Word: wildered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...even in the exclusive A Group (top studio brass and long-established superstars, like Gary Cooper). For all his gregariousness, he can be cruel without reason, successfully plays the domestic tyrant. At dinner one evening, his wife Audrey announced brightly: "Darling, do you realize this is our anniversary?" Replied Wilder: "Please-not while I'm eating." Says Playwright George Axelrod: "Billy is essentially, not personally, mean. Most of his meanness goes into his work. He sees the worst in everybody, and he sees it funny...
Billy almost never does, on screen or off. Inside a head that makes him look like a benevolent old bullfrog resides a restless imagination, a "flypaper memory" and a wit that ranges from the merry to the mordant. Wilder, not Benchley, was the man who first said: "Wait till I slip out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." He is also the author of this scathing epigram: "I would worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood...
Undivided Fame. For a professed cynic, Wilder was born at an unlikely time and place-the Johann Straussian Vienna of 1906. The son of a well-to-do restaurateur, Billy dodged law school at 19, signed on as a reporter for a Vienna daily. At 20, he was off to Berlin as a movie and drama reviewer. Not long afterward, he fell in love with a dancer and was fired for neglecting his work. Next thing he knew, Billy himself was dancing for his supper as a nightclub gigolo, and writing film scripts on the side. At 27, with...
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...
...written-though always in collaboration. "Most of Billy's collaborators," says a friend, "are just $50,000 secretaries." They sit at a typewriter while Billy strides feverishly up and down, slashing the air with a swagger stick, frothing at the mouth with dialogue and situation. On the set, Wilder is relaxed, ribald but in deadly earnest about his work. He is so sure of what he wants that he wastes an amazingly small amount of film footage. Says Billy: "All that's left on the cutting-room floor when I'm through are cigarette butts, chewing...