Word: wilderness
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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...
...watercooler burlesque as it glances at an office Christmas party. But beyond that, unfolding the story of a nice little guy whose bosse's use his apartment as launching pad for some fairly sordid affairs, the picture takes on a hard, unwinking look of irony. Again and again, Wilder seems to speak in the accents of one of his favorite cities, prewar Berlin, a tough, sardonic, sometimes wryly sentimental place whose intellectual symbol was Bertolt Brecht. Is Billy trying to say something serious about men and women, heels and heroes? Is he as a sort of puritanical pander, trying...
...Wilder himself backs away from the question with alarm. Says he: "I want to be truthful, but if I have to choose between truth and entertainment, I will always choose entertainment. I have a vast and terrible desire never to bore...
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...