Billy Wilder, I’m proud to say, was a friend of mine. In a business in which the word “genius” is tossed about like confetti on New Year’s Eve and bestowed, like a sheepskin, on every film school graduate, Billy was one of the few people who may have actually deserved it.
In the mid-30’s, he distinguished himself as one of the writers of “Ninotchka.” Over the following quarter century, he wrote, wrote and directed, or wrote, directed and produced, the likes of “Hold Back the Dawn,” “Five Graves to Cairo,” “Lost Weekend,” “Double Indemnity,” “A Foreign Affair,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “Stalag 17,” “Love in the Afternoon,” “Witness for the Prosecution,” “Some Like it Hot” and “The Apartment.” Divide those movies up between five or six other guys and they’d all have had terrific careers. It didn’t matter whether the movies were dramas or comedies, originals or adaptations, Wilder brought them off with style and wit.
Once, I asked him why, as a high-paid screenwriter, he had decided to take on the chore of directing. He explained that Paramount kept assigning director Mitchell Leisen to the scripts he and Charles Brackett wrote. “Leisen was lousy,” Wilder said. “He didn’t care about characters and dialogue. You’d look for him to discuss the script, and you’d find him with the clothing designer, counting pleats in dresses. It was very frustrating. Fortunately, Preston Sturges, who was Paramount’s number one screenwriter, had recently become its most successful director. So I figured my timing was good. I went to the bosses and told them that I, too, wanted to direct. They were against it, but I persisted, and finally they told me I could direct our next script. Well, I knew they figured I’d come up with something artsy-fartsy, fall on my face, and that I’d go back to being a nice little writer and stop bothering them. Instead, Mr. Brackett and I wrote ‘The Major and the Minor,’ a sex farce with Miss Ginger Rogers pretending to be a 12-year-old. It was Paramount’s biggest hit in 1941. After that, they were stuck with me.”
It makes for a wonderful story, and it led to some wonderful movies. But all I can say is, phooey!|
Perhaps if the super talented Sturges and Wilder hadn’t succeeded in their experiments, we wouldn’t be stuck with so many no-talent hacks being encouraged to wear two or three hats. Believe me, it’s difficult to write a good script. For entirely different reasons, it’s difficult to direct a good movie. So you can imagine what the odds are that the same person is going to write and direct a halfway decent flick. The problem isn’t just with writers who shouldn’t be allowed to direct traffic or directors who can’t be trusted to write a laundry list. We also have producers who actually believe that reading Variety, dating starlets and sitting through dailies, qualifies them to direct movies.
In the old days, legendary producer David O. (“Gone With the Wind”) Selznick was famous for the epic length memos he’d send to his directors. But he didn’t do the actual directing. Even with an ego the size of Hoover Dam, the man was smart enough to know his limitations.
It probably wasn’t until Stanley Kramer came along that a successful producer decided he belonged behind the camera. As a producer, Kramer had made his reputation with such small, well-made movies, as “Champion,” “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “High Noon.” But Kramer, whose ego was as large as Selznick’s even if his budgets weren’t, made up his mind that he could do a better job than directors like Mark Robson and Fred Zinnemann. And, so, as a producer-director, he got to grind out such boring, preachy, snoozearamas as “The Defiant Ones,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “Inherit the Wind.” Then, to prove he was equally adept at comedy, the totally humorless Kramer foisted a movie that was every bit as long and hokey as its title, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
Which brings us to Irwin Winkler. Mr. Winkler, in partnership with Robert Chartoff, had been a successful producer until he was about 60 years old. They had made some decent movies, including “Raging Bull,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and “The Gambler,” not to mention a ton of money with the five “Rocky” movies. But clearly Winkler felt himself creatively stifled. And, so, as with Stanley Kramer, came the fateful day he simply had to spread his wings…only to prove he didn’t have any. However, when you’re a big name producer, it’s a lot like being a naked emperor; nobody dares tell you the truth. One would think, though, that after unleashing such critical and commercial flops as “Guilty by Suspicion,” “Night and the City,” “The Net” and “At First Sight,” Mr. Winkler wouldn’t have had the gall to make a Cole Porter biography, “De-Lovely,” that was even worse than the abominable “Night and Day.” But I don’t blame Mr. Winkler entirely or even Mr. Kramer. No, I blame my old friend, Billy Wilder. The problem is that he not only kept doing the impossible on such a regular basis, but he made it look so easy that every shnook was convinced he could do it, too.
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©2004 Burt Prelutsky
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