Billy Wilder

 

Photo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.Photo of Barbara Stanwyck + Fred MacMurray in Double indemnityPhoto of Shirley MacLaine + Jack Lemmon in The apartment

Biography

Billy Wilder

Humphrey Bogart

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore.
The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut

Movie news

This week 56 years ago Sabrina premiered (September 9, 1954)

Born:

June 22, 1906

Born as:

Samuel Wilder

Died:

March 27, 2002

Billy Wilder was born in Sucha, Poland. From 1929 he worked as a screenwriter for silent films in Berlin until the Nazis came to power and the Jewish Wilder left for America.

Wilder knew little or no English when he arrived in Hollywood but was helped by film star Peter Lorre, with whom he once shared an apartment.

A turning point in his career came in 1938 when he began a long and succesful collaboration with screenwriter Charles Brackett which was expanded into a producer-director one in 1942. The duo turned such classics as Double Indemnity (1944), Five Graves to Cairo (1943) , The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), after which the partnership dissolved.

During the 1950s Wilder continued a string of hit films including Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some like it hot (1959). Through the 1960s and 1970s, Wilder worked on several more films, although none was as successful as his previous ones.

Though his last film was made in 1981, Billy Wilder was still turning up to work at his Hollywood office well into his 80s.


Academy awards:

Selected Movies:

 

Photo of Marilyn Monroe

News

Poster of Sabrina

This week 56 years ago Sabrina premiered (September 9, 1954)

Poster of Double Indemnity

This week 66 years ago Double Indemnity premiered (September 6, 1944)

Trivia

Wilder wrote the story for The apartment because he was inspired by Davis Lean’s Brief encounter. “What about the guy who owned the flat where the lovers met?” Source / More (Book)

Wilder was a perfectionist. When he sends a character to a good show, the show must be really good. In the script of The apartment Jack Lemmon had to go to The sound of music. But first Wilder went to see the show for himself. He hated it and Lemmon went to The music man. Source / More (Book)

Billy about his longtime producer Samuel Goldwyn: “Just because Sam Goldwyn is a shit, doesn’t mean that being a shit makes you Sam Goldwyn” Source / More (Book)

Sunset Blvd. came in 7th in a list of the best scripts ever written. The members of the Writers Guild of America voted the Sunset Blvd. script into the top 10 of the guild’s 101 greatest screenplays. Three writers (Woody Allen, Francis Coppola and Bily Wilder) had four films on the list.

The apartment is Billy Wilder’s favorite film of his own. Irma la Douce was his greatest financial success, but Billy didn’t like it very much: “It didn’t come out the way I wanted”. Source / More (Book)

The movie that Joe and Norma watch in the private screening room is Queen Kelly (1929) directed by Erich von Stroheim, who plays the butler. Von Stroheim came up with the idea, and so Paramount purchased for $ 1,000 122 feet (37 meters) of footage. Source / More (Book)

Bibliography