Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder was an American filmmaker and screenwriter. Born in Sucha Beskidzka, at the time in Austria-Hungary, Wilder's career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of classical Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards.
In 1916, when Wilder was ten years old, his family moved from Galicia to Vienna, where he worked as a journalist instead of attending university. Wilder's career as a screenwriter started in Berlin, where he relocated in his early adulthood. The rise of the Nazi Party and antisemitism in Germany saw him move to Paris. He then moved to Hollywood in 1934, and had a major hit when he, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award-nominated film Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director with Double Indemnity, a film noir based on the novel by James M. Cain with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Wilder won the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for The Lost Weekend, which also won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
In the 1950s, Wilder directed and co-wrote a string of critically acclaimed films, including the Hollywood-set drama Sunset Boulevard, for which he won his second screenplay Academy Award; Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17 and Sabrina. Wilder directed and co-wrote three films in 1957: The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon and Witness for the Prosecution. During this period, Wilder also directed Marilyn Monroe in two films, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. In 1960, Wilder co-wrote, directed and produced the critically acclaimed film The Apartment. It won Wilder Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Other notable films Wilder directed include One, Two, Three, Irma la Douce, Kiss Me, Stupid, The Fortune Cookie and Avanti!.
Wilder received various honors over his career, including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1990, the National Medal of Arts in 1993 and the BAFTA Fellowship Award in 1995. He also received the Directors Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement and the Producers Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Seven of his films are preserved in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Early life
Samuel Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, to a Jewish family in Sucha, a small town in Galicia, present-day Poland, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Years later in Hollywood, he would describe it as being "Half an hour from Vienna. By telegraph." His parents were Eugenia, from Zakopane, and Max Wilder, from Stanislawczyk; they met in Kraków where Billy spent his early years. His mother described him as a "rambunctious kid"; inspired by Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, which she saw while living briefly in New York, she nicknamed him "Billie", which he changed to "Billy" upon moving to America.Wilder's elder brother, W. Lee Wilder, was also a filmmaker. Their parents had a successful cake shop in Sucha's train station that flourished into a chain of railroad cafes. Eugenia and Max Wilder did not persuade their son to join the family business. Max moved to Kraków to manage a hotel before moving to Vienna and dying when Billy was 22 years old. After the family moved to Vienna, Wilder became a journalist instead of attending the University of Vienna. In 1926, jazz band leader Paul Whiteman was on tour in Vienna where he was interviewed by Wilder. Whiteman liked young Wilder enough that he took him with the band to Berlin, where Wilder was able to make more connections in entertainment. Before achieving success as a writer, he was a taxi dancer in Berlin.
Career
Early work
After writing crime and sports stories as a stringer for local newspapers, he was eventually offered a regular job at a Berlin tabloid. Developing an interest in film, he began working as a screenwriter. From 1929 to 1933, he produced twelve German films. He collaborated with several other novices on the 1930 film People on Sunday. Eschewing the German Expressionist styles of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, People on Sunday was considered as a groundbreaking example of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement in German cinema. Furthermore, this genre of Strassenfilm paved way to the birth of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. He wrote the screenplay for the 1931 film adaptation of a novel by Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives, also screenplays for the comedy The Man in Search of His Murderer, the operetta Her Grace Commands and the comedy A Blonde Dream, all of them produced in the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam near Berlin. In 1932, Wilder collaborated with the writer and journalist Felix Salten on the screenplay for "Scampolo". After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Wilder went to Paris, where he made his directorial debut film Mauvaise Graine. He relocated to Hollywood prior to its release.After arriving in Hollywood in 1934, Wilder continued working as a screenwriter. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939, having spent time in Mexico waiting for the government after his six-month card expired in 1934, an episode reflected in his 1941 Hold Back the Dawn. Wilder's first significant success was Ninotchka, a collaboration with fellow German immigrant Ernst Lubitsch. The romantic comedy starred Greta Garbo, and was popularly and critically acclaimed. With the byline "Garbo Laughs!", it also took Garbo's career in a new direction. The film marked Wilder's first Academy Award nomination, which he shared with co-writer Charles Brackett. Wilder co-wrote many of his films with Brackett from 1938 to 1950. Brackett described their collaboration process: "The thing to do was suggest an idea, have it torn apart and despised. In a few days it would be apt to turn up, slightly changed, as Wilder's idea. Once I got adjusted to that way of working, our lives were simpler."
1940s
Wilder continued his screenwriting career with a series of box office hits in the early 1940s, including the romantic drama Hold Back the Dawn and the screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Both films earned him nominations for the 1941 Academy Awards in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Story respectively. Wilder made his Hollywood directorial debut in 1942 with The Major and the Minor, a comedy starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland.Wilder's mother, stepfather, and grandmother were all victims of the Holocaust. For decades it was assumed that they had been killed at Auschwitz, but, while researching Polish and Israeli archives, his Austrian biographer Andreas Hutter discovered in 2011 that they were each murdered in different locations: his mother, Eugenia "Gitla" Siedlisker, in 1943 at Plaszów; his stepfather, Bernard "Berl" Siedlisker, in 1942 at Belzec; and his grandmother, Balbina Baldinger, died in 1943 in the ghetto in Nowy Targ.
Wilder's third Hollywood film as director, the film noir Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson, was a major hit. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actress; Wilder co-wrote it with Raymond Chandler. The film not only set conventions for the noir genre, but is a landmark in the battle against Hollywood censorship. Based on James M. Cain's novel, it featured two love triangles and a murder plotted for insurance money. While the book was popular with the reading public, it had been considered unfilmable under the Hays Code because adultery was central to the plot.
In 1945, the Psychological Warfare Department of the United States Department of War produced an American documentary film directed by Wilder. The film known as Death Mills, or Die Todesmühlen, was intended for German audiences to educate them about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. For the German version, Die Todesmühlen, Hanuš Burger is credited as the writer and director, while Wilder supervised the editing. Wilder is credited with the English-language version.
Also in 1945, Wilder adapted from Charles R. Jackson's novel The Lost Weekend into a film of the same name. It was the first major American film with a serious examination of alcoholism, another difficult theme under the Production Code. It follows an alcoholic writer opposing the protestations of his girlfriend. The film earned critical acclaim after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and competed in the main competition, where it received the Festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, and four Academy Awards including for Best Picture. Wilder earned the Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay and Milland won Best Actor. The film is one of four to win both the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, alongside Marty, Parasite and Anora.
1950s
In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the cynical noir film Sunset Boulevard. It follows a reclusive silent film actress, who dreams of a comeback with delusions of her greatness from a bygone era. She accompanies an aspiring screenwriter, who becomes her gigolo partner. This critically acclaimed film was the final film Wilder collaborated with Brackett. The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards; together Wilder and Brackett won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.In 1951, Wilder directed Ace in the Hole starring Kirk Douglas in a tale of media exploitation of a caving accident. The idea had been pitched over the phone to Wilder's secretary by Victor Desny. Desny sued Wilder for breach of an implied contract in the California copyright case Wilder v Desny, ultimately receiving a settlement of $14,350. Although a critical and commercial failure at the time, its reputation has grown over the years. The following year, Wilder announced plans to direct and produce a film version of the Sophocles tragedy Oedipus Rex, adapted for the screen by Walter Reisch. They planned to shoot the film on location in Greece in Technicolor, but it never went into production.
Subsequently, Wilder directed three adaptations of Broadway plays, war drama Stalag 17, for which William Holden won the Best Actor Academy Award, romantic comedy Sabrina, for which Audrey Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress, and romantic comedy The Seven Year Itch, which features the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grate as her white dress is blown upwards by a passing train. Wilder was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for the first two films and shared a nomination for Best Screenplay for the second. He was interested in doing a film with one of the classic slapstick comedy acts of the Hollywood Golden Age. He first considered, and rejected, a project to star Laurel and Hardy. He held discussions with Groucho Marx concerning a new Marx Brothers comedy, tentatively titled A Day at the U.N. The project was abandoned after Chico Marx died in 1961.
In 1957, three films Wilder directed were released: biopic The Spirit of St. Louis, starring James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh, romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon—Wilder's first screenplay with I. A. L. Diamond, who would become his regular partner—featuring Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier and Audrey Hepburn, and courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution, featuring Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton. Wilder received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for the last film.
In 1959, Wilder reunited with Monroe in the United Artists released Prohibition-era farce film Some Like It Hot. It was released, however, without a Production Code seal of approval, which was withheld due to the film's unabashed sexual comedy, including a central cross-dressing theme. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis played musicians disguised as women to escape pursuit by a Chicago gang. Curtis's character courts a singer, while Lemmon is wooed by Joe E. Brownsetting up the film's final joke in which Lemmon reveals that his character is a man and Brown blandly replies "Well, nobody's perfect". A box office success, the film was lightly regarded by film critics during its original release, although it did receive six Academy Award nominations, including for Best Director and Best Screenplay. But its critical reputation grew prodigiously; in 2000, the American Film Institute selected it as the best American comedy ever made. In 2012, the British Film Institute decennial Sight and Sound poll of the world's film critics rated it as the 43rd best movie ever made, and the second-highest-ranking comedy.