by Ed Sikov
Wilder originally wanted to use a character actor for the lead. He specifically did not want the magnetism of any of Paramount’s handsome stars to get in the way of his realism. “But the head of Paramount, Buddy De Sylva—a very wise man—said, ‘No, take a leading man, because then the audience will feel with him. They will wish that he would reform.’” Wilder goes on to make clear that redemption was not his goal: “But of course I never went so far as to say, ‘He will never drink again.’ He just says at the end, ‘I’ll try,’ and he takes that cigarette and throws it into that whiskey glass. That’s as far as I would go. I cannot suddenly come out with a happy ending. It has to fit.” Wilder expanded on the theme on another occasion: “Originally I wanted Jose Ferrer, who had just had a great success on Broadway as Iago in Othello. But I was told that no one would care whether he stayed an alcoholic or died of cirrhosis of the liver. Instead, if I took a seductive actor, people would have sympathy for him and wish he would stop drinking.” He chose Ray Milland.
When Jean Arthur turned down the role of Helen, Billy offered it to Jane Wyman, who accepted it. (He’s also said to have considered Barbara Stanwyck, but this is dubious.) She was under contract to Warner Bros., but her contractual obligations were of no concern; Jack Warner was happy to loan “little Janie” to Paramount for The Lost Weekend, or as he put it, “that drunk film.”
For the role of Don’s brother, Wick, Billy chose Philip Terry. Terry had been working as a stand-in for another actor when Billy was directing screen tests for The Major and the Minor. Impressed with the personable young man, Wilder told Terry that he wouldn’t be a stand-in forever—that Wilder would actually cast him in a film when the right role came up. He was as good as his word. Finally, for the role of Helen’s mother, Billy chose Lillian Fontaine (Joan’s mother); it was her first film job.
In production meetings held on September 14 and 15, Billy spelled out his artistic goals for the benefit of the executives whose approval he required. They were typically skeptical, but Billy won most of the fights. He absolutely rejected the idea of using building miniatures for The Lost Weekend. He demanded that the set of Sam’s Bar have four walls so he could shoot in all directions. He specified that the apartment set have a genuine Greenwich Village atmosphere, including the kind of minuscule kitchen that never seemed to enter into Hollywood art directors’ imaginations. He insisted that John Seitz be able to film the skyline, the garden, the exterior of the apartment, and the bedroom window all in a single shot, so that he could achieve a slow but smooth revelation of Don Birnam’s whiskey bottle hanging out the window. He spelled out the wardrobe for all the central characters and issued express commands regarding the songs to be sung in the bar.
As The Lost Weekend sped toward its start date, problems surfaced. In their script, Brackett and Wilder set a scene at a Metropolitan Opera performance of La Traviata—specifically, during “Libiamo,” the drinking song. As written, the scene might have looked authentic, but it would also have cost money. The Met was demanding $1,000 for the use of the words “Metropolitan Opera” alone. The legal department, meanwhile, was increasingly nervous about Billy and Charlie’s unwavering insistence on location shooting in New York City. Location work was always rife with tension; after all, this was why Paramount had built a whole New York City street scene on the lot, where everything could be carefully controlled. But for Wilder and Brackett, the canned quality of a Hollywood back lot was absolutely out of the question for The Lost Weekend. They would simply have to brave the onlookers and the traffic, the logistical headaches and the weather. There was no room for compromise on this point. Thus the mounting tension of the legal department. As an executive pleaded with them in a poignant mid-September memo, “Will you please see that we stay out of trouble?”
Staying out of trouble appears to have been a theme in Billy’s domestic life as well. As much as Judith loved the house on Hidden Valley Road, the Wilders decided to get rid of it and move down the hill into the heart of residential Beverly Hills. They sold the house in May and bought a large, comfortable place at 705 North Beverly Drive. The Wilders abandoned their plans to build the house on Tarcuto Way; by November that property was sold.
Billy left for New York by train on September 21. Brackett joined him in Chicago after a side trip, and by the 24th they had taken up temporary residence at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York, along with the twenty other people on the production team. Ray Milland and his stand-in appeared on schedule on the 27th—they stayed at the Waldorf, apart from the others. Milland, who was quite troubled by both the novel and the screenplay, later described his mood as “increasingly snappish and morose.” The Lost Weekend was ready to begin shooting.
For Paramount’s front office, there was an additional worry: money was being spent on the picture, but Brackett and Wilder had not finished writing it yet. The Lost Weekend was not a blithe, interchangeable genre movie—a bobby-soxer romance with dialogue that could be filled in at the last minute if need be—but rather a difficult drama that had already sent a flurry of red flags flying at the censors’ office. Brackett and Wilder had tended in the past to write and rewrite passages as they filmed, but never before had the gaps been so extensive. Whole stretches of The Lost Weekend were still incomplete when the film started rolling, and the executives were notably worried. On October 5, one of the men on location wrote to his colleague back in Hollywood, expressing both enthusiasm and mounting alarm over Billy and Charlie’s idea of following Don Birnam the length of Third Avenue as he tries to pawn his typewriter for the price of a bottle of liquor: “The Third Avenue walking shot has really developed since we arrived here but we have no script as yet and it is difficult for me to know just how much or how little will be used in the final picture.” The executive also reported another distressing fact: both Billy and Charlie had fallen violently sick with colds. Wilder’s was the worse of the two. He was under a doctor’s care, but, being Billy, he wasn’t nearly “sick enough to stop him going out to shoot if we get light.”
If they got light. The Lost Weekend’s exteriors were being filmed in New York, not Southern California. Shooting was well under way by that point, but as everyone knew, light could never be counted on in the Northeast. Filming had begun early in the morning of October 1 with exterior shots of Bellevue Hospital. In the days to follow, Billy, Charlie, and their actors and crew spent their time setting up locations on the streets of Manhattan, ignoring bystanders, shooting bits of film documentary style, and waiting, waiting. The corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street; the exterior of the St. Agnes Church at Forty-third and Third; Gluck’s Pawn Shop at Third and Fifty-seventh; Bloom’s Pawn Shop at Third and 104th; Kelly’s Pawn Shop at 124th and Third…. Light was an enormous problem. The dawn sequences really had to be shot at dawn, which meant that even under the best conditions only an hour or so of work could possibly be done.
In fact, no shots could be taken at all on the first day. Some footage was shot in the morning of October 2, but then they needed afternoon light and had to wait for it for several hours. Ray Milland was called for 8:00 A.M. on the 3rd, but once again everyone sat around waiting for the right light. They finally got some at three in the afternoon, but by that point they only had time for a single setup.
Even when they managed to get something recorded on celluloid, the results were often unusable. To catch Milland walking down the street as unobtrusively as possible, Seitz and his cameramen set up shop in a kind of box that was disguised on the back of a truck. Milland would walk, they would shoot from inside the box, and countless passersby had no idea they were being filmed. (Assistant cameraman Jack Etry may have come up with the idea for the television series Candid Camera, but apparently he demanded too much money for it and ended up with no credit at all.) They also hid a camera in an empty piano packing case on the sidewalk. The result of all this surreptitious filming was some serviceable material. Much of it, though, was unusable footage showing passersby picking their noses and
scratching areas forbidden by the Production Code.
Nothing at all was accomplished on October 4. The “company waited for light all day.” The same thing happened on the 5th. And the 6th. They actually got something filmed on the 7th. A group of unruly New York street children caused a few headaches at the St. Agnes location, but they managed to work around them. A cop reportedly tried to pick up an especially haggard-looking Ray Milland in front of Bellevue, but an agitated Billy burst forward waving documents that demonstrated that they were filming a movie and that the derelict was really a movie star, and the cop went on his way. Later, when Bellevue’s managing director saw the film, he was enraged at its depiction of his hospital and regretted ever having given Wilder permission to film there: “He showed me one script which I approved. Then he filmed a different script.”
The company’s luck held out until the 13th, when another protracted burst of bad weather kept the whole crew waiting all day long and nothing was shot. The 14th was a washout as well. Some remaining Third Avenue shots were finally completed on the afternoon of the 15th. On the 16th the company traveled back to dependably sunny Los Angeles, where they would be shooting indoors. They left the New York transparency unit to finish filming the rest of the exteriors, including some of those that appear behind Milland as he makes his famous walk.
Now it was the star’s turn to get sick. Milland developed a sore throat and, saying that he was worried about the air-conditioning on the train, refused to travel back to Los Angeles with the rest of the company. Perhaps he just found the level of nervous energy too high. Whatever his reasons, he left by train for Los Angeles the following day, by himself.
The script still wasn’t finished. And the executives were really getting annoyed. The Hays Office wasn’t pleased either. The censors were unable to approve or reject the screenplay simply because there was no screenplay for them to read. This, indeed, may have been Billy and Charlie’s point in not finishing it.
Wilder and Brackett arrived in Los Angeles on the 19th and proceeded immediately to Paramount, where they inspected the film’s sets, which had been constructed in their absence. They were thrilled with what they saw: the sets were cramped and drab, just as they had ordered. Production was scheduled to resume on the 23rd.
By this point, The Lost Weekend was attracting national attention, and not necessarily from friendly quarters. “I guess the distillers are watching nervously to see what we are doing with the picture,” Brackett told the press. “They won’t find it an argument for Prohibition because we’re not dealing with the average drinker at all…. We are making the movies’ first attempt to understand a drunkard, a chronic alcoholic, and interpret what goes on in his mind.” At that point, the liquor industry did not plan to mount any sort of campaign against the film, but there was still great concern about the adverse effects The Lost Weekend would have on sales. Stanley Bear of the Allied Liquor Industries, a national trade organization, wrote to Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman, pointing out that fully one-third of the counties in the United States were then legally dry and that twenty-five million people lived in those areas. The Allied Liquor Industries saw no need to increase these already extensive restrictions on alcohol sales, and the group was worried that an antialcoholism film would put them further on the defensive. He noted that Charles Jackson himself was certainly no temperance crusader. In March 1944, Jackson told the New York World-Telegram that he was “deathly afraid the drys may seize on his merciless, clinical portrait of a drunk as a weapon in their battle for the return of Prohibition.”
Clearly, alcohol and alcoholism was still a touchy subject in wartime America. And the Hays Office did not like touchy subjects. The task of dealing with the censors fell, as usual, to Paramount’s Luigi Luraschi. The studio had no choice but to submit the script “in piecemeal fashion,” Luraschi told Joseph Breen at the end of October, because the film was already in production. In still another letter he blamed technical difficulties for the delays. For his part, Breen was already upset about what he had read so far. The character of Gloria, he told Luraschi, was definitely a prostitute—there was no question about that. As such she was unacceptable. Breen himself helpfully suggested “defining her as a buyer who entertains out-of-town visitors.” Luraschi probably knew better than to forward that idea on to Brackett and Wilder.
Billy, meanwhile, plowed right ahead with Gloria the prostitute. After shooting scenes with Milland and Terry on the 23 rd, he stayed around the set to film screen tests with the actress he had in mind to play her. Her name was Doris Dowling. She was twenty-one years old, a beautiful would-be starlet from New York, and she was currently enjoying an affair with Billy.
Dowling may have been one of the many eager young women who were calling Wilder on the telephone—and irritating Raymond Chandler—during the writing of Double Indemnity, but by October of 1944, she had become much more central to Billy’s romantic life. Having arrived in Los Angeles in early 1943, Dowling soon found herself under contract to David Selznick. By the end of the year she was asking to be released from her contract. She speedily landed a new contract at another studio—Paramount. Billy’s promiscuity appears to have wound down to some extent. He began seeing Dowling as often as he could, and his friends assumed that when he got around to divorcing Judith he’d end up marrying Doris.
It was at this juncture that Billy met Audrey Young, the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. He soon started cheating on his twenty-one-year-old mistress, with whom he was cheating on his wife, so that he could have more time to see the swinging big-band singer he’d hired for a bit part in The Lost Weekend. The arrangements were complicated.
When The Lost Weekend was released, Dowling reported the circumstances of her casting in the New York Sun. She and Billy were having lunch at Lucey’s along with Charles Jackson. She hadn’t yet been cast in the film. Wilder and Jackson were talking about Gloria. Too bad Doris isn’t more common, Jackson remarked—she could play Gloria. Billy, not bothering to look up from his plate, said, “She is.” “I almost went crazy with excitement!” Dowling told the reporter, though it is entirely unclear from the phrasing whether Billy meant simply that she was going to be playing Gloria or that she was common enough to do so convincingly.
Whatever Billy’s joke meant, Doris Dowling was hardly common. In fact, she was a knockout. In The Lost Weekend, Wilder introduces her immediately after Birnam settles into his first drink. Until that point, Milland plays his character as stiff and anxious, pressurized against a hostile world. Then he downs a shot of whiskey, at which point his body relaxes and he becomes an easygoing sweet-talker sitting on a bar stool, enjoying himself. At this precise moment Wilder cuts abruptly to a long shot of a slim, strong young woman getting up from a table. She’s wearing a tight black lace top, tied closed at the top but open in the back, with a white bra underneath to keep it from being censorable; a tight black skirt that sets off the sharp angle of her hips; sheer black stockings; black high heels. She doesn’t walk. She strides—slowly and confidently. The camera pans with her, as if unable to take its single glass eye off her. She strolls behind Birnam at the bar, runs her finger along the back of his neck, and with the cool authority of a dame who knows her business, says, low and smoky, “Hello, Mr. Birnam. Nice to have you back with the organization.”
Then she points her index finger at him, cocks it, and clicks her tongue as she shoots, never missing a beat. The camera stares at her as she leaves the room. It is abundantly clear what Billy saw in Doris Dowling.
At the same time, Gloria is an object of mild, amused contempt. She’s forever shortening words. She’s too cool to say “naturally”; to Gloria, it’s “natch!” After a couple of natches and a “Don’t be ridick!” Birnam can’t take it anymore and whines: “Gloria, please, why imperil our friendship with these loathsome abbreviations?” A little later, he drunkenly invites her to see Hamlet at a theater on Forty-fourth Street. “Do you know Hamlet?” he asks. “I know Forty-fourth
Street,” she answers. Taking his invitation seriously, Gloria blows off a rather wizened potential customer and arranges for Don to pick her up at eight that evening. “I live right on the corner house—you know, where the antique shop is, the one with the wooden Indian outside? They got the Indian sign on me, that’s what I always say.” Curious that Wilder picked up on his mother’s favorite memory of New York in this manner.
Audrey Young, meanwhile, was every bit the looker Doris Dowling was, though perhaps without the starlet’s exquisite features. A cool brunette with a hot voice, Audrey at twenty-two was a bit of a party girl. As Walter Reisch described her, she was “brilliant, beautiful, and as hard as he is.” She was a jazz singer who knew her business. If you could make crystal as soft as velvet you’d have a way of describing Audrey Young’s voice. She wasn’t a belter. Her singing voice was strong but delicate and precise and effortless. Hearing her few recordings one can’t help but fall a little bit in love with her on the basis of her sexy voice alone. She glides up and down the scale, casually nailing complicated vocal arrangements like a sharpshooter hitting a moving target. And she was nobody’s fool. As one admirer once described her, “With her reed-slim figure and Louise Brooks bob of dark hair, [she] possesses a combination of earthiness and sophistication that Nora Charles would envy. Indeed, [the Wilders’] Thin Man–style banter is the stuff of Hollywood legends.”
With Doris already on the payroll as Gloria, Billy proceeded to cast Audrey as a hat-check girl. Years later, a Playboy interviewer observed that “Wilder cut the scene so that only her forearm appeared, and both Wilders agreed that the forearm gave a superb performance.”