Sneak preview
Exclusive interviews with Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and others
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Billy Wilder: It was an opening day of the Dodgers baseball team in the Coliseum. At the first game that they played there were a lot of personalities, well-known personalities, that were wishing them good luck and so on and so forth, and it was Joe E. Brown out of nowhere because he was an aficionado of baseball and he wished them good luck and stuff like that. And I said, 'This is the guy, the crazy guy who is old and loony enough looking ...'
Dan Auiler: Why didn't you work with Cary Grant?
Billy Wilder: Because he didn't want to work with us. I don't know, but for some reason or other he was afraid of working with people who came from Germany, I think. But he was a great friend of mine.
Writing & Directing
Billy Wilder: The [writing] routine was that we met in the morning at 9 o'clock or so and we started plowing ahead. We would sit around the table with the typewriter there and we did everything together. We would act out some of the things, just like exchanging talk-but it was a real collaboration. It was not that he went his way and I went my way and then we would meet and we would compare notes-not at all. We did everything together.
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Barbara Diamond: This was the second picture they did together and it more or less set the pattern for the next twenty years. They met every morning, as Billy has said, 'like two bank tellers,' and over the course of weeks they would talk the whole movie out, the complete structure, the individual scenes, and not a word would be on paper until they were satisfied with what they were doing. Then when things were sufficiently worked out, Iz would write a draft of the script and bring it back to Billy who would say, 'Now we make it better.' And they rewrote together. Actually, since their discussion beforehand had been so intensive, there is very little difference between this first draft and the shooting script. Really just fine-tuning. Billy was funny. He loved the act of creation and there was no one who was better at it, full of wit and imagination and ideas, but I think he loathed the physical labor of actually putting the words down on paper. It was too sedentary a task for him, he needed to be up out of his chair and moving about. Iz, on the other hand, could sit happily at a desk for hours on end. It made for a happy match.
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Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Billy Wilder: It was an opening day of the Dodgers baseball team in the Coliseum. At the first game that they played there were a lot of personalities, well-known personalities, that were wishing them good luck and so on and so forth, and it was Joe E. Brown out of nowhere because he was an aficionado of baseball and he wished them good luck and stuff like that. And I said, 'This is the guy, the crazy guy who is old and loony enough looking ...'
Dan Auiler: Why didn't you work with Cary Grant?
Billy Wilder: Because he didn't want to work with us. I don't know, but for some reason or other he was afraid of working with people who came from Germany, I think. But he was a great friend of mine.
Writing & Directing
Billy Wilder: The [writing] routine was that we met in the morning at 9 o'clock or so and we started plowing ahead. We would sit around the table with the typewriter there and we did everything together. We would act out some of the things, just like exchanging talk-but it was a real collaboration. It was not that he went his way and I went my way and then we would meet and we would compare notes-not at all. We did everything together.
***
Barbara Diamond: This was the second picture they did together and it more or less set the pattern for the next twenty years. They met every morning, as Billy has said, 'like two bank tellers,' and over the course of weeks they would talk the whole movie out, the complete structure, the individual scenes, and not a word would be on paper until they were satisfied with what they were doing. Then when things were sufficiently worked out, Iz would write a draft of the script and bring it back to Billy who would say, 'Now we make it better.' And they rewrote together. Actually, since their discussion beforehand had been so intensive, there is very little difference between this first draft and the shooting script. Really just fine-tuning. Billy was funny. He loved the act of creation and there was no one who was better at it, full of wit and imagination and ideas, but I think he loathed the physical labor of actually putting the words down on paper. It was too sedentary a task for him, he needed to be up out of his chair and moving about. Iz, on the other hand, could sit happily at a desk for hours on end. It made for a happy match.
***
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Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe having a not-so-private moment as Wilder and crew watch their every move (MPTV.net)