Always daring Hollywood censors' limits on content, Billy Wilder
directed greats such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Ginger Rogers,
Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, and Gary Cooper.
"Billy Wilder: Interviews" follows the filmmaking career of one of
Hollywood's most honored and successful writer-directors and spans
over fifty years.
Wilder, born in 1906, fled from Nazi Germany and established
himself in America. Starting with a celebrated 1944 "Life" magazine
profile, the book traces his progress from his Oscar-winning heyday
of the 1940s to the 1990s, in which he is still witty, caustic, and
defiant.
Often playful and sometimes outrageous, but just as often very
serious, Wilder details his rise as a Berlin cub reporter to a
fledgling screenwriter in Hollywood's "Golden Age." He tells the
stories behind his brilliant direction of such classics as "Double
Indemnity" (1944), "The Lost Weekend" (1945), "Sunset Boulevard"
(1950), "Stalag 17" (1953), "Sabrina" (1954), "The Seven-Year Itch"
(1955), "Some Like It Hot" (1959), and "The Apartment" (1960),
among others.
A dazzling raconteur, Wilder gives the scoop on the royalty of
cinema, from the maddening magic of Monroe to the uncanny empathy
of frequent alter ego Lemmon. Though his natural tendency is to
spin marvelous anecdotes on the subject of show business, Wilder
also delivers penetrating and instructive observations on his
craft. On screen, his special blend of cynicism and romanticism was
always expressed in a style that avoided showiness.
"Billy Wilder: Interviews" includes in-depth profiles, spirited
Q&A's, and on-the-set glimpses of the director at work. Taken
together, the interviews form an unofficial memoir of a
sophisticated artist once described by a colleague as the most
unusual and amusing man in Hollywood.
Robert Horton is the film critic for "The Herald" in Everett,
Washington. His work has been published in "Film Comment," "New
York Newsday," "American Film," and the "Seattle Weekly."
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