Freda: I
loved reading the book. I thought your introduction is fantastically
informative about Billy Wilder, situating his life within the context of Weimar
Berlin and 1920s culture too, really fascinating. I was struck by the language
in these pieces.
Isenberg:
There we really need to thank Shelley Frisch. She translates with such
extraordinary aplomb, it’s amazing. Translating is so hard. I’ve done it and
I’m not terribly skilled at it and Shelley is just a wizard. And we owe her a
great deal in making these texts accessible to people who don’t otherwise have
the German language skills to read them. That was the impetus for this
collection: I’d worked with [these texts] over the years, I happen to have done
my graduate training in German, so I had the access and I was grateful for it,
but I was also equally upset and kind of miffed, perplexed, and even borderline
depressed that my Anglo-American comrades couldn’t have access to these texts.
These are jaunty pieces. There’s a certain liveliness to them, and that comes
across in the German, and thanks to Shelley Frisch, it really comes across in
her rendering of it in English. The snappiness of Wilder’s language – a
snappiness that will ultimately make it into his American screenplays and be
translated into the screen, is definitely on the page in these early articles
of his.
Freda:
Yes, I love your word “jaunty.” It leads to this broader issue of language and
description and style. There’s that wonderful quote from [Charlotte] Chandler’s
[biography] Nobody’s Perfect, of Wilder saying that “to know me, you have to
know Vienna of 1906. This was a world of whipped cream and cream cakes.” That
nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Berlin of the 1920s. In that
milieu, it was language all the time. It was café culture, when people actually
read newspapers and spoke to each other. He was a writer, his creativity in
terms of these little pieces – feuilletons, cultural essays. It’s such a lovely
genre, kind of like Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag. Little daily flashes of
imagery, not pre-directorial in any specific training, but a jaunty orientation
to reality.
Isenberg:
Yes, that combined with acute observation – the powers of keen observation of
people in his midst. And likening it to Susan Sontag or Joan Didion or Roland
Barthes is maybe not all that wide of the mark. Here is someone who is
enormously perceptive but also enormously playful. Because he’s Wilder and is
someone who likes to add a little mischief to whatever he’s doing, you do have
a bit of poetic license.
During
the time that he’s writing there is what’s known in Weimar Germany as Neue
Sachlichkeit, The New Objectivity, with the best-known example being Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City (1927), this great Soviet-inspired montage of Berlin.
The whole point of the New Objectivity was to present the facts, whether on the
screen or on the page. Obviously what Wilder’s doing isn’t exactly that, you
have those acute or keen observations but you also have someone who’s having a
good time, spinning a yarn, telling a good story. That is one criticism of the
New Objectivity phase in visual arts and culture: there was a certain coldness
to it. And you don’t have that in Wilder’s writings at all. Exactly the
opposite: they radiate warmth and there is a personal voice that’s often there.
In some cases it’s Wilder’s voice, and in some cases it’s an invented voice.
There’s that piece (“Wanted: Perfect Optimist”) when he takes on the persona of
being a hardboiled New York tabloid journalist writing on the person who’s
hired to smile all day for that marmalade company. He’s just having a good
time.
Freda
[laughing]: That’s a wonderful piece.
Isenberg:
It is. And it reminds me of the “Shouts & Murmurs” column in the New Yorker
where sometimes you’ll see there’s a single line that’s ripped from a tabloid
piece, and then an author will create a humorous story out of that. I don’t
know whether young “Billie” caught a notice of this story somewhere and then
made it into his own, but it does seem to have that sort of “Shouts and
Murmurs” style to it.
Freda:
He has an attitude, he’s not an intellectual, and maybe that’s where my analogy
went wrong; he’s not even really an essayist. Although I love “The Art of
Little Ruses,” which is about him complaining why aren’t people taught to
dissemble and lie – because this is the most important thing you need to learn.
This goes back to this issue of language and description. It starts out, “I
don’t want to come right out and insist that, starting this very day, schools
teach the art of lying, by which I mean using postures and facial expressions,
gestures and inflections of the voice to convey the opposite of truth with
sweeping powers of persuasion and achieve smashing success.”
Isenberg:
You’re saying that he’s not an intellectual, which is so true, and he would
never want to have any of the stuffiness of an intellectual. He’s a born
entertainer so that’s his objective in these pieces… I love the piece that you
mentioned, “The Art of Little Ruses” which I think is in some ways a nod to
Oscar Wilde, or at least has a certain Wilderian (if you’ll pardon the pun)
feel to it. “The Decay of Lying” by Wilde and “The Art of the of the Little
Ruses by Wilder” – so we’ve got Wilde and Wilder.
There’s
another one, “Anything but Objectivity,” which may in fact be viewed as a
little bit of a barbed critique of intellectual culture at that time. He
clearly knows these philosophers and sociologists and other thinkers and
artists who were prominent at that point in time in Weimar Berlin and Vienna
between the wars – [Sigmund] Freud and his colleague [Alfred] Adler and Richard
Strauss and Arthur Schnitzler – he claimed to have interviewed all four of them
in a single day. That was one of the more audacious claims by young Billie. I
think he just figured that there’s no way that anybody could ever verify
whether [he had]. There are no extant articles, no interviews. So I think that
was Wilder being Wilder, or being Wilder than Wilder perhaps. I’ll stop.
Freda:
Wasn’t it in a later interview when he said “Well, Freud kicked me out, but at
least I got kicked out by Freud. That was the status symbol.”
Isenberg:
There’s this profile of the French playwright Claude Anet, and Wilder’s
adaptation of Anet’s Ariane, jeune fille russe (Ariane, a Russian Girl) is what
forms the basis of Love in the Afternoon. I’m almost obsessed with the idea of
Wilder as a young journalist in Vienna between the wars and in Weimar Berlin
laying the foundation for a lot of the work that he would do as a screenwriter
in Hollywood. You can’t see everything that he would later do in these early
texts but there’s a lot that’s there.
I was
doing an interview for a journalist at the Observer in the UK who wanted to
know some of the examples, and I [mentioned] a sort of alienation in the big
city, that struggling to get by and being a little bit of a schlemiel – an
architect of one’s own misfortune. There’s a direct line between that and C.C.
Baxter, Jack Lemmon’s character in The Apartment. I thought I was going out on
a limb, and maybe I was, but then I saw a recent short documentary on Wilder,
and the German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff is interviewed in it and he makes
exactly that same claim, so I felt vindicated by Schlöndorff.
Freda:
It’s flawed, but in Trespassing Bergman [(2013)] you have all of these
directors and it’s quite fascinating, even the most more obnoxious ones. It
would be interesting to have a series of filmmakers speak about Wilder.
Isenberg:
It’s a recent documentary it came out maybe two years ago and it’s called Never
Be Boring, which I suspect is probably a line from Wilder. I can’t actually
find proper attribution.
Freda:
Not as easy as Nobody’s Perfect.
Isenberg:
The epitaph on his tombstone is “I’m a writer, but [then] nobody’s perfect.”
Schlöndorff interviewed Wilder at length and did this documentary [with Gisela
Grischow] in the 1980s called [for its English release] Billy Wilder Speaks,
and it’s the German biographer Hellmuth Karasek who was interviewing Wilder for
the German language biography that came out a little bit after that so
Schlöndorff tagged along so he’s on screen a lot in that earlier documentary.
It’s in the later one that I just referenced, where he says [that with] CC
Baxter you can really trace the line back to Wilder’s Weimar Berlin writings as
a young freelance journalist. That’s from maybe 2018 or so. You can stream it
free on Amazon Prime.
Freda: I
will, because for anybody writing about or teaching Wilder this is fascinating
stuff. As you so beautifully observe here and in the book, it’s that kind of
observation, that kind of orientation – the jauntiness, the way of seeing, the
color of his language and how that translates in his films, which are notoriously
variegated in terms of topic and genre. He really has a range as a director
that, I think, you see even in these pieces, in the range of who it is that
he’s interviewing — Vanderbilt, and then the Prince of Wales…
Isenberg:
…Asta Nielsen. He’s just as promiscuous as a journalist as he is as a
screenwriter and director, I would say. There is this promiscuity that drives
him, and I mean that in all senses of the term.
Freda:
And in a positive way.
Isenberg:
Definitely very sex-positive! That variegated, as you said, number of topics
and genres that he would later take up as a writer-director, you see that here
in the range of a relatively small collection. Back to the extraordinary
award-winning translator Shelley Frisch, when we were doing this together – me
and my capacity as editor and she in her capacity as translator – there were
certain texts that we decided just didn’t really fit, or wouldn’t really speak
to an Anglo-American reader or just didn’t work well in translation. Sometimes
you face that…But in this representative selection, you can get that sense you
seem to just have noted yourself of the breadth, the range of somebody who’s
really interested in so many different things. And that jauntiness comes across
as he’s just flitting about, as he was known to do his whole life, you know
this inveterate pacer, just sort of taking in everything that he can.
The
point that you made moments ago about trying to think of his writing as a
feuilletonist, as someone who’s trafficking in the sort of cultural reportage,
in the feuilleton, and the writings of Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag… There
are definitely affinities and I think it’s certainly worth making those
references when thinking about Wilder’s journalism. The key difference is the
element of play. And that mordant wit that is palpable on every single page of
the book. In terms of style, he’s very interested, I think, not only in the
sartorial habits of the Prince of Wales and of fashioning himself as a sort of
elegant, natty dresser, but also in the style of writing, the form, achieving
an elegance on the page. I think that he’s aspiring to that elegance already at
a 19 [year old] and then early 20-something.
Freda:
When you speak about humor, that’s present throughout [the book], but where he
really goes to town is the [piece published in Harper’s] and again where I see
the beauty of the translation because of the word choices…
I wanted
to ask you about your great observation about [the New Objectivity] and his
mediation of that tendency at that time. Either he states it in the first
person or he’s quoting somebody: “Ignore the Neue Sachlichkeit,, except for…”.
You mentioned Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which is
really kind of brutish. It’s always interesting to compare that film’s realism,
with a Vertov – much softer, playful.
Isenberg:
I think that the real comparison – and it says a lot about Wilder – comparing
Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City from ’27 to the production that
Billy Wilder was involved in in the summer of 1929 and that was released in
February of ’30, People on Sunday, which is such a love letter to Weimar
Berlin. And the author of that love letter is Billy Wilder.
You’re
absolutely right about comparing Vertov and Ruttman, for sure, but in People on
Sunday it’s even more extreme because the film really presaged, I think,
Neo-realism and also Jean Vigo and Paul Fejos, those sort of sun-dappled
landscapes. It’s a very different feel and a very different aesthetic than that
sort of steel-like, harsh imagery that you have in Ruttman’s film. To a certain
extent, you see some of it in Man with a Movie Camera, but I think that if it’s
not a love letter, it is definitely a kind of passionate interpretation of the
joys and the art of filmmaking. You don’t see that in Berlin: Symphony of a
Great City.
Freda:
We don’t want to draw Wilder into everything, but he is this personality. He’s
not only, of course, Jewish and had the terrible tragedy of his family during
the Holocaust, but that personality, where he comes from in Vienna, his
orientation, this sort of joyful playful quintessential beauty of German
culture at this time. I think that you’re right with the film People on Sunday,
where you get these beautiful studies at this precipice in world history. Every
time I see that film I can’t help thinking, right around the corner from this
beauty is…
Isenberg:
I don’t know whether you saw [2017-2020 TV series] Babylon Berlin, but there’s
a couple of scenes from People on Sunday that are actually cut into an episode,
and of course you’re anticipating even more the rise of Hitler. In People on
Sunday, there are a couple of points where you can get at least a vague sense
of the storm that is brewing. There’s the scene for instance of that older man
in the Tiergarten who’s sitting there and saluting the statues of these
Prussians, the days of glory, and you can sense a sort of worship of Germany’s
militarist past. But otherwise you’re absolutely right, that’s what’s so kind
of haunting about the movie is that it’s made and there is something so joyful
– they’re really just trying to squeeze as much as they possibly can out of a
single day in the life of Weimar Berlin and these four people out on a double
date.
But
there is an element [in People on Sunday] of that so-called [New Objectivity]
and that comes on the beach. Eugen Schüfftan was the cameraman on the film, and
Fred Zinnemann worked as his assistant. You have those kind of almost August
Sander-like photos that are taken on the beach, and that has a certain nod to
that dominant trend of New Objectivity. But otherwise the film is much of a
departure from it. There really isn’t any of that coldness or that sort of
hyper-detailed focus on capturing the facts and nothing but the fact, so to
speak – the facts stripped of the emotional content effect. I don’t mean to
make the New Objectivity into our straw man, but I do think it’s a pretty stark
departure from that and People on Sunday.
Freda:
And going back to his writings, he brings all of this again to his second
entrance into American culture, the Hollywood exile experience – exiled in
paradise, to quote the book. Like so many others his adaptation is
extraordinary. There are some really interesting pieces for film historians;
his [piece on] Asta Nielsen I really want to give to my class if I’m showing a
German Expressionist film. Thinking of the [New Objectivity] again it’s the
acute observation, and then we leave the coldness for warmth, which is like a
Vigo versus a Ruttmann.
Isenberg:
People on Sunday is much more Vigo than Ruttmann. Again I don’t mean to make
these false dichotomies, but I think you can see it. You know Pabst’s film
Joyless Street, that’s a good one to teach with the Asta Nielsen profile by
Wilder.
Freda:
It’s a good one to teach but it’s grim.
Isenberg:
But a nice counterbalance if you want more warmth and less grim is then to
teach Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel, which appeared just a couple of years
later, and would become the source novel for Edmund Goulding’s Academy
Award-winning film with [Greta] Garbo and [Joan] Crawford and the Barrymore
brothers.
Freda:
Pandora’s Box, of course, as well. All of these great films that are
surrounding Wilder at this time. It’s interesting that he’s not this avid
filmgoer that you would expect. I know he did write movie reviews.
Isenberg:
Capsule reviews.
Freda: I
guess he couldn’t find the forum to write other pieces like the one [he wrote
on Erich von] Stroheim. That’s a long piece and it’s very interesting and his
perspective on Greed (1924) – that’s exactly what he’s not interested in, in
terms of aesthetics and reality and megalomania.
Isenberg: No, that’s not Wilder!
Freda: I want to bring up [another] piece I just adore, “Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore?”, in terms of what you were discussing about Wilder being [so] keenly observant. “Well, it was like this: a match whooshed gently across the striking surface, and light blazed up. And silently, eerily, the blue spirits’ flame arose…Oh, blessed fragrance from the sun-kissed leather cushions of a carriage!” I’ve just got everything underlined. I was thinking of where one trains one’s camera, how one composes a narrative, and what is that filmic frame.
Isenberg: No, that’s not Wilder!
Freda: I want to bring up [another] piece I just adore, “Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore?”, in terms of what you were discussing about Wilder being [so] keenly observant. “Well, it was like this: a match whooshed gently across the striking surface, and light blazed up. And silently, eerily, the blue spirits’ flame arose…Oh, blessed fragrance from the sun-kissed leather cushions of a carriage!” I’ve just got everything underlined. I was thinking of where one trains one’s camera, how one composes a narrative, and what is that filmic frame.
I want to refer to Wilder’s return to Berlin with A Foreign Affair (1948), a film I discovered a number of years ago and fell in love with, a great example of Wilder weirdly being able to [craft] what seems like a kind of schizoid narrative of bombing and destruction, and the way he works with Dietrich and the experience of Germans in Berlin, that’s also a romantic comedy.
Isenberg: Where he comes to terms with his own personal loss. Mother, stepfather, extended family. In US servicemen’s uniform he returned to Berlin in 1944 and together with Hanuš Burger who’s a Czech filmmaker they did a documentary called Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills, 1945), which you can stream on YouTube. It’s just unrelenting footage of these piles of dead bodies from the camps and Wilder makes that documentary with Burger and then somehow a mere three years later is able to have fun, so to speak, with A Foreign Affair.
You could see that kind of acerbic wit in a lot of Wilder production, but here he is returning to a Berlin in ruins and dealing with the incomplete denazification process that hadn’t even really fully begun. You’ll see flashes of that in One, Two, Three (1961) as well. In an interview late in life when someone was asking him about his past, Wilder says, you know there are optimists and pessimists; the optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have swimming pools in their backyards in Beverly Hills. If you extrapolate from that anecdote –I’m not gonna put him on the couch, but I think there is a certain degree of survivor guilt and yet he’s coming to terms with it by way of comedy. And Marlene Dietrich, as she so often is, is marvelous in that film.
I need to make a plug for a dear friend and colleague of mine and I’ve been indebted to this work as well, and in my own writings on Wilder, and that’s a book that took the title of that film, it’s called A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films (Berghan, 2008), by Gerd Gemünden who teaches at Dartmouth College.
Freda: I have it! It’s really great.
Isenberg: It is really great and in fact I give him a little shout-out in the editor’s introduction.
Freda: I was just thinking about this realism and attentiveness to detail and then humor, and we’re getting to Wilder’s return to Berlin. I was also thinking of [Wolfgang] Schivelbusch’s In a Cold Crater, that fascinating book about Berlin at that time.
Isenberg: There’s another good book by a guy named Robert Schandley called Rubble Films that I think you may find interesting.
Freda: I read it too. I like to [teach] that and Schivelbusch with the trilogy Murderers Among Us (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948) and A Foreign Affair – three radically different ways of negotiating that [history]. But Wilder’s is the most powerful in some ways.
Isenberg: I agree, and I’m a big fan of Murders Among Us, but I agree about A Foreign Affair. You’ll get no argument from me.
Freda: Thank you for editing this book. I’ve already of course told my mother to read it.
Isenberg: It’s those people I want to reach, that I care about. Your mom, my mom. Those people in film, if they can learn something from this, fabulous. But it’s those ever-elusive general readers – they’re the target audience for this book. And the reception has been like a warm bath. They have embraced this; it’s really lovely.
Freda: That’s beautiful; that’s how it should be. And it’s because of the way that it’s framed, the way that you’ve edited it, its readability, the chapter segmentation, the translation, the font…It was a real pleasure to read, and to discuss with you.
Isenberg: Thank you, the pleasure was mine. Great chatting. Nice kaffeeklasch and you take care.
Freda: All right, you too.
Something Wilder: Noah Isenberg and Isabelle Freda in conversation on ‘Billy Wilder on Assignment’. New Revue of Film & Television Studies, Spring (May) 2021.
It takes a certain kind of perfection to end a movie with the line “nobody’s perfect.” And that’s why “Some Like It Hot” remains a classic more than 60 years after its 1959 release.
He describes dutifully what happens “on screen” so to speak. We don’t really know what happened beyond that. Late in life he did like to say he worked “as a gigolo,” but whether this was true we don’t know. You should figure that, as was the case with the Production Code, a lot that was written then was by way of suggestion, rather than explicit depiction.
NI : Absolutely. These were prominent papers. The Berliner-Zeitung was very widely read, as was the perfectly named magazine Tempo.
Of all
the artists who washed up in Hollywood during the great wave of refugees from
Nazism in the 1930s, it was Billy Wilder, more than any other, who not only
made Hollywood his own but helped to remake it. The films of the
writer-director—Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Blvd. (1950), and Some Like It
Hot (1959), to limit the list to save space—are as well-known and
oft-referenced as any in the motion picture canon, their signature scenes still
worshipfully cited and routinely ripped off by his descendants.
Off-screen, Wilder’s presence looms nearly as large as a sage and wit. After retiring from active filmmaking in 1981, the old pro gave advice to aspiring screenwriters, aphorisms that came to take on the authority of Holy Writ (“If your second act curtain doesn’t work, your film doesn’t work”). Earlier, actually as soon as he mastered enough English to crack wise, he was famous around town for utterances as quotable as anything he put into the mouths of his actors. (Personal favorite: While working for the OWI in postwar Germany, Wilder responded to an ex-Nazi actor who wanted to play Christ in a production of The Passion Play with a counteroffer: “Only if we can use real nails.”)
Yet Wilder’s place in the American film canon has not always been so obvious, even to committed cineastes. In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, the go-to sourcebook for Hollywood cinema before the arrival of digital tomato and popcorn icons, film critic Andrew Sarris consigned Billy Wilder to his “less than meets the eye” category, the artistic dungeon reserved for auteur wannabes whose “reputations [are] in excess of their inspirations” and whose “personal signatures” are “written with invisible ink.” Wilder was a poseur “too cynical to believe his own cynicism” and so vapid he was “hardly likely to make a coherent film on the human condition.” Sarris later recanted his bone-headed judgment.
Wilder’s incisive wit, acerbic vision, and commitment to sturdy dramatic scaffolding were already part of his creative portfolio when, in 1934, his fellow exile, the great Ufa director Joe May, first drove him down Sunset Boulevard. The proof is reprinted in Billy Wilder on Assignment, an irresistible collection of articles, profiles, and reviews from Wilder’s salad-und-bratwurst days in Berlin, where he worked as a roving journalist, critic, and scene-maker between 1926 and 1930. Culled from two comprehensive volumes of Wilder’s journalism published in Germany, edited by Noah Isenberg and translated by Shelley Frisch, the volume flashes back to the days when the byline was Billie not Billy, the language German, and the voice, even then, unmistakable.
Wilder was always fortunate in his collaborators, and even posthumously his luck still holds. Both the editor and translator have extensive experience prowling the precincts of Weimar Berlin: Film historian Isenberg (We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of America’s Most Beloved Movie) is an expert guide to the Berlin-to-Hollywood axis, and Frisch is a veteran translator of German language biographies, most recently Karin Wieland’s 2011 Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives (Wilder hung out with Dietrich back in the day but not, alas, with Riefenstahl, so we lack a Wilder witticism on the woman who became Hitler’s favorite filmmaker). Isenberg and Frisch are also unabashed fans. “Affinities between Wilder’s Weimar-era writings and his later film world abound,” remarks Isenberg, and, inevitably, one reads the dispatches from the Weimar Wilder with an eye to the Hollywood Wilder.
Off-screen, Wilder’s presence looms nearly as large as a sage and wit. After retiring from active filmmaking in 1981, the old pro gave advice to aspiring screenwriters, aphorisms that came to take on the authority of Holy Writ (“If your second act curtain doesn’t work, your film doesn’t work”). Earlier, actually as soon as he mastered enough English to crack wise, he was famous around town for utterances as quotable as anything he put into the mouths of his actors. (Personal favorite: While working for the OWI in postwar Germany, Wilder responded to an ex-Nazi actor who wanted to play Christ in a production of The Passion Play with a counteroffer: “Only if we can use real nails.”)
Yet Wilder’s place in the American film canon has not always been so obvious, even to committed cineastes. In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, the go-to sourcebook for Hollywood cinema before the arrival of digital tomato and popcorn icons, film critic Andrew Sarris consigned Billy Wilder to his “less than meets the eye” category, the artistic dungeon reserved for auteur wannabes whose “reputations [are] in excess of their inspirations” and whose “personal signatures” are “written with invisible ink.” Wilder was a poseur “too cynical to believe his own cynicism” and so vapid he was “hardly likely to make a coherent film on the human condition.” Sarris later recanted his bone-headed judgment.
Wilder’s incisive wit, acerbic vision, and commitment to sturdy dramatic scaffolding were already part of his creative portfolio when, in 1934, his fellow exile, the great Ufa director Joe May, first drove him down Sunset Boulevard. The proof is reprinted in Billy Wilder on Assignment, an irresistible collection of articles, profiles, and reviews from Wilder’s salad-und-bratwurst days in Berlin, where he worked as a roving journalist, critic, and scene-maker between 1926 and 1930. Culled from two comprehensive volumes of Wilder’s journalism published in Germany, edited by Noah Isenberg and translated by Shelley Frisch, the volume flashes back to the days when the byline was Billie not Billy, the language German, and the voice, even then, unmistakable.
Wilder was always fortunate in his collaborators, and even posthumously his luck still holds. Both the editor and translator have extensive experience prowling the precincts of Weimar Berlin: Film historian Isenberg (We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of America’s Most Beloved Movie) is an expert guide to the Berlin-to-Hollywood axis, and Frisch is a veteran translator of German language biographies, most recently Karin Wieland’s 2011 Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives (Wilder hung out with Dietrich back in the day but not, alas, with Riefenstahl, so we lack a Wilder witticism on the woman who became Hitler’s favorite filmmaker). Isenberg and Frisch are also unabashed fans. “Affinities between Wilder’s Weimar-era writings and his later film world abound,” remarks Isenberg, and, inevitably, one reads the dispatches from the Weimar Wilder with an eye to the Hollywood Wilder.
Wilder’s all-America first name—Billie, bestowed by a mother smitten with Buffalo Bill—can perhaps be read too easily as predestination. Born in 1906 in the Galician backwater of Sucha, he moved with his family to Vienna at an early age, and, like many transplants, adopted the more fashionable address for his origin story. At 18, he hustled a gig with a local paper, Die Bühne, and was off and typing, composing everything from crossword puzzles to character sketches. Wilder’s format of choice, Isenberg helpfully explains, was the feuilleton, or cultural essay, a kind of New Journalist mix of “reportage and descriptive musings,” that thrived in Central Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. First in Vienna, then in Berlin, he spent the last half of Die goldenen zwanziger Jahre—the golden ’20s—chronicling the sweet life as an enthusiastic participant-observer.
The opening—and best—tale is Wilder’s account of a career interlude that the teller would richly embroider in years to come. While down on his luck in Berlin, Wilder worked as a dancer-for-hire in the ballroom of the swank Hotel Eden, 5 marks a night, plus tips. Young Billie was an unlikely paid escort—Richard Gere he ain’t—but the nattily dressed and cologne-scented charmer was, at least as he told it, a favorite on the treadmill. “I wasn’t the best dancer,” he recalled, “but I had the best dialogue.” If you want to think he did more than the foxtrot with his partners, he will not disabuse you of the notion. “The dancer’s First Commandment is: there can be no wallflowers!” proclaims Wilder’s dance hall monitor, before delivering a line that Hollywood-period Wilder might have penned to bait the Breen office: “He needs to pluck them because that is what he is getting paid for!”
The other gold nuggets in the first section are two pieces on the making of People on Sunday (1930), the film produced from Wilder’s first screenplay, an early masterpiece of handmade indie cinema (today it would be shot on iPhone). The lackadaisical neorealist portrait of a quartet of carefree German youth on a day off, swimming and sunbathing, flirting and quarrelling, was a smack in the face to the artsy pretensions of mainstream German cinema—no Expressionist sets or noirish lighting, but plenty of moving camera work. Besides the novice screenwriter, People on Sunday was a training ground for future Hollywood luminaries Robert and Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, and the brilliant cameraman Eugen Schüfftan, the most experienced member of the tyro crew. Under the stateside radar for decades, the film was revived and restored for a Wilder retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964.
Shilling shamelessly for the project, Wilder tracks the genesis of People on Sunday as a spontaneous notion among five friends spinning out ideas at a coffeehouse. “It has to be a simple documentary film,” he insists. “A film about Berlin, about its people, about the everyday things we know so well.” The amateurs secure funding, scrounge film stock, and recruit photogenic non-pros to play versions of themselves (the family of Brigette Borchert, who plays the fetching record seller in the film, “thinks we’re sex traffickers”). Everyone chips in regardless of job description (Wilder schlepped the camera equipment and held the light reflectors), all in the service of “shooting a few truths, we consider important, for a laughably small sum of money.” Wilder relates the backstory with utter sincerity and boyish exuberance, without a trace of cynicism.
The matrons on the dance floor of the Hotel Eden weren’t alone in being charmed by the young Billie Wilder. In 1926, Paul Whiteman, dubbed “the King of Jazz” by Caucasians innocent of Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, visited Europe with his orchestral version of the African American art form. In Vienna, the voluble, pear-shaped conductor invited Wilder to tag along with the band for the Berlin dates. It was Wilder’s introduction to big-time American showbiz and he was hooked.
Compared to the real deal, Whiteman’s scored jazz stylings seem like elevator music, but the Germans had never heard anything like it and went gaga. On the playlist was a piece Whiteman debuted in 1924, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” an “experiment in exploiting the rhythms of American folk music,” which “created quite a stir over in the States,” Wilder reports. He also likes it hot, and predicts American jazz will inspire “an essential regeneration of Europe’s calcified blood.”
Wilder’s character sketches and interviews are now more interesting for their insights into the mind of the journalist than for the comments by his little-remembered subjects. He comes away from a chat with Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. puzzled that a guy with that much money has such bad dental work; he is star-struck talking backstage with the Danish actress Asta Nielsen (“and now she is standing in front me, quite close, so close that I feel her warm breath”); and, while trailing after the Tiller Girls, a popular British dance troupe, he confesses to stealing a “harmless, unerotic, friendly, cousinly, for God’s sake obligation-free, forgotten the next minute” kiss from at least one of the 16 members. Years later, Wilder claimed to have interviewed—in one morning—the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler; the novelist Arthur Schnitzler; and the composer Richard Strauss. “There may not be any extant articles to corroborate such audacious claims,” Isenberg deadpans.
Of course, the film reviews are most apt to be scrutinized for a future payoff in Wilder’s Hollywood work. The best-remembered film classic he discusses is Erich von Stroheim’s 14-reel endurance test, Greed (1924), which he calls a “cruelly naturalistic depiction of the depths to which human beings can sink,” a description that American critics applied to Wilder’s own films (think Ace in the Hole [1951]). Again, a flash-forward is inevitable: Von Stroheim will next appear in Wilder’s field of vision as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and then as the ghostly waxwork Max in Sunset Blvd.
When not sitting in darkened motion picture palaces like the Palast am Zoo and the Gloria Palast, Wilder liked to hang around the shop floors of the movie studios to soak up material and get a free education. On the set of the first German talkie, A Day in Film (1928), he was fascinated by the emergence of sound technology and describes the new Tri-Ergon sound system with the precision of a tech geek. (“The camera records the images and sounds on a rolling celluloid tape in parallel strips—incorporating the sounds by electrically converting sound waves into light oscillations to make the image and sound form a complete unit.”) One imagines him wandering the early soundstages, eyes and ears on high alert, scoping out the equipment, already sensing not a newspaper story but a career opportunity.
Two topics very much in the Berlin air—and on the streets—in the late 1920s are missing from Wilder’s Weimar datelines: Jews and Nazis. Reviewing Josef Gale Ezer’s Springtime in Palestine (1928), a three-reel Zionist documentary on the transformation of “a barren desert with noxious swamps” into the modern metropolis of Tel Aviv (“the future seaside resort of the Orient”), Wilder is an admiring but curiously detached observer. “This film is a unique cultural document, a paean to willpower and work,” he comments, without saying whose willpower and work it was. “Wilder never showed much interest in Zionism,” Isenberg notes. Fair enough, but to review a film about Palestine without typing the word Jew seems an act of willful repression. And if Wilder heard the sound of jackboots rumbling in the distance, he did not record it.
Throughout, Isenberg is careful not to disrupt the flow of Wilder’s prose with parenthetical intrusions, but a bit more orientation, perhaps via explanatory footnotes, would have been useful. For example, in reviewing Greed, Wilder notes that eruptions of outrage forced the film “to be cancelled abruptly after its premiere in Berlin.” He was referring to an odd incident that occurred during its original booking in May 1926 at the Ufa Palast am Zoo. About a reel and a half into the second screening, whistling and catcalls rang out from the audience. “Take it off, enough, enough!” yelled the crowd. The frightened management turned up the lights, announced the screening would be stopped, and told customers their money would be refunded. The pre-arranged demonstration had been launched by an organized claque in the audience. Nazi brownshirts? Probably not, but the outburst was not without nationalistic overtones. Famous Players and MGM had recently bought a controlling interest in Ufa, the flagship German film studio, a takeover which resulted in the loss of 400 German jobs. No wonder the locals were angry.
By 1930, Wilder had left the grind of deadline journalism to devote himself to the more lucrative screenwriting trade. As the Weimar Republic wheezed, he prospered. According to biographer Maurice Zolotow, he lived the life of a “decadent Berliner,” tooling around town in a Graham-Paige convertible and residing in an art moderne flat with Mies van der Rohe furniture.
The first-act curtain came down on Jan. 30, 1933, but Wilder’s luck was still solid: He got a cable from Hollywood with the invitation that every Jew in the German film industry was hoping for. On Jan. 22, 1934, he walked up the gangplank of the Aquitania, on route to New York, his steamer trunk packed with phrase books and novels by Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Wolfe, to learn the language that would make him famous, and that he would enliven immeasurably. To better master the vernacular, he made a point of dancing with and chatting up the American lady passengers on board, putting an old skill to good use. From now on, he knew, the dialogue would be in English.
I’m a
writer, but then, nobody’s perfect.” These are the words inscribed on the
gravestone of one of Hollywood’s most respected and beloved craftsmen: Billy
Wilder, perhaps the most versatile writer/director of all time, winning Oscars
for writing and directing films that span decades and multiple genres. From the
dark corners of film noir in Double Indemnity (1944) and Ace in the Hole (1951)
to the groundbreaking comedies Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment
(1960), Wilder impressed audiences and critics alike. He always identified
himself as a writer, even though he is most frequently celebrated as a director
on the level of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Wilder’s daring critique of
Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard (1950), features a doomed protagonist who is a
struggling screenwriter; it’s the writer and aging actress, not the director
(Cecil B. DeMille playing himself), that Wilder identifies with in this
Hollywood nightmare.
Wilder
cut his teeth as a journalist in Europe before moving to the United States, but
his pre-Hollywood writing has long been unavailable to anyone not fluent in
German. Wilder’s sharp and witty journalism is now available for
English-speaking audiences in Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from
Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna. The collection has been edited by the great
film historian Noah Isenberg and translated by the brilliant Shelley Frisch.
Wilder’s writings in this compilation include work published between September
1925 and November 1930, from a range of newspapers he worked for prior to
leaving Europe.
Isenberg
sets up the collection by exploring the Wilder family’s early years. Billy
Wilder was born in 1906 near Kraków, Poland, as Samuel Wilder. The name came
from his grandfather, but his mother, Eugenia, preferred the name Billie. After
all, Billy’s brother Wilhelm was already nicknamed Willie, so Billie and Willie
had a nice ring to it. In addition, Eugenia had memories of traveling as a
young girl to New York City, where she saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. She
always loved the nickname, which seemed foreign and exotic to her. (Wilder is
credited as Billie in this collection but I will refer to him as Billy to avoid
confusion.)
Billy’s
father, Max, ran a chain of restaurants along the Vienna-to-Lemberg railway
line. The family moved to Vienna, “where assimilated Jews of their ilk could
better pursue their dreams of upward mobility.” After World War I, the Wilders
tried to get Austrian citizenship, to no avail, and they would remain “subjects
of Poland.” During this time, Billy went to school across the street from a
hotel popular for its hourly rates. Channeling his creative mind, Billy would
dream up humorous tales about the patrons revolving in and out of the seedy
establishment. After school, Billy discovered his love of film when he began to
“spend long hours in the dark catching matinees at the Urania, the Rotenturm
Kino, and other cherished Viennese movie houses.” While his father wanted him
to pursue law, Billy was drawn to popular culture and journalism.
By the
end of 1924, Billy found the courage to write to the local newspaper, Die
Bühne. The aspiring writer offered to serve as a foreign correspondent, hoping
it would be his crack at a trip to the United States. The only problem was that
he didn’t speak English. Billy continued to visit the office and, with his
“outsize gift of gab,” eventually talked his way into a post. One story Billy
fondly told involved him walking in on the paper’s theater critic having sex
with his secretary. He was quickly offered a promotion to stay quiet. In what
sounds like something out of one of Wilder’s films, Billy was soon chatting
with major talent such as actor Peter Lorre, then known as László Löwenstein.
Between strokes of luck and aided by his native wit, Wilder became a real
journalist, writing crossword puzzles, small features, film and theater
reviews, and other popular profiles.
Wilder
also got his first taste of fear as a journalist when Die Stunde’s prominent
writer Hugo Bettauer (best known for the 1922 novel The City Without Jews) was
shot dead by a “proto-Nazi thug.” Wilder never had an issue speaking truth to
power, nor did he fear the political ramifications of his writing. Such thick
skin served him well when he hammered Hollywood with Sunset Boulevard, a film
that exposes the industry’s careless attitude toward its aging stars and
struggling writers. In Cameron Crowe’s excellent 1999 book Conversations with
Wilder, the director told a story of the first Hollywood screening of the
classic noir film, when MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer was heard kvetching to
notorious fixer Eddie Mannix and executive Joe Cohen, “That Wilder! He bites
the hand that feeds him.” When Wilder overheard the comment, he introduced
himself and said, “[W]hy don’t you go fuck yourself.”
Looking
back at his years chasing ledes, Wilder said that he was “brash, bursting with
assertiveness, had a talent for exaggeration, and was convinced that in the
shortest span of time [he]’d learn to ask shameless questions without
restraint.” Anyone familiar with Wilder’s work in Hollywood knows that these
skills served him well behind the typewriter and in the director’s chair. One
assignment Wilder got as a budding reporter was to interview bandleader Paul
Whiteman, who responded to Wilder’s enthusiasm by paying for him to travel with
the band. Wilder composed his article from Germany, where he saw the band
premiere Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and then joined a new paper in Berlin.
Wilder’s
profile of Whiteman gives us a glimpse into the future filmmaker’s eye for
detail and his ability to channel humor through the seemingly mundane. For
example, it was not Whiteman’s music that Wilder found most compelling; it was
the composer’s mustache. According to Wilder, “If you add these things together
— the most amusing mustache you could imagine, a truly charming little double
chin, two gentle, childlike eyes in a nice broad face, a burly, graceful, tall
man, dressed casually and unobtrusively — you get Paul Whiteman.” Wilder also
learned that Whiteman was the United States’s second most popular celebrity,
according to the Chicago Tribune, behind Charlie Chaplin and ahead of Jack
Dempsey. Wilder continues:
“There’s
that mustache of his again, a splendid, peerless, divine, superb mustache. It
alone would have made Paul famous, without a doubt. It is cut quite short and
twirled up in the middle, the two ends extend out quite far, and it points
upward toward his nostrils at a sharp angle; the tips have a bit of pomade,
which adds an aromatic element to our visual pleasure. That is the mustache of
the future. Copyright by Paul Whiteman.”
If
anyone could make a facial fashion statement the backbone of a print profile of
a world-famous composer, it was Billy Wilder.
Wilder’s
affinity for the United States burgeoned while he was in Berlin. He even served
as a tour guide for Hollywood director Allan Dwan, who was in Germany for his
honeymoon. As Isenberg notes,
‘’Berlin in the mid-1920s had a certain New World waft to it. A cresting wave of Amerikanismus — a seemingly bottomless love of dancing the Charleston, of cocktail bars and race cars, and a world-renowned nightlife that glimmered amid a sea of neon advertisements — had swept across the city and pervaded its urban air.’’
It was
in this climate that Wilder was able to fully embrace his love of popular
culture and, most specifically, his admiration for American movies.
In
Berlin, Wilder worked under the mentorship of Egon Erwin Kisch, whose reporting
Wilder described as being “built like a good movie script. It was classically
organized in three acts and was never boring for the reader.” Wilder also
landed a job at Tempo, a tabloid perfectly suited for his cultural curiosities
and acerbic wit, where he would begin writing about cinema. After introducing
readers to Filmstudio 1929, an independent film company, Wilder eventually
wrote a screenplay for a 1929 film, Der Teufelsreporter (A Hell of a Reporter),
a blend of autobiography and hyperbole that, as Isenberg observes, served as an
excellent primer for the journalists in Wilder’s future films.
‘’Berlin in the mid-1920s had a certain New World waft to it. A cresting wave of Amerikanismus — a seemingly bottomless love of dancing the Charleston, of cocktail bars and race cars, and a world-renowned nightlife that glimmered amid a sea of neon advertisements — had swept across the city and pervaded its urban air.’’
Billy Wilder’s “Amerikanismus”. By Chris Yogerst. Los Angeles Review of Books, April 28, 2021.
In an
arresting scene from one of director Billy Wilder’s most famous films, Some
Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe sashays along a Chicago railway station platform in
a figure-hugging outfit, leaving Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis gobsmacked.
Until
now, few have made the connection between this scene and some of Wilder’s own
experiences as a young Austrian journalist in the 1920s. This month, the first
major collection of Wilder’s journalism ever published will reveal the way his
early writings shaped and influenced memorable scenes, characters and plots
from films he later wrote and directed, including Sunset Boulevard and The
Apartment.
In Billy
Wilder on Assignment, Wilder’s German-language journalism from both Austrian
and German publications is collected together in one volume and translated into
English for the first time.
The
all-female musical troupe in Some Like It Hot appears, for example, to have
much in common with the Tiller Girls, a famous British dance troupe Wilder
wrote about for an Austrian tabloid in 1926. “This morning 34 of the most
enticing legs emerged from the Berlin express train when it arrived at
Westbahnhof station,” he writes, aged 19, in a paragraph that could have been
lifted straight out of the movie’s script. “Those figures, those legs…”
Another
of Wilder’s articles from the collection, which was first published in a German
literary magazine in 1929, is a highly critical profile of the spendthrift
behaviour of the silent movie director Erich von Stroheim. He highlights the
actress Gloria Swanson’s performance in von Stroheim’s movie Queen Kelly, and
describes von Stroheim as “the man we love to hate”.
Later,
Wilder casts both Swanson and Von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard – Swanson as a
bitter, forgotten silent film star and Von Stroheim as a formerly successful
silent film director who is now working as a butler. At one point, the audience
sees Swanson watch the film Queen Kelly.
“In a
lot of these early pieces, I think you can see the germs for a lot of later
ideas,” said Noah Isenberg, professor of film at the University of Texas at Austin
and editor of Billy Wilder on Assignment, which will be published on 27 April
in the US and on 1 June in the UK. “And beyond that, you can see a lot of what
we come to expect from a Billy Wilder movie: the dramas and the comedies, all
that sparkling wit, that charm, that mordant humour and sarcasm. A lot of that
is on full display in these articles that he wrote from the tender age of 19
into his 20s.”
His
journalism demonstrates that he was a “born entertainer”, Isenberg says. “You
can see, even in the very short pieces that he wrote, there is this desire to
entertain and even to dazzle his reader.”
For the
collection’s translator, Shelley Frisch, the articles feel like new Wilder
films she has discovered: “So much of what we see in the Wilder films seem to
be very visually based,” she said. “But strip that away and all of it,
including the amazing ability he had to make characters come alive as
full-blooded, three-dimensional people, is right there in his journalism.
“You see
in these pieces the journalist Billy Wilder studying the human condition from
all possible angles and then when you see him make films, he’s studying the
human condition all over again – and building on the observations he made in
these early journalism pieces. It’s clear to me that he carried his articles
around in his head as ideas he wanted to build on.”
In one
of his most successful observational pieces, ‘Waiter, A Dancer, Please!’, the
personal experience Wilder relays could be a plot from one of his films. He
writes: “My trousers aren’t ironed, my face is badly shaved… my stomach is so
empty that it’s hurting and my nerves are shot. Behind every knock on the door
the venomous face of the landlady, shrieking, with the bill in her hands.”
Walking along Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, he meets a friend who takes him out
for lunch and somehow persuades him to hire himself out as a dancer, despite
being unable to dance.
The next
morning, at an audition, he is asked: “So, where have you danced?” “Nowhere,”
he confesses. “I see. Amateur. Got it,” is the hilarious reply. He is hired on
the spot and immediately taken to a hotel ballroom to dance with elderly ladies
and other men’s wives, at which point he discovers that he hates dancing – and
is trapped.
“The one
with the long neck has asked for my name, letting me know that she plans to
come often, now that I’m a dancer here,” he writes.
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