"Billy & Ray" -- Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler Clash Their Way to a Classic

“Billy & Ray,” is a terrifically entertaining and beautifully performed current off-Broadway play about the locking-horns collaboration on the screenplay adaptation of James M. Cain’s pulp classic “Double Indemnity” which became, as so many already know, the Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck noir classic that was nominated for seven Academy Awards and was an early benchmark for the many film noirs to follow.

The film brought together as screenplay collaborators the great filmmaker Billy Wilder and novelist and movie-agnostic Raymond Chandler, perhaps Hollywood’s first true off-screen “odd couple.” Wilder was younger, friskier, prone to humor and a womanizer (forget the minor detail of a wife at home); Chandler, by stark contrast, was older, stuffy, a literary light and newbie to The Biz. He was also a covert drinker whose alcoholism would later get the better of him.

“Billy & Ray” was not a promising ticket. Weeks ago at its opening, it got clobbered by several New York area critics. The New York Times’ review was unsparing, using words like “torpid,” “slumberous,” “long,” “listless,” “static,” “mediocre,” flat.” Yikes! But what cinephile could resist a play about Wilder, Chandler and their masterpiece "Double Indemnity"?

So, nasty reviews aside, how to explain the sheer delight palpable in the recent audience that included a seasoned stage and TV actor and a fussy vet writer/correspondent on the film beat? Maybe it’s a lesson about why living theater, unlike film, is truly alive and organic. Film is largely locked in concrete but a play can grow from performance to performance and surely some of the negative feedback inspired some serious tweaking (more below on this).

So the play as experienced post-reviews was, at least for many of us, fun and rewarding theater.  Sundry thoughts below aren’t meant as reparation for the critical slams but as observations regarding what “Billy & Ray” has to say about some important aspects of The Biz, e.g., the dynamics of creativity, collaboration, Studio and Breen Office meddling, this latter’s role especially as the formidable censoring mechanism that restricted depictions of sex and violence. And what of, as the play has it, the guts it took for the studio to O.K. Wilder’s insistence on a new ending even after a preview audience gave the film with its old ending a big thumbs up? Let’s just say it was a sign of how much Paramount valued its slightly spoiled filmmaker, a 38-year-old whiz of a director who came aboard “Double Indemnity” with two Hollywood hits behind him. Lesson: Success pays.

Wilder in the play, with his European sensibility, owns up to a weakness, claiming he doesn’t know the “vernacular” that informs the Chandler/Cain dialogue that the screenplay requires. Lesson: Hubris is good, but to a point.

The collaborators also know their way around the story’s sex and violence that the Breen office won’t approve. Solution: Both sex and violence are very effectively conveyed but never, really never shown on screen. Lesson: Silent reaction shots do wonders.

“Billy & Ray,” in which we learn (again) how so many stars turned the material down (Raft, Ladd, Milland, etc.), is also a reminder of how established actors who should be smarter and bolder are often blind to great material when it comes their way.

The play also conveys to what degree Hollywood hates originality and how much Chandler, the Hollywood outsider, was initially put off by Wilder’s ex-pat crowd of insiders. Lesson: Even the most seemingly mismatched of collaborators can produce wonders.

Another lesson: Knowledge provides leverage in any kind of match. This is made clear when Wilder discovers that his stuffed shirt collaborator, claiming status as a non-drinker, secretly stuffs a bottle of liquor into his leather briefcase for frequent encounters. Wilder knows how to use this discovery to positive effect.

The play also provides insights into how and why the writers unexpectedly turned "Double Indemnity" into a love story — not between the MacMurray and Stanwyck characters — but, surprise, between MacMurray’s Walter Neff and Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson. Lesson: The more surprises and ironies, the better.

So “Billy & Ray” can also function as an engaging Hollywood primer about how words on a written page (a book, no less) can end up in the Hollywood pantheon of cinematic greats. Apparently, luck, persistence and good timing also had something to do with it. And that near-catastrophic tug-of-war between the stuffy, humorless Ray, frumpy in his retiring WASPy way, and the good-time Charlie who was Billy was a personality and skill clash that Wilder was smart enough to see as beneficial to the collaboration (Chandler was so movie-ignorant, he had no idea what a script looked like).

It’s movie theme aside, the play also reminds of some important differences between live drama and film. For instance, there is usually great clarity regarding authorship of a play, whereas writing credits for films are often murky.

Set in cement, films, unlike plays, are only rarely altered once they hit the marketplace. But a stage play lives a lifetime as malleable as soft clay, suggesting “Billy & Ray,” unrecognizable as described in the Times piece, must surely have been tweaked to death (through rehearsals, previews, those punishing reviews and onward). And like many plays, it might also get a measure of further fine-tuning with each performance. Such flexibility no doubt helps explain why that salvo of negative adjectives hurled at the play almost two weeks ago seemed so off the mark at a recent performance (“Billy & Ray” ends November 9th at New York’s Vineyard Theatre).

As Kevin Lally, FJI editor and author of “Wilder Times,” the well-regarded biography of Wilder, noted after seeing “Billy & Ray,” the play attempts to show whether it was Wilder or Chandler who came up with the hard-boiled dialogue. Says Lally, “The author of the play [Mike Bencivenga] says he pored through boxes of Paramount memos, but I still doubt these would confirm authorship of individual lines. I like to think that that famous ‘How fast was I going, officer?’ exchange wasn’t solely Chandler, but the play gives him the credit.”

A further complication regarding screenplay authorship comes by way of original “Double Indemnity” author James M. Cain, whose story first appeared in Liberty Magazine in 1935 before becoming the pulp classic published in the 40s. The play also suggests that Cain himself might have authored some of the screenplay’s hard-boiled zingers.

Lessons aside, “Billy & Ray” is so appealing as good theater. Nods are due the fine cast — “Mad Men"’s Vincent Kartheiser as frisky Billy, theater and TV vet Larry Pine as his older stuffed shirt opposite Ray, Sophie Von Haselberg (Bette Midler’s Yale-trained daughter) as Billy’s assistant (also kept busy arranging rooms for his trysts) and Drew Gehling as Wilder’s studio-frazzled producer on "Double Indemnity."

It helps that Hollywood heavyweight Garry Marshall, a veteran of 17 movies, directed and was blessed with Bencivenga’s deeply researched play. Also impressive is Charlie Corcoran’s expansive set representing Billy’s comfortable filmmaker’s suite on the Paramount lot.

But so much entertainment comes with a word of caution to potential audiences: Full appreciation of “Billy & Ray” is best achieved by more than just a vague familiarity with "Double Indemnity." Even obsession with the Wilder classic is strongly advised. Or, to paraphrase one of Barbara Stanwyck’s famous lines, “Are we going too far, officer?”
--Doris Toumarkine