Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge with Author Joseph McBride. (2022)

another book he published in twenty twenty one. The title of that book is Billy Wilder Dancing on the Edge, and it's a very thorough detailed study memoir about really an important director of so many important films doublin dimnity some like it hot, very important cultural films.

Ford and Steven Spielberg. He's done a number of inquiries into the JFK assassination, which we talked about last time, and he had definitely Novelist Thomas Flanagan and The New York Review of Books called McBride's wide knowledge of American social history, which informs his work in the JFK Assassination

and in this book. But he's also written I'm not going to list all of his books, but a few of the other titles are Whatever Happened to Orson Wells, a portrait of an independent career, The Whole Durned Human comedy life according to the Cohen Brothers, Frankly Unmasking Frank Capra, and then another one another biography that ties into this book, character and filmmaker I didn't know much about. But the title of that book is how did Lubitch Do It?

And Lubich ties in as an acquaintance and friend of Billy Wilder. But you can find more about that. But those are just some of the books and his long career. In this book he has he can talk about that, but he has a signed picture of Billy Wilder in it, but I'm delighted to have him back. So Joseph McBride, welcome back to the show. Thanks for ging to the interview.

And the Cohn Brothers book is partly new and partly based on a long essay I did on them in a book till five years ago called Teachers for Hollywood. It's a collection of my short work, but I wanted to spin off the Cone Brothers into their own book. But Wilder has always been one of my very favorite directors and I've admired him. I've been writing about him

for more than fifty years now. My first article about him was published in nineteen seventy and Film Quarterly with my collaborator Michael Wilmington, who died recently, and Mike and I were writing articles and films together and we did a piece called The Private Life of Billy Wilder, which was a career overview, and we were quite young when we wrote it, but I still think most of it holds up pretty well. And so you know, I've been

following him all those years. I did an essay in nineteen seventy two seventy three on his film Avanti, which I like very much, which was underrated, and also Mike and I reviewed Private Life for Showlike Holmes, and then the film was These films are beloved by Wilder fans, but they were not popular at the box office because he was in his later work. He was known earlier for being very a cerviic and sarcastic, hard edged social statirists.

But he made some ramantic comedies. He was trying to emulate Lubitch, his mentor, and they weren't totally successful until he made a Banti, which I believe is one of his best films, and it says here, wasn't he the director? They got to film the alleged atrocities at Auschwitz. Well, first of all, those weren't alleged, they were real electrocities. He didn't film them, per se. He worked on a film called Death Mills, which the US Army did right after.

Right at the end of World War Two, Wilder was assigned to the Army in Germany to handle the dinassification of the German film industry. He was supposed to sort out the Nazis from the non Nazis, and that didn't pan out because the Americans were trying to kind of play ball with a lot of the form Nazis, especially in the intelligence agencies after the war, so we didn't

denotify as early as we could have. But Death Mills was a film that another director had put together, and Wilder did some re editing and rewriting of the dialogue actually the narration, and it shows a number of death camps.

Wilder believed his mother died in Auschwitz, but two ostro and biographers found a record at yad Va Shem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Center there from his mother's brother testifying that she died at the Plashau camp in Krakau, which if you've seen Schindler's List, that's the camp that's run by the psychopathic Nazi played by Ray Fines. And his stepfather died at another camp, and his grandmother died at another place.

And one of the ironies was Wilder wanted to make Schindler's List as a tribute to his family who died in Auschwitz. Is the way he put it. Excuse me, but he never knew that his mother actually died at the camp. Was portrayed in the film.

to Spielberg. Spielberg was a big admirer of Wilder and still is, and Wilder said, you know, I could produce it, you could direct it, or vice versa or whatever. And finally nothing was happening for a long time. Wilder called him in the early nineties and said, you know, how

about Schindler's List, We could still do it together. And Spielberg had to tell him where in pre production were starting in a few months and I'm sorry, you know, I'm making the film, and Wilder took it well, and Spielberg said it was the most difficult phone call of his life. Wilder loved the film. He said it was the best film he ever saw on He wrote an essay on a review for a Bavarian newspaper or magazine and it's interesting he chose Bavaria because that's where the

Nazis originated and he read about Holocaust. Well, he said it really made him feel that he was there, you know, which I interviewed to a lot of Holocaust survivors from my book on Spielberg, and that's what they all told me. They told me two things. Every thirty five Holocaust survivors said that it made them feel like they were back in that time and place, which is a high compliment

for a filmmaker to do that. But they all said the only flaw they saw on the film was that Gross was played by actor who was handsome, and he was not a handsome man. He was ugly and tesque, and I think Spielberg cast finds aside from the fact that he's a very good actor, but he wanted to make him more humanized so you could understand him evil. If he was a caricature or just gross looking person, people might not have been able to kind of care

about understanding him, I think was the reason. But these Holocausts, and I interviewed one one man whose job was to He was a teenager and he handled the German shepherds that Girth used at the Flaschno camp to attack Jews. And here's this Jewish kid who's caring for these German shepherds, and they would you know, Garth was torturing and killing people, and he would sick the dogs of people, and this

kid had to take care of them anyway. Wilder at the end of his review, he brought up Holocaust revisionism and said that there are people who don't believe it happened, and he said, I for those people, I have just one question, where is my mother? All Right?

where he moved after that. But he lived his formative years, for his adolescent and young adult years in Vienna. He started working for a newspaper and magazines there. And there's a whole book of his Vienna journalism published in German that I read. And then there's a book of his German journalism, separate book, and it's very interesting stuff. And I, since I'm an old journalist and I like to follow an artist progression and growth, I really studied his journalism

to see how he developed as a writer. He always thought of himself primarily as a writer, but also there are seeds of his later films in some of the articles, like there's he was very enamored of a girl's band and dance troupe called Tiller Girls came from England to Vienna and he met them at the train and he wrote this gloring, kind of heavy breathing article about them. He was a very free spirited journalist. He didn't write

staid prose. He wrote kind of impressionistic essays in effect for these papers that allowed him to do that in the magazine, and he actually fell in love with one of the dancers, his name was Olive. And then he got to Berlin because he was a big fan of American jazz. He's a fan of American movies, American jazz, like a lot of Europeans were in those days. And Wilder loved Paul Whiteman, the American bandleader who he popularly. He's a white band leader, but he kind of popularized

jazz with white audiences acrossover. The former Duke Ellington was very high on Whiteman, and he was a very popular man, and Wilder just idolized him and he got it. He talked himself into a job with Whiteman to go to Berlin with him and his band to be a publicist, and he wrote another glowing review of Whiteman in Berlin that may have been kind of a quick for a quote.

But he got out of Vienna. I got to Berlin, which was probably the most exciting city in Europe at that time, full of cultural firm engine political unrest, and they had a lot of magazines and newspapers. So he was one of many journalists and he struggled, you know, to make a living because there's a lot of competition. But he kind of made a name for himself. He wrote a famous four part series called Waiter, Bring Me a Dancer, which was about his time as a tea dancer.

It's called an eintencer dancing for chips with older ladies or even younger ladies that with a couple of hotels in Berlin. It's really wonderful writing. It reads like a film, and it could be a film. And he told me

it was partly fantasy, partly fictionalized, partly real. And for a long time there was a debate whether it was he really a tee d answer and then decided to write about it or did he take the job so he could write about it, And he admitted to me he really was a tee d answer in between newspaper gigs. And then he thought I could write this as well,

and that helped make a name for him. And then he became a screenwriter in Berlin, and I studied his German screenwriting, which was very interesting and mixed bag with some good films and some not so good films. And then he came to America when Hitler took over. He actually he went to France first. He spent a year in Paris. He directed his first film there called Mobile's Ground which means bad seed. It's kind of a proto new wave film about Karthie's young Carthy's a fun movie.

And then he came to America in thirty four, and he struggled again in Hollywood to re establish himself. Writing in a new language is difficult for anybody, and he was just another writer in Hollywood. But he started getting some credits, but most of the films weren't very good. He was kind of typecast as a writer of operettas, you know, kind of Schmallsey Viennese type of operettas, which he had written some in Berlin as well. And we don't think a Wilder as a musical director. He only

directed one fulcal edge of musical in Hollywood. It's called The Emperor Waltz, which came out recently in blu Ray and I did the commentary for it, which is actually kind of a disguised metaphor for the Holocaust. It gets very grim sometimes underneath the surface of beautiful things.

for everybody. Tremendously influential. But he also brought a new European sophistication, as you're suggesting, to American films, which were still in the throes of Churchianism and Victorianism at the time due w Griffiths films, etc. And Leuvich brought this racier sensibility, very sophisticated romantic comedies and approach to sex, and the American audists really loved that, and other people began imitating him, and Wilder was doing the same kind

of films to some extended Berlin. And then the way he came to America. The thing was he was typecast as doing Schmaltz, and his natural tendency was more a cerbic social satirist in those days, and he didn't get much of a chance to exercise that until he worked for Luvich on Liberard's Eighth Wife and Nanatchko, which was

Wilder's really big breakthrough in America. It's a great film with Greta Garbo in nineteen thirty nine, and it established him as a top screenwriter with his partner Charles Brackett, and then they went out from there to do more films. Then Wilder began directing again in Hollywood in nineteen forty two.

he may have exaggerated that a little bit. It may have been a room like right off the bathroom. But anyway, that was kind of his low point in America. But he only was there for a brief time. But he spent uh some time at the Chateau Marmau. He had his own little room after a while, and that's still a famous solarooch hotel. A lot of European people stay there and it's you know, books have been written about it.

In nineteen thirty five, he had scraped together some money as a screenwriter and he went to Vienna to see his mother and stepfather and he tried to persuade them to move to America because he knew as a journalist that Hitler was on the rise and he would take over Austria, and which happened not too long after that.

But the mother and stepfather were older, they were kind of said in their ways, and he couldn't persuade them to leave, and he felt terrible about then they felt guilty about it when the war came, and knowing that he didn't know what was happening to them, and he felt a sense of survivor guilt which never left him. And that permeates his films to some extent, the echoes of the Holocaust and a number of his films and

the dark side of human nature. That's one of the most important things about his work is that he was a great comedy director, but he also dealt with He made dark comedies, He made heavy dramas, He made black comedies, all kinds of films. He mixed comedy and drama very well. And I asked him in nineteen ninety five, I interviewed him a lot, and I gave him the LA Critics Career Achievement Award, and at the luncheon, I said, what

do you think is your best film? And he said The Apartment And I said why and he said, because it's my best mixture of comedy and drama, which is what I was trying to land all my life.

Although his film Arwell Leduce in nineteen sixty three was his most popular film in the box office, but after that he kind of lost his connection with the audience. He was out of sync with them. We can talk about why. But I like his later films, but that is kind of an argument I'm making in the book his later films, or it's one of his most pertal periods, unlike what a lot of people think.

There was a real social disdain that he had, and he didn't like some of Wilder's habits, like he was kind of a playboy and he was a wisecracker and he would pace up and down in the office. He was a very restless man in his whole life, and I think that's part of being an exile. Never sat down. Jack Lemon said, there's a picture wild sitting down and should be in the Smithsonian because it's probably very rare. But Brackett didn't like the Wilder head. When he walked around,

he would have a writing crop or a whip. He would crack it and I drove Cracket crazy. And so he makes all these comments from almost the beginning of their partnership in nineteen thirty sixty, saying how can I get get away from this guy? And then he never does. It's sort of like a a bad marriage in a sense where he keeps saying, I want to divorce my wife, but the next day, oh, okay, back to work, you know.

at a more advanced agent. So he always said that accent, which was a delightful accent. But some people would make fun of himportant. He was a little self conscious about it, but people it made him. A quote character in Selka Bertel, who was an important exile Maven, and she had a salon in Hollywood. The Wilder and many other important people were part of it. She said that when you're an foreigner, people say, oh, you have such a cute accent. It's

so funny, and it's so fun of patronizing people. But so Wilder stood out as a foreigner, and he needed a writing partner. And also he was a kind of guy who didn't like to write alone because he always wanted to collaborate. He wanted somebody in the room to talk to.

But he was also he had been the drama critic of the New Yorker, so he had that literary pedigree, and he was part of the Algonquin roundtable, and so he's a sophisticated literary man, well read. And Wilder was well read but didn't have that rbal dexterity. And when Wilder got the Felberg Award from the Academy, he thanked Bracket and he said he thanked him for his patients with my English. You know, he really helped me to learn English better. And after I think Wilder said, three

years in Hollywood he could start thinking in English. But when he came over he listened to the radio a lot. That's where he got a lot of his English. He would play soap operas and sports programs and music shows and things and pick up the argot. And then he would date a lot of young women, American women, partly because he was the ladies man, but partly to listen

to them talk, you know. And so he learned. But for a while he had to write in German and have somebody surrepticiously translated his work into English to give the studios. He had to kind of hide it from the studios that he couldn't speak English very well.

Double Indemnity. People are still watching that today, I mean, and you I think one of the things you mentioned in your book too, is he was very self conscious of about not getting typecast, right, Like he didn't want to just be like a Hitchcock or something like that.

of moods and sometimes in the same film. But Double Indemnity, I mean, has a lot of humor, but it's a very dark film, film noir classic helps set the mold for film noir. It's a murderous couple, but there is there is humor in it. And Last Weekend is a very dark drama about an alcoholic It's a very strong film, kind of hard to watch, good, good film that you wanted to out of me work for directing that as well, and Raymond Land when they ask her for playing the part.

But Wilder would tend to follow dramas with the comedy and change the pace. And Susai Boulevard is funny but a tragic film as well, And so he was all over the map in terms of the kind of films he made, and he liked different genres. I mean, he didn't do all the genres. He directed twenty five films in Hollywood, and he didn't do every genre, but he tried a number of them and did well in several genres.

That was part of his personality he was and you get that partly, I think from being a newspaper person. You know, when I was a reporter. I'm still a journalist. One of the fun things about the job is you go to work every day you really don't know what's going to happen. You know, you're at the mercy or as the fun part is the news happens and you're sent out to cover some breaking news or you're told to interview somebody. And Wilder like that excitement as well,

and I think he liked that in his films. He was very as I say, restless person, right.

But it dragged on, as these things tend to do. And while the producer of pulp fiction was getting his word and going on and on and on, Wilder was muttering under his breath next to you know, and he kept getting anxious about going, And so I helped him through the lobby, I mean, to navigate his way through the crowds. And it turned out he had a four o'clock meeting with somebody he thought might give him money

to make a film. So he was naturally anxious about that, and he hadn't made a film for a while, and so he really didn't want to pose for photographers, so he really snapped at them and it was kind of stunning. But a lot of times he would make funny jokes, but one time. For example, in Playboy, he referred to the producer Hal Wallace as the prisoner of Fazenda because he was married to Luis Fazenda, who is a comedy actress from the Silent period, the prisoner of Fazenda, which

is pretty funny. But he said he told me he had to. He called hal Wallace after that and said, I never said that, and you know, I apologize. I didn't want to hurt your what I was feeling or you're feeling. So he would sometimes have you double thought about what hexcept. But he made many many great crips and he was a great person to interview. He would have loved to have interviewed Hi because he just was like a Roman candle full of wonderful constantly talking.

floating in the water. And we put out our hand to pull him off out of the water, and we gave him the place to live and regain the job, and we saved him from you know, hit laring all this, and Wilder claimed that Mayor said he should be deported for making this film, for biting the hand that feeds him. And then Mayor saw Wilder standing there, and wild Wilder said, mister Mayor, I'm Billy Wilder. I made this film, Fuck you, mister Mayor, which was a very bold thing for a

filmmaker to say, especially an immigrant filmmaker. And also at that time, Wilder was opposing the Hollywood Blacklist, which was rampant at that time from forty seven onwards. And the Bracket Book makes it clear that's why they actually broke up, and that was sort of unclear until the diaries came out that they had disagreements, like, for example, Brackett didn't want to work on Double Indentity because he thought that James mk novel was too sordid, so Wilder got Raymond

Chandler to work on it. But the real reason was Brackett actually approved of the House Committee in an American action. He's forcing people to say if they were communists, sympathizers or communists. And Wilder thought there was against the First Amendment. He as an immigrant, he believed very strongly in the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court. He said, who's the most important thing about America? I wonder what we would say today. But Brackett and he got into big

arguments about Dalton Trumbo refusing to testify, et cetera. And Wilder said at that time, I don't want to work with you anymore, you know. But they still did Senset Boulevard. I guess they had one more film they wanted to do and had our time to break up. And then Wilder just said that's it, and Brackett acted surprised, even though there been many warnings where Wilder said, I want

to be more free. I want to do certain films that you don't want to do, and he warned them and then they broke up and Brackett was really kind of berefed after that. And Wilder worked with a number of different writers in the fifties until he found Diamond, and they were really simpotic. They're both European Jewish refugees, and they both had similar sensibilities, and they talked the same language, and they were had similar senses of humor. Diamond was more of a comedy writer. He came from

screenwriting and review writing. He wrote the school reviews for Columbia University for three years and they were so good that they were reviewed by the New York Times and they gave him glowing reviews, and that's how he got Hollywood. And so he wasn't a literary man like Bracket. But Wilder by that time was, you know, a master of screenwriting, and Diamond had a lot of experiences as screenwriters, so

they worked really smoothly together. And all of Wilders screenplays with both collaborators are misterpieces of structure and construction, which William Goldman said, screenplays are structure. That's the most important thing about a good screenplay, and they really work well, like you planted something early in the film that pays off later, maybe up two or three times, and then pays off in a graduate at the end. They're very carefully constructed, not only the great dialogue, but the great

storytelling skills. And so him Diamond were like brothers, kind.

actress talk, you wouldn't liked them improvised. And because they both of them said, if you know, if you spend six months in the office writing the dialogue, an actor on the spur of the moment is not going to come up with a better line. I mean, I've I've worked in films. I've worked with Arson Wells and he helped he me write my dialogue with him before. I've seen those unusual but once in a while an actor does have a good idea and they put in some lines.

Shirley McLain in the apartment, for example, when they had lunch, she said she was having an affair with the married man, and she said when you have when you're having an affair with the married man, you shouldn't wear a Maskkara wildly thought there was a greade line and put that in the film. And then she also said something like why do people have to love people anyway? Why can't

we love zebras or giraffes or something. He said, great, okay, and he rebuilt the set and had her say why do people have to love people anyway?

mc murray and how they would talk. But I was on the set of The Front Page for a day and watch while they're shooting, which was really a great experience for me as a critic and future author of a book on him, and I noticed that Diamond would sit on the side of the set on a little stool or applebox, and his job was to police the dialogue, he told me, and he actually had to write. Normally, the writer is not even on the set, and then when they are in the set, we're not supposed to

interrupt the action. But Diamond had the license to interrupt the actors, and I saw him do that sometimes with Welder, math Out would say a line. Actually, Vincent Gardenia as a police chief threw in some goddamnits or something, and Wilder said, do we have too many goddamits? And Diamond looked at the script and he ran his finger down and said, yes, we have three damns and two god damits for something. And so he tells him not to

say goddamn it too often. Another time, Wilder Matho was supposed to tell the sheriff, we're going to throw you out and your fat can, and he kept saying big fat can. And then he turned to Diamond and he knew the drill, and he said, I've been throwing in a big before fat can. Is that okay? And Diamond sort of sniffed. He said, yes, I didn't say anything about that, you know. In other words, they would allow little changes if it seem more natural, and sometimes, you know,

if they felt the need for adding something. As Diamond said, there was a poker game and running poker game in the film with the reporters. He said, that's the kind of thing where you need to write some dialogue got on the set to cover the action in the poker game. And but while Theer and Diamond would go off and spend half an hour, you know, writing, the dialogue got on the set, you know, which is unusual. But they did not wing it like some directors like to do, and.

hates his characters, etcetera, etcetera. And I really don't believe that. Diamond said Wilder was a disappointed romantic, which I think is a good phrase. And he said he was like Arthur Schitzler, the Viennese playwriter read Laurent and he wrote the novel that Eyes White Shot.

Apartment was pretty unredeemable character. The way he exploits Shirley maclain and other women. But again there's there's a moralism that I find that in Luvitch too, that both Luvich and Wilder are moralists, but they're against conventional morality. There's a difference, I think. And Noel Coward's Private Lives is the line that I like where Amanda mentions morals and somebody said, what do you mean by that? Because they're very sophisticated characters, and she says, morals what one should

do and what one shouldn't do. And I think that's when lubach is films are about how men should treat women and how women should treat men. Underneath the jokes and all that, that's the serious underpinning of his great films like Trouble and Paradise and Designed for Living and chopp Around the Corner, et cetera, and then Wilders films. The Apartment is a very it's a morality play, but you know it's it's it's not one thing Lubits does.

He's in favor of adultery a lot of these films, which is kind of an un American attitude that's not what you usually see in American films because he's as a European sophistication. He's not prudish, and he's you know, in Europe sometimes marriages tolerate partners having something going on on the side. It doesn't destroy the marriage, and it can enhance the marriage. Who portrays that and then Wilder

has the same kind of attitude. But he also shows how people can really be hurt by people using them sexually, and that is one of the common themes in his films is the clash between casual sex and true love, or sex for money and love. A lot of his

films deal with prostitution or various forms of prostitution. You know, a man giving a woman money was his mistress, etc. Or a man doing things for money like in the Apartment to Jack Lemon, character is like a company's letting out his apartment to his superiors so he can rise in the career. And Wilder, I guess part of that stems from his experiences as a teat answer he makes pains in that series of articles to say he never

slept with women, but who knows. But he also when he went to high school, he said he would stare out the window at a brothel across the street all day long, and there was a prostitute who had red hair, curly red hair. They called it red Fritzy, and he was really taken with her, and he saved up all his money to score with Red Fretzy once. And you know, this was when he was in high school and he registered at the hotel under the name of one of his teachers he didn't like, which was a Wilder kind

of joke. But so Wilder was very you know, advanced in terms of his sexual understanding of what people do, and he was not condemning sex workers. For example, like in Kiss Me Stupid, which I think is a great film, it's very underrated and scandalize people in America. Kim Novac plays of prostitute and she's really the most admirable character in the film. The men in the film are awfully slazy and the wife. It's about a man hiring a prostitute to maskrat as his wife so he can sell

a song to Dean Martin. And what happens is the wife winds up sleeping with Dean Martin for a night, and the prostitute winds up sleeping with the songwriter for one night, and she says, for one night it was good being a housewife or my wife, and then the wife says, for one night, it was good being Hollywood pistol. And that outrage audience is in nineteen sixty four, it's

ironic today things have changed so much. When I show that filmly my class, what scandalizes them is not the wife being a prostitute for a night, but the prostitute saying she wants to be her wife for one night because she never had anybody treat her with respect or she hasn't not at home, you know. But today's audience, Oh my god, that's shocking.

came by train. They had a very stern woman as they're kind of chaperone, just like in some Like an Hot And it's filled with music from the nineteen twenties. It's said in the twenties and transplanted to America, but it's a lot of it is taken from his memories

of that, and Marilyn Monroe's character is you know. I talked to Howard Hawks did a book on him called Hawks and Hawks, and he and Wilder are the only two people who ever directed Monroe twice in complete films, and Hawks said that Monroe there was nothing realistic about her. She was a creature of fantasy all the time in films, and that's how he used her in films, and she's very good in that. But Diamond Wilder. First, Wilder put her in some seven year ritch where she is literally

a creature of fantasy. She's basically Marilyn Monroe living upstairs from this orny married man and it's all fantasy. He has fantasies of having a flame with her, and the sensors wouldn't allow him to do that. But when they come to something like it Hot, she plays a very realistic, very poignant character who's bitter sweet. She's looking to marry a rich man, which is kind of her flaw in a way, but she wants to be treated better. And the whole film is about Tony Curtis, who's a cat,

learning to treat her with respect and affection. And that's what the morality of the film is. But it's very unusual situation for American films. I remember when I first saw that film. I was twelve, I guess, and I was really amazed by that film. It opened my mind. Billy Wilder is kind of my sex education teacher. I think I was a repressed Catholic kid, and I thought, Wow, that feelings really really sexy and wild. And then I went to see Aramel Deduce. I had a funny experience.

First time I saw it, I walked down in the middle. I was kind of scandalized by it. And then the second time then I went back to it, and I kept being drawn to it, and I made it all the way toward the end when Charley McLean has her baby in church while she's getting married, and I was scandalized by then I walked out again. The third time I went to it, I made it all the way through, and so I kind of matured thanks to Wilder. And soon after that they had the Legion of Decency Pledge,

which they had every year. You had to stand up in church and pledge you wouldn't go to movies and were condemned by the Legion and I refused to stand for that. My father was upset, but I had been changed by Billy Wilder and a few other things, and I was starting to become a film person instead of religious, and I broke away from the church. So, yeah, Wilder was pushing the envelope. I'm personally here to tell you how I worked in those days, right.

so they had a lot of influence on that. But the production code was opposed by the studios from the thirty four onward, and it changed Lubitch's films because he was he was very risque before that, and then he had to be more oblique and more subtle, and that actually was good for him in a sense. But Wilder

kept pushing that envelope. And Wilder and other directors from that period told me that even though they chafed about the code and the restrictions, which were kind of ludicrous, like you couldn't have a married bull in bed together, even a merried couple of the advent supper beds and things like that, but it made them think of more ingenious solutions, to be suggestive rather than blatant. Showing people bouncing around the bed is not particularly sophisticated form of storytelling.

And so Wilder kind of thrived by pushing the envelope. I see him as the bull in the China Shop and American puritivism. And but when the code was abolished in sixty eight, in the rating system was opposed, which has its own problems. The China Shop, all the crockery was broken and anything went for a while. You know, they made Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider and all kinds of racy films and films with profane language, you know,

I can. He was afraid of Virginia Wolf, etc. And Wilder didn't want to do that explicit kind of stuff. He didn't think it was witty or funny, so he became more openly romantic. He was like a closet of romantic and his romanticism came out of the closet and he made He was kind of also traumatized by the reactions Christmas Stupid, which was pretty, you know, ronching film, but it was a restoration comedy, as Diamond said, the

audience didn't get it. But then they made The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is a beautiful film, and they spent ten years writing that and it was a lovely, bittersweet romantic film. And unfortunately the varioush company cut a lot out of it after some bad previews, and Wilder was kind of forced to accurates, and they cut out a couple of humorous episodes at the beginning that are a loss, But the biggest loss they cut out a flashback in which the whole film is about what is

Sherlock Holmes's attitude toward women? You know, Some people also say that Wilder is a misogynist. I don't think he is. I think he criticizes both men and women equally, and he doesn't undamentalized women. And Mollie Haskell, who's a great writer about women in film, said in my book that one reason Wilder is so modern today is that he doesn't sentimentalize women like a lot of the films did in the old days. And we look back at them

and we think they're kind of phoning or limited. But Wilder didn't hesitate to criticize women, but only about three women in his films who were just out and out nasty people of Harbus Stanwick and Double and Dmnity, Jan Sterling and Ason Hall and Judy West and Fortune Cookie. The rest are a mixed group of real people, and some of them are very good people, like Betty Schaeffer, the story editor and Sense of Boulevard is my favorite example,

and Shirley McLain and Nancy Olsen plays that character. Shirley McLain is a wonderful character in the Apartment. She's flawed, but she's a lot. You love her. You understand why she's falling for the wiles of this married man. And doesn't understand that the guy who really loves her when she should regret until toward the end of the film. But she's a very real person. And when my students saw that film recently, they said, Wow, that film is

so modern. It's just like sexual relationships today, and we're really impressive. So that's kind of what wild they're brought to American films, right.

was at Oxford he won a crew race. He was the captain of the crew and as a reward, his team bought a prostitute services for him and he had been worshiping from Afar, this beautiful blonde who would go to a church with a bunch of other girls and things like that. He could see her from the fire, and then when he gets the prostitute, he's very shy, and she turns around and she's the girl that he's been worshiping and idealizing, and that's a terrible shock Tom

and he runs out. And Maurice Solatov, who's one of Wilder's biographers, claimed that Wilder had a similar experience as a young man, that he was in love with a girl named Ilsa who he had idealized, and that his friend said she was turning tricks in the local park and he went there and was terribly disillusioned. But I asked Wilder about that, and he said, absolute bullshit. Never happened. He said, as a young man, I wouldn't sleep with the prostitute because you know, he'd get syphilis one and

number two I couldn't afford it. But he didn't actually deny the story, and actually the Red Fritzy story a kind of belies the thing that he wouldn't sleep with the prostitute and didn't have the money and he admitted to Kevin Lalley, another biographer, that yeah, I did date this girl, Elsa, but I knew she was of her, you know. It's a different version of the story, but

something like that happened to him. So that's that's a really tragic loss in Sherlock Holmes of that scene, which was very short they could have kept it is missing. I have a still from it in my book Bill Wilder Dancing on the Edge. But then he did Avandi, which is a very romantic film about a again, a guy who's sort of callous and just believes in extramarital

sex without emotional entanglement. Jack Lemon's character an American businessman what we call the ugly American kind of character, while they had a lot of them in his films, and he goes to Europe. He meets this young, attractive english woman who is more open about sexuality, and they have romance, reenacting the romance of their dead parents. It's a beautiful, tender film that looks back to the traditions of Luvich and all that. But in nineteen seventy two, the word

romantic was kind of a dirty word. If people wanted to put you down, they'd say, oh, you're a romantic, like that meant that you didn't understand life or something, because true love was the big thing. And Wilder was against that concept because he believed in emotions, and so that's why he's not a cynic or misogynist. He believes in people treating each other decently and cares about the emotions of both genders. And also he's interested in things

like cross stressing. And masquerading is a big theme.

by being something. The art and I talked about that for a long time, and then I realized, oh, well, that's common to exiles, and I started I read a lot about exiles, and people say that when you're in exile and you come to a new country, you are masquerading, whether you want it or not, in fact, because you're adopting the language and customs of a new country, and sometimes the clothing or the jobs or whatever, and you

have to do that to survive in the country. Some people are more able to do it than others, and some people resisted. But Wilder wholeheartedly became an American, but he was still a European and he's later a work When Hollywood was not financing him much, he became a European filmmaker again, and so he deals a lot with masquerating, but that also is a way in which he deals with people fooling people and exploiting people and then getting

their come up. In Fedora, his last good film, it's all about masquerating about a an old actress who her face has become disfigured through plastic surgery, bad clastic surgery, and so she turns her daughter into effects similary of herself and passes off her daughter as herself, and people

marvel at how useful she looks at all. That it's a terrible mask, great of ruins its young woman's life, and it's a tragic film, and it's a dark film about film business, and it's related to the sense of boulevard, but even more tragic. And that's a fascinating, flawed film, that fascinating and he.

every play by Strindberg was cynical. And what was the thing you were mentioning?

people who have the broken heart. And this critic was saying, I see the broken heart in Pekapa on display, even though he was very violent filmmaker, But the characters that are fascinating because they're complex. But he said, I don't see the broken heart, and say, Robert Altman, A lot of modern filmmakers are not. They're not as much into vulnerability as Billy Wilder was. And that's one of the

qualities that I really love and admire about him. And you love a lot of his characters and you understand them, even a terrible person like Barbus Stanwick and Double Identity sort of understand why she's doing what she's doing to get out of this bad marriage. She's going to kill her husband. But then Fred mc murray is a great piece of casting. He's a likable fellow, a kind of all American guy. And Wilder had written one of the interesting discoveries. I saw a film called Champagne Waltz in

the thirties, Wilder had co written. It was rewritten after he left, but it's the first Wilder character in an American film. Buzzy Blue is a character played by McMurray who's kind of wise cracking, gum chewing jazz man who goes to Vienna and he puts a Viennese waltz palace out of business, and he feels guilty about it because of the young woman who's getting interested in and he's ruining her business. And then she goes to America with him and they kind of combined jazz and Viennese waltz

is in a kind of unlikely combination. But it's a very Wilder character. In his love of music, which is one of the great things about his films. He always picked the right songs for his films with a lot of residents, a lot of symbolism, and his use of background scores. He picked great proposals to work with, so that McMurray he saw the darker side underneath the surface charm, and he used him in double identity. He is kind

of a regular guy. We could all kind of relate to this guy, but he comes to lust and and he wants to outwit his father figure, who's great performance by Edward G. Robinson. There's a great insurance investigator and Worry, like a lot of people, thinks he can out with somebody who's really brilliant, and then he fails, although he does not rid him for a while. And it's it's really as wild he said, it's a love story between

two men, not between the man and the woman. They have a murderous relationship, but he betrays his father figure and it's a very poignant ending where they kind of expressed their love for each other in oblique place. It's very moving from Joseph.

in Germany. He was the main writer on that, and it's kind of a near realist film about ordinary people on a bittersweet weekend jaunt and they cast non actors for their roles. It's really a terrific film, and Criterion has a disc of that. And then he did Amil and the Detectives, which is based on a children's novel. It's very good about a gang of children who crooked adult and there have been several versions of that. Wilders is really terrific. And then he did a film called

The Blonde Dream. If anybody can dig that one up, it's just a very moving film. It's a mixture. Like when he was in Germany. The head of the oof A company was a Hitler sympathizer, and he made them put in sort of conformist elements and songs extolling conformism and how we're all happy even though we're poor, and all this kind of insense. But the main character is a woman who wants to go to Hollywood, and so

this isetting seen Lilian Harvey plays and she's marvelous. She goes to Hollywood in a dream sequence and it becomes a nightmare for her. It's kind of like Sense of Boulevard where the men treated really badly. And this is so contemporary because it's just like the Me Too movement, and she winds up staying in Germany, which is kind of a depressing ending, but it's a very interesting film. She has some very beautiful songs in the comment So

he did some good films. He made another one called Scampalo, which is a girl of the streets, a good fether. Dolly Haas is very much like Adrea Hepburn. Wilder directed later, so it's worth exploring the more obscure Wilder films. So I really paid attention to all those films that he wrote before he became a director, which you know, you don't really understand him if you just look at the films he directed. If you have to understand, Okay, how

did he get to be that very assure guy. When he started directing in Hollywood with the major and the minor, he was already during accomplishment. How did that happen? You know? And I delve into that's I find that really interesting. I think most people like to know that.

Marlena Dietrich and John Lund. It's about an American congresswoman who goes to Germany and she's kind of like Sarah Palin, the conservative Brudish congresswoman, investigating the morale ofy gis who were all, you know, pooling around with German women and selling stuff in the black market. And Wilder has a very tolerant attitude toward a lot of that, and the

congress woman is sort of opened up by that. She's like one of the Zuglar American characters who becomes her deeper feelings come out and she falls in love with this gi who's kind of fooling her. And it's a marvelous film that Wilder and Bracket. The Bracket was nervous about the subject under that's one of the really edgy political films while they're made that got some criticism for them. But today it looks very refreshing. It's so realistic and

so truthful about the post war period and all the corruption. Right.

In the Broken Places? But in political truth, the media and the assassination of President Kennedy, which I think is a book that I cared deeply about. I've had a lot of many years of research into that book and the whole subject of the assassination of it, studying for decades. In the acknowledgments or in the front of the book, I have my address because it's self push through a fulfillment house and you can only get it through Amazon, but on the copyright page it has my address and

my email. J O E M A C A O nine at gmac gmail dot com. J O E M A C H A O nine at gmail dot com. I love hearing from readers. It's one of the pleasures for an author who is getting feedback from readers. I really appreciate it when somebody writes me I think that's very nice. We don't I'm not doing in personal events

right now because of the pandemic. But one of the pleasures for writers when you write a book, they let you out of your page for a while and you get to go and meet your readers at signings and things. And I'm not doing that right now, but it is you're right for the unknown reader, the ideal reader, and then it's very nice when you meet the actual people and get their reactions to the book.

And I really appreciate your broad range of interests that you're interested in that and the film film books too, And you know, film is my kind of official job, but the Kennedy Assassination is sort of my my real avocation in life. But you know, I do both. I'm fascinated by both areas. I'd like to go back and forth, and I write other kinds of books to but those are the two areas that.