Word: brackett
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...plot, borrowed partly from a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar and partly from a Wilder-Brackett-Lubitsch movie called Ninotchka (1939), is almost as intricate as the famous secret recipe for Coca-Cola-a beverage that, incidentally, benefits in this film from 108 minutes of effervescent and unmitigated schlock. The hero (James Cagney), who heads up the Coca-Cola operation in West Berlin, dreams of a deal with Moscow's Soft Drink Secretariat that will 1) insinuate the pause that refreshes into the Communist way of life, and 2) install him in London as chief of European operations...
After two punishingly lean years, Wilder at last got a screenwriting job at Paramount. And at the whim of an executive producer, he was teamed with Writer Charles Brackett, onetime drama critic for The New Yorker. Suave Charlie Brackett and rough Billy Wilder clicked right away. Wilder spewed Niagaras of notions, and in this prodigious stream of consciousness, Brackett fished for usable ideas. Together they wrote 14 films without a single flop, and some of their movies were among the biggest hits (Ninotchka, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard) of the era. But in 1950 Brackett and Wilder broke up. Says...
Other Hollywood directors answer that description. What makes Billy Wilder stand out? Two things, says Writer Brackett: "His exuberant vulgarity and his magnificent awareness of the audience. When it comes to guessing audience reaction, Billy is almost never wrong...
...splendid day for an outing! Whereupon the professor brushes a speck of dust from his tweeds, adjusts his rucksack and deerstalker, stamps his stout shoes, grasps his walking stick and casually strolls off-to the center of the earth. Fortunately, he is followed by a Hollywood producer (Charles Brackett) with wit enough to smile at some of the most preposterous pseudo-scientific poppycock ever published by Jules Verne. And so what might easily have been just one more merely colossal ($4,500,000) monster-movie comes off the reel as a grandly entertaining spoof of the boys' book...
...sets are fun, and properly improbable. Not many of the situations in the script can be found in the book, but Scenarist Walter (Titanic) Reisch has at times improved on the master himself. Producer Brackett's dialogue has a Vernal freshness and LIFE Science Writer Lincoln (The World We Live In) Barnett, retained as a technical adviser, has shrewdly inserted his scientific facts so as not to impair the general implausibility. On the whole, the film seems sure to enhance Author Verne's reputation as the best dead writer Hollywood ever had. In the last five years three...