Books I'm Reading: On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder

Midnight, Ninotchka, Ball of Fire, The Major and the Minor, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce—Wilder either wrote or co-wrote the screenplay or wrote the screenplay and directed each of these films (and more than a dozen more Hollywood films that are less well known today, not to mention the many screenplays he wrote before emigrating to the United States). It's an impressive list; each is a classic.

Before picking up Ed Sikov's On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (Hyperion, 1998) I had seen all of these films but I realized quickly as I began reading the book that I knew very little about Wilder's early life—in particular, that he had written so many screenplays. I knew him mostly as the director of the films from the sweet spot of his career—say, from Double Indemnity to The Apartment.

He got his start, however, as a screenwriter, working first in German, following a period as a journalist in Vienna and then Berlin. He had been born near Krakow, in 1906. Twenty years later, he was leaving Vienna for England in the company of bandleader Paul Whiteman, on tour (he had become friendly with Whiteman by showing him around Vienna; as a reporter, Wilder knew the city well). A few months later he left with the Whiteman entourage for Berlin, never looking back. When it became clear in 1934 that Jews were no longer welcome in the German capital, he left for Hollywood, without his mother, who later vanished in the Holocaust. When he arrived in the United States, he had virtually no money and spoke almost no English, but he quickly found work as a screenwriter anyway, often working as a team with Charles Brackett. Leveraging his quick wit, chutzpah, and good luck he found increasingly lucrative work and eventually landed an opportunity to direct. The Major and the Minor (1942), starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland, was his first directing credit.

On Sunset Boulevard looks at Billy Wilder as an artist, a businessman, and, eventually, as an exceedingly wealthy art collector gradually left behind by a changing Hollywood. Author Sikov looks at each of Wilder's films in detail, from conception to critical and popular reception, while serving up a great deal of anecdote to create a vivid portrait of one of Hollywood's most important directors. Along the way, Sikov gives us much about the people Wilder worked with and for and the people who worked for him, particularly writing partner Brackett, and performers such as Marilyn Monroe, William Holden, and Jack Lemmon. Wilder was notoriously foul-mouthed and casually abusive and tightly controlling on the set—character traits that not everyone tolerated well. It was his desire for control that drove his ambition to move from writing to directing and that kept him writing much of the material he directed, material that was often on the edge of the limits allowed by the Hollywood production code, a code that Wilder was instrumental in eroding (Wilder's writing was often darker and more sexually suggestive than the censors would allow, particularly early in his career). Long but a worthwhile appreciation of the man and each of his major films and worth reading for the wealth of information it includes about how films are conceived, written, financed, and produced.  

Books I'm Reading: Fast-talking Dames

The fast-talking dame of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood was a uniquely American phenomenon argues author Maria Di Battista in her 2001 book Fast-Talking Dames (Yale University Press) and she notes that the fast-talking dame had passed from the screen by the early 1950s as the movie-land ideal of American womanhood shifted toward the dumb blonde--a shift away from sexually alluring but articulate woman that knew how to stand up for themselves toward a more passive, controlled type often admired for her sex appeal alone. Di Battista argues persuasively that it was an unfortunate shift. Her book is an affectionate tribute to the snappy, sassy stars of the earlier era.

The book gets off to a slow start. Its dense text requires more concentration to digest than I was expecting. It's a serious book of scholarly importance, not the quick read I had imagined before picking it up (based on no evidence). It was worth the work.

Di Battista's book seems valuable not only for its insights into Hollywood's attitudes toward gender roles in the golden age of the screwball comedy, but also for its looks at the careers of actresses such as Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, and Myrna Loy (under the heading of "Hot Heiresses and Working Girls"); at the actresses she calls "The Grande Dames" (Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunn, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck); and through detailed looks at a few of the most important films of the era--His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, Ninotchka, and The Awful Truth. Along the way, there is much useful discussion of dozens of other films worth watching. Fast-talking Dames would be worth reading just for its indirect recommendations of good films from the period it covers. My one complaint is that there is no list of films mentioned in the text, which makes it tedious to find them once passed over. Halfway through, I started writing down titles that seemed worth seeking out. I've been visiting my local video store to rent quite a few I'd never seen. I've particularly enjoyed seeing Theodora Goes Wild, The Bombshell, If You Could Only Cook, and Wife Versus Secretary, among others. Recommended.

Books I'm Reading: Pictures at a Revolution

Mark Harris's thesis in Pictures at a Revolution (Penguin, 2008) is that the 1967 Oscars can be taken as a turning point in the history of Hollywood. By examining in detail the creative genesis of the five movies nominated for Best Picture that year--Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and Doctor Dolittle--Harris looks at the transition from increasingly less successful big budget musicals, dramas, and romantic fluff born of the studio system toward a riskier, more independent, more personal style of film-making relying on the creative genius of individuals of a new generation. Interesting as a snapshot of Hollywood at the time and also for its back-stage look at how films are conceived, funded, made, and marketed. The book manages at the same time to paint portraits of some of the main players in the stories it tells, particularly Warren Beatty, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman, and Rex Harrison. Well written, highly readable. Successful as film history, social history, and biography all at once. Recommended.

Tidbits: RIP--The Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, Santa Rosa

Tonight was the last night of showings at the Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, on Summerfield Rd., not far from where I live in Santa Rosa. I had heard the place had been forced to close, but didn't realize tonight was the last night. If I had known, I would have gone. What a shame to lose such a good theater so close to home. I will miss the place and the memories associated with it. Now where do we go to see the films the big commercial houses refuse to show?