brief period in Mexico.
During Wilder’s first years in Hollywood, when he spoke little English, he roomed with expatriate German actor Peter Lorre and accumulated credits on modest scripts such as Music in the Air (1934) and The Lottery Lover (1935) by collaborating with writers who could translate his contributions. In 1937 Paramount assigned him to work with former New Yorker theatre critic Charles Brackett. After first collaborating on Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), they wrote such romantic-comedy gems as Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939), Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), and Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941). Arguably Wilder’s most personal work during this period was Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn (1941), a compelling drama about a suave European refugee (played by Charles Boyer) stranded in Mexico who uses his wiles to entice an American schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) into marriage so that he can gain entry into the United States.
In 1942 Wilder and Brackett entered a new arrangement: Wilder directed, Brackett produced, and both wrote their subsequent projects, beginning with The Major and the Minor (1942), a clever farce in which a woman (Ginger Rogers) who masquerades as a 12-year-old to avoid paying full fare on a train becomes involved with an army officer (Ray Milland) who cannot quite figure why he is so attracted to a young girl.
Wilder and Brackett’s next project, Five Graves to Cairo (1943), was a suspenseful tale of wartime espionage. It was followed by Double Indemnity (1944), one of the most searing of the early films noir and, in the eyes of many historians, the apotheosis of the genre. James M. Cain’s 1936 novella, on which the film is based, had been deemed too controversial for Hollywood’s Production Code at the time of its publication, but by 1944 standards had relaxed enough to allow depictions of the decidedly adult scenario it offered, and the adaptation by Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler was masterful. The genial Fred MacMurray, cast against type, played a jaded insurance salesman who conspires with the sexy wife of a prospective client (Barbara Stanwyck) to insure her husband, kill him, collect the money, and spend it together. The film—told in flashback with a voiceover—was nominated for an Academy Award, and Stanwyck received a nomination for best actress for her portrayal of the film’s icy, calculating femme fatale. Moreover, Wilder garnered the first of his seven Academy Award nominations for best director and another nomination for his and Chandler’s screenplay.
Wilder had arrived. He managed to equal the success of Double Indemnity with The Lost Weekend (1945), a stark, harrowing portrait of one man’s battle with alcoholism. Milland gave a career-defining performance as an aspiring writer whose weekend drinking binge nearly costs him his life. Both critics and audiences embraced this powerful cautionary tale, which won the Academy Award as best picture, while Milland won for best actor, Wilder won as best director, and Wilder and Brackett won for their screenplay.
Although Wilder was arguably the hottest director in Hollywood, he put his film career on hiatus for three years to join the army, serving as a colonel in the Psychological Warfare Division in occupied Berlin. His first movie after his military service was The Emperor Waltz (1948), a slight musical set in Austria that starred Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine. Much more substantial was A Foreign Affair (1948), a cynical romantic comedy set in occupied Berlin that illuminated the workings of the post-World War II U.S. armed services with a candour that was unique for its day. Jean Arthur starred as a prim congresswoman on a fact-finding mission, and John Lund was the calculating army captain who tries to protect his well-paid mistress (Marlene Dietrich, in one of her last significant screen roles).
Before splitting, apparently without rancour, Brackett and Wilder collaborated on one more film, which may have been their best. Sunset Boulevard (1950) was the caustic tale of an out-of-work screenwriter (William Holden) who agrees to move in with former silent-film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), an eccentric recluse who wants him to write her comeback vehicle. The story is narrated by the writer’s corpse, which is seen floating facedown in a swimming pool in the film’s indelible opening scene. Wilder and Brackett’s storytelling prowess is on full display in what many critics consider to be the ultimate Hollywood story. Holden gave the first important performance of his career as the kept writer who despises himself for his willingness to sell out even as he pities his self-deluded benefactress. Also notable is director Erich von Stroheim’s portrayal of Norma’s butler, ex-husband, and former director. (Von Stroheim actually directed Swanson in the uncompleted silent Queen Kelly, a segment of which is shown in Sunset Boulevard.) Swanson’s deliberately over-the-top performance as the tragic Norma earned her an Academy Award nomination as best actress. Wilder and the film were also nominated for Academy Awards; the screenplay by Wilder, Brackett, and D.M. Marshman, Jr., won.
Ace in the Hole (originally titled The Big Carnival; 1951) was Wilder’s first endeavour as both producer and director, and it would prove to be his first box-office failure. This acerbic drama, a corrosive account of a tabloid reporter (Kirk Douglas) who amorally manipulates a mining tragedy in New Mexico to artificially extend its run on the front pages, was viewed by some critics as heavy-handed. Nevertheless, its screenplay (by Wilder, Lesser Samuels, and Walter Newman) was nominated for an Academy Award.
Stalag 17 (1953) was far more successful on every front. It was based on a Broadway play about the dynamics of a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II that had been written by two former internees and starred Holden as a clever but reviled bunkhouse entrepreneur who is accused of having leaked information to the camp commandant (Otto Preminger). The black humour and suspense are adroitly handled by Wilder, who again was nominated for an Academy Award, but the focus is firmly on Holden, who delivered an Academy Award-winning performance (best actor).
With Love in the Afternoon (1957), Wilder began working with a new writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, though this first collaboration between them is generally held to be one of their lesser efforts. This homage to Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies, based on the novel Ariane by Claude Anet, featured an aging Gary Cooper as an American playboy living in Paris who becomes infatuated with a young cellist (Hepburn) and unwittingly hires her private-eye father (Maurice Chevalier) to investigate her.
Wilder’s third film of the year, Witness for the Prosecution (1957), was a brilliantly structured courtroom drama based on a long-running play by Agatha Christie. Tyrone Power played a murder suspect who persuades an ailing but able barrister (Charles Laughton) to defend him. The defendant’s loyal but inscrutable wife (Dietrich, in a film-stealing performance) is his only alibi, and the plot turns on her flip-flopping testimony. Laughton (best actor), Elsa Lanchester (best supporting actress), Wilder (best director), and the film itself were all nominated for Academy Awards.
The provocative Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) was reviled by contemporary critics, condemned by the Legion of Decency, and failed at the box-office. Although film historians have had a more mixed response, Kiss Me, Stupid is generally thought to represent the nadir of Wilder’s career. Ray Walston played a small-town songwriter whose attempt to sell his songs to an egotistical pop singer (Dean Martin) includes offering up the favours of a prostitute (Kim Novak) whom he presents as his wife.
After being absent from the screen for the next four years, Wilder returned in 1970 with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (coscripted with Diamond), a generally underrated revisionist take on the fictional detective. Avanti! (1972) followed and starred Lemmon as a millionaire who travels to Italy to bury his father only to fall in love with the daughter (Juliet Mills) of his father’s mistress. Like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, it did not fare well commercially, though, arguably, this was a function not of any deficiency in the work itself but rather of Wilder’s being out of step with the times. Contemporary critics were inclined to find fault with the gentle patiently paced romantic comedy, but later critics hailed it as an underappreciated gem.
Audiences did turn out to see Lemmon and Matthau paired in The Front Page (1974), but few critics thought Wilder’s remake of the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur play was the equal of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 original or Howard Hawks’s version, His Girl Friday (1940). More interesting but little seen was the German-financed Fedora (1978), in which Holden played a producer who tries to coax a Greta Garbo-like actress (Martha Keller) out of retirement. Matthau and Lemmon were teamed by Wilder one last time in his final film, Buddy Buddy (1981), adapted by Wilder and Diamond from the French farce L’Emmerdeur (A Pain in the A—; 1973).
Head film section Psychological Warfare division United States Army, 1945.
Connections
Wilder married Judith Coppicus on December 22, 1936. The couple had twins, Victoria and Vincent (born 1939), but Vincent died shortly after birth. They divorced in 1946. Wilder met Audrey Young at Paramount Pictures on the set of The Lost Weekend in 1945, and she became his second wife on June 30, 1949.