What cinephile could want more than an upfront and pretty intimate evening spent with a cool, casual, candid, even catty legendary and beloved giant of cinema?
Maybe it wasn’t a wild night but definitely a “Wilder” one Monday evening at the Film Forum event where acclaimed German director Volker Schlöndorff introduced Billy, How Did You Do It?, his near three-hour 1988-89 documentary about his late friend.
It was Wilder years ago who, when he was visiting Munich where the younger filmmaker was living, initiated the contact after he had seen and much admired Schlöndorff’s 1975 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.
The Billy doc has rarely been seen — Wilder refused to let it be shown during his lifetime — except for an airing in the U.K. (it was produced for the BBC), a hush-hush screening about 20 years ago at New York’s Goethe House and last year at the Forum. (Kino-Lorber distributes a much shorter version of the doc.)
In his introductory remarks Monday, Schlöndorff shared that when he showed his pal the doc, Wilder — a filmmaker who knew what he wanted and got it — objected to such things as seeing him sweating, chewing gum, scratching his back, etc. (yes, it’s all up there — but briefly — on the screen) and ordered that “No way, not in my lifetime” will the film be shown.
Devastated by so harsh a reaction to so many hours of filming and editing, Schlöndorff went ahead and granted the BBC permission. Of course, this decision caused a serious breach in the cherished friendship, one strengthened by their shared German backgrounds (though Wilder was born in what is now a corner of Poland). Happily, the friendship was rekindled before Wilder’s death in 2002.
Schlöndorff structured Billy, How Did You Do It? as Truffaut did with his 1983 Alfred Hitchcock-François Truffaut book of interviews (a Bible to many of us) by using individual films as springboards for discussion. The challenge of finding a structure was, in fact, one of Wilder’s more interesting points in the doc. Structure, he said, in talking about the script for Witness For the Prosecution is “the toughest job,” and much more difficult than dialogue (he tipped his hat to the play’s author Agatha Christie for the Witness structure).
The structure problem also challenged Wilder in his collaboration with great pulp novelist Raymond Chandler, his co-writer on Wilder’s noir classic Double Indemnity. In his estimation, Chandler “would have been unbeatable if only he had a sense of structure.”
No surprise that the doc is rich in Wilder film clips, including rare clunkers like the ultra-corny Bing Crosby Tyrolian-themed period musical The Emperor Waltz that Wilder makes no excuses about (it was, in his word, “a catastrophe” and done to help a friend). “We all do it once [make flops],” he says, noting that even Lubitsch had one, too. His Ace in the Hole wasn’t a flop but failed to win audiences. Wilder dismisses the usual excuses (“it was released too close to Christmas” or “it was ahead of its time”) to matter-of-factly explain that “it affronted audiences” with things such as its downbeat ending, Kirk Douglas' immoral character, etc.
Wilder tips in this doc “wilder-ness” include his view that narration should always add to the story and not repeat what audiences already know. Wilder also praises the virtues of an all-important (and often silent) single visual in films (his and others’) that can tell so much. He cited the liquor bottle hidden in a lighting fixture in The Lost Weekend and the exposed leg in It Happened One Night, the tell-all hand of missing fingers in The 39 Steps and, in his great friend and mentor Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, the hat that the harsh Commie Garbo dons that signals her transition to the Western and amorous side of life.
And, of course, there are the memorable surprises Wilder cherishes, like the loud pop at the end of his Oscar-winning The Apartment that is not a gunshot — as the audience and co-star Shirley MacLaine’s character are led to believe — but a freshly uncorked champagne bottle. And how about that stalled getaway car in Double Indemnity? Wilder was struck with the idea just before they tackled the scene when his own car stalled in a parking lot.
While a number of highly regarded books on Wilder, including FJI Executive Editor Kevin Lally’s Wilder Times, are teeming with information and insights into the great filmmaker, Billy, How Did You Do It? has the benefit of those proverbial (moving) pictures that can speak a thousand words. And so we can see a man of boundless humor, so comfortable in his skin, who loved life, art, craft, and beauty.
There was also a belief in his fellow man. The doc reveals Wilder’s faith in a universal human nature that all people share (and was his job to tap into) — a counterintuitive belief considering the tragedies of the Holocaust he witnessed in the very early post-war years in Europe as a documentary filmmaker. The doc also reveals a man who believed in playing by the rules and having the wisdom and appreciation to be a lifelong art collector — a passion, he notes, that eventually, in one evening at an auction of his holdings, brought him more money than an entire storied career in film.
And there’s some dishy stuff about his great friends Marlene Dietrich (her lovers were many and he names names) and protegé William Holden (he was an “inhibited” man, which is why he became an alcoholic). Wilder went on to comment that while Holden was a great champion of endangered species in Africa, “he forgot that he was an endangered species.”
But Bogart presented a problem for Wilder in Sabrina, apparently because “he was not used to humor.” The two didn’t get along but Wilder got through it by telling himself, “I’m in jail but not for life."
On the other hand, making Love in the Afternoon was “fun to do. It was Paris, I was young and we had three rooms at the Ritz [where the film was shot].” Wilder was also a great admirer of the film’s star Gary Cooper, “a shy honest man but amazingly elegant. And irreplaceable.”
Wilder tried and failed to get Mae West as star of Sunset Boulevard and Montgomery Clift for the role William Holden landed. Wilder plucked Holden from character actor anonymity at the studio and launched him on a great Hollywood career.
Hollywood legend Otto Preminger, as the Nazi general in Wilder’s Stalag 17, always forgot his lines and Marilyn Monroe, his Some Like it Hot and The Seven-Year Itch star, was a big challenge, a “pathetic figure” who was unable, on one long occasion, to get a simple 3-word line right.
Wilder, in Billy, is generous with compliments for his collaborators like cinematographer John Seitz, co-writer I.A.L. Diamond, and production designer Alexandre Trauner (who so effectively created the Witness For the Prosecution sets).
Wilder as doc star is a funny, spontaneous, comfortable and comfortably dressed (he’s seen often in suspenders, a casual short-sleeved shirt, his signature hat) screen presence. He’s droll throughout, offering tidbits like why he ended Witness For the Prosecution with a stabbing and not a shooting: “I hate the noise; I’m a delicate creature.”
Schlöndorff and Film Forum also took the opportunity at the Wilder evening to plug Zietgeist Films’ Diplomatie, Schlöndorff’s drama starring French vets Niels Arestrup and André Dussollier about Germany’s military governor of occupied Paris and his tangle with the Swedish consul-general. The Zeitgeist release bows at the Forum on October 15th.
As delicious as it is, Billy, How Did You Do It? leaves viewers wanting something more, something impossible, something along the lines of: Billy, Will You Do It Again For Us?
At least Billy, How Did You Do It? allows us to extrapolate that Wilder did it with what he was born with, although luck, timing and determination were indispensable midwives. And his films — and audiences — are all the better for it.
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