On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Wilder says he actually made a note to himself after seeing Brief Encounter: “What I had written was, ‘What about the friend who has to crawl back into that warm bed?’” For Billy, there was something appealing about this premise—emotionally, sexually, thematically, commercially. Before meeting Jack Lemmon and seeing the sweet intimacy with which he expressed Wilder’s harsh imagination, Billy was prone to lavishing his attentions on the exploiters of the world—the evil manipulators (Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole), the hustlers (Sefton in Stalag 17), the self-pimps (Gillis in Sunset Boulevard). Even his Oscar-winning victim (Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend) was a diseased liar and a compulsive cheat. But in Jack Lemmon Billy saw new potential—the endearing comedy of an American loser. Tom Ewell was good at it, but Jack Lemmon was brilliant. Overwhelmed with possibilities, Billy found he had far too much to say about such a dud: “I started with this character and this theme: a man who lets himself be exploited, a solitary bachelor who comes home at night and gets in the bed still warm from the lovers. I called my friend Diamond and we started working. Once you have an idea like that, millions of others follow. The problem then is to eliminate, to simplify. In other words, what’s important is the elimination of what has been invented.”

  To Shirley MacLaine, whom he wanted for the film’s leading lady, he was more succinct: “This is about a young fellow who gets ahead in a big company by lending his apartment to executives for that grand old American folk ritual, the afternoon shack-up.” She agreed to do The Apartment based on this one-line précis and some early script pages. The time was right, the Production Code ineffectual, the Legion of Decency exercising its waning authority only over the nation’s Catholics, and even then many of them simply ignored the peril to their souls and went to whatever movies they wanted. “I would have done it in 1948 or 1949 but for the censorship,” Wilder had said. But, by the end of the 1950s, thanks to much of that decade’s innovations—Elvis, Monroe, Little Richard, Jayne Mansfield, Some Like It Hot—any attempts to erase overt sexuality from American mass entertainment had become laughably out-of-date.

  The heartlessness of American corporate culture, meanwhile, had become a standard theme in American film drama. Executive Suite and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit struck a chord with the public—glacially impersonal architecture, callous bosses, and professional lives devoid of hope, let alone soul. Fifties’ audiences related to it. So into this conventional world Wilder dropped his own creation: C. C. Baxter, the perfect WASP schmeggege.

  Tony Curtis offers another account of the film’s genesis, defying everyone else’s. Curtis claims credit for inspiring The Apartment: “The reason it came about was because there were a lot of beautiful girls who were extras and bit players that I wanted to fuck, and I did…. Most of the time the problem wasn’t the girl, it was the place.” So Tony used his friend Nicky Blair’s bachelor pad somewhere off Laurel Canyon. According to Curtis, the hose-nosed Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky ran into Blair one day when Blair was killing time by sitting in his own parked car. Why can’t you go home? Skolsky inquired; “Tony’s up there with a girl,” Blair answered. According to Curtis, “Skolsky wrote it up as a treatment and sold it and it became The Apartment.” Curtis also claims Wilder didn’t cast him in the Nicky Blair role because he was too good-looking.

  If Hollywood backdoor romances lie at the heart of The Apartment, another dazzlingly tawdry real-life incident was probably more influential. In 1951, producer Walter Wanger discovered that his wife, Joan Bennett, was having an affair with the agent Jennings Lang. Their encounters were brief and frequent. When Lang and Bennett weren’t meeting clandestinely at vacation spots like New Orleans and the West Indies, they were back in L.A. enjoying weekday quickies at a Beverly Hills apartment otherwise occupied by one of Lang’s underlings at the agency. When Wanger found proof of the affair, he did what any crazed cuckold would do: he shot Lang in the balls. Given the prominence of all three principals and the lurid, just-deserts vengeance extracted by Wanger, Hollywood was delighted by the story. Given its timing, Life couldn’t help but observe that his passage from cell to police desk, a walk punctuated by flashbulbs and the hum of newsreel cameras, looked and sounded uncomfortably like the end of Sunset Boulevard.

  From whatever source Wilder developed The Apartment, had he found the means he might have staged it as a theatrical production, but according to Diamond, it proved to be too unwieldy: “Originally Billy wanted to do The Apartment as a play, but since there had to be such a visual contrast between the apartment and the three-hundred-desk office, it was not feasible.”

  This was going to be a film about a clerk and an elevator operator, but none of the filmmakers who created The Apartment were themselves anonymous little people anymore. Lemmon and MacLaine were each paid straight salaries of $175,000 for their appearances. (This was an ample sum, certainly. Still, because neither of them got a percentage of the profits, let alone the gross, their combined salaries didn’t even equal what Tony Curtis alone made on Some Like It Hot.) Billy’s own deal with the Mirisches remained the same: $200,000 and 17.5 percent of the gross above two times the cost of the negative, 20 percent if the film pulled in $1 million over the break-even point. As long as Billy didn’t blow it, and there was little chance that he would, more art was likely to be purchased after The Apartment hit the marketplace.

  For Shirley MacLaine, The Apartment confirmed her status as a top-ranking star. She’d done some good comedies in the mid-1950s (Artists and Models, 1955; The Trouble with Harry, 1955; Around the World in 80 Days, 1956), but her most recent role was a major dramatic one—Frank Sinatra’s trashy girlfriend in Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1959). Wilder nevertheless credits himself for MacLaine’s later success as an accomplished dramatic actress. “Take Shirley MacLaine,” Billy boasted. “She was infected with that one-take, Rat Pack, all-play-and-no-work nonsense, but when she came to work for Iz and me in The Apartment she got serious and worked as hard as anybody. Now she’s playing drama.” Wilder is being overly generous to his friend Iz here. In no sense did MacLaine or anyone else work for Wilder and Diamond. They all worked—Diamond as well—for Wilder and the Mirisches. As Diamond himself explained at the time, “I am listed as a coproducer on the film. In essence this means no more than my being allowed to stay on the lot after the shooting has started.” Billy, on the other hand, explained Diamond’s recurrent role as associate producer by saying that he was “the only one willing to associate with the producer.”

  In any event, MacLaine did a little on-the-job training for her role as the working-class Fran Kubelik. She spent a day preparing for her part by operating one of the elevators in the Los Angeles Times building. As usual for MacLaine in this period, this wasn’t a glamour role. Her entire wardrobe for the film is said to have cost $178.50.

  According to MacLaine, “There were only twenty-nine pages of script, maybe thirty-nine—that was all we had when we started. And then Billy and Izzie observed Jack and me together, and as they observed us they wrote the screenplay—as we were shooting.” According to Diamond, he and Billy went into production with a complete screenplay, though they’d only just finished “in the last four days and nights before shooting.” Filming began in November 1959 on location in New York. Ignoring his own account of the film’s genesis, Wilder once declared that “The Apartment occurred to me while I was in New York, where I go twice a year. On the other hand, maybe that theme would have occurred to me in Oklahoma.” The theme, perhaps; the look, impossible. This was a purely New York story—harsh, funny, and fast, full of tiny people in tall buildings. Ironically, Billy would be filming this most vertical of cities in CinemaScope.

  A picturesque, spindly tree-lined block of West Sixty-ninth Street was chosen for the exteriors of C. C. Baxter’s run-of-the-mill apartment (the interiors of which Alex Trauner designed as anything but ordinary). Other sites included the exterior of the Majestic Theater, a Columbus Avenue bar,
and a Chinese restaurant, which was actually a below-street-level barbershop dressed with a neon COCKTAILS sign. Wilder and his crew also filmed in the gleaming lobby of a brand-new $38 million Wall Street office tower, which Billy knew would superbly reflect the polished stoniness of the world he wished to depict.

  It was a cold New York November. On the day the scene involving Buddy-Boy Baxter sitting drenched on a park bench was shot, the temperature dropped to sixteen degrees. No matter. Jack Lemmon still had to be sprayed and soaked—with a mixture of water and antifreeze.

  Originally, the script called for Baxter to wait for the woman he tries pathetically to date, the perky and suicidal elevator operator Fran Kubelik, outside the theater in which The Sound of Music was playing. This was because Billy is said to have invested some money in the show and thought he’d work a plug into his own film. Then Billy went to see The Sound of Music himself. No surprise here, he hated it—so much so that he switched Baxter’s tickets to The Music Man.

  Location shooting in New York was arduous—reminiscent of The Lost Weekend, only worse. “We weren’t making progress,” Trauner recalled, “and besides it was so cold that we were always running to the bar to warm ourselves. Billy even claimed that my little dog was becoming an alcoholic because she would run ahead of us to the bar. Finally he had enough, and we decided to reshoot the exteriors of New York on a set at the Goldwyn Studio, where we also had the advantage of controlling the bad weather that was important to the film. I think the only part of the real New York that made it into the film were a few shots of streets and two shots in Central Park.”

  At least one casting decision was made in New York as well. Ray Walston, who plays the leering Mr. Dobisch, remembers the audition: “I met him at the Warwick Hotel in New York, while he was there doing exteriors. I was sent over there by my agent, and I went over about eight-thirty one night and went into this living room, where he was sitting at a French table that served as a desk. He said to me, ‘Josh Logan tells me that you are a good actor.’ I nodded, and he said, ‘Do you have an overcoat.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Is it an expensive overcoat?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Good. Then you got the job.’ How can you resist a man like that?”

  Billy and his crew returned to Los Angeles just before Thanksgiving, and shooting resumed on November 30 at Goldwyn. The block of brown-stones was completely rebuilt (facades only, of course), as was the office building lobby. The restaurant and bar interiors were constructed anew. Most important of all, Trauner designed and built the vast office in which Baxter and hundreds of his coworkers drudged. Trauner’s skill at using perspective reached its epitome in The Apartment. The idea was Billy’s, who took his inspiration from King Vidor. As Vidor himself said, “Wilder copied the scene in The Crowd for his picture The Apartment and asked how many desks I had had.” The Crowd is one of the jewels of the American silent cinema—a poignant look at the drab disaster that comprises an average working man’s life in New York. Both heartbreakingly realistic and poetically stylized, The Crowd is The Apartment’s antecedent in tone as well as set design. Since American corporate anonymity had become even more grotesque by 1959, Wilder took Vidor’s vision to a heart-of-chrome-and-glass extreme. Vidor makes “John” (James Murray) seem small in his office in The Crowd; Wilder practically atomizes Buddy-Boy Baxter in The Apartment, an effect Trauner achieves by way of forced perspective.

  Billy later insisted that midgets played an integral part of Trauner’s design: “Take the big office set of The Apartment—the one that looks as big as a football field covered with five thousand individual desks. We shot it in a Goldwyn sound stage on a medium-sized set. How? By using perspective. Some tall extras seated behind normal desks, others shorter, behind smaller desks, some dwarves at miniature desks, then some cut-outs and toy desks.” Trauner himself said, less colorfully, that they used children.

  To dress this frighteningly modern set, Trauner and his staff borrowed $2.5 million worth of office equipment (calculators, punch card machines, and sorters) from the corporate behemoth IBM. Whether or not there were midget people behind midget desks, there still had to be a vast floor; it took half an acre of linoleum. For Trauner, though, the real gem was the aluminum ceiling: “Most of the points of view took advantage of the ceiling, which offered another advantage—the spectator simply fills in the background for himself and concentrates on the action in the foreground.” Thus a 120-foot-by-200-foot set took on the demoralizing force of a 650-foot-by-800-foot corporate hell.

  Despite the noticeable presence of Eastern Europeans (Dobisch, Eichelberger, Kubelik), Consolidated Life is essentially heartless. But home offers a kind of architectural love. However solitary and depressing it may seem at first glance, Baxter’s apartment is warm—worn and shabby, perhaps, but in a gemütlich sort of way. Wood and plaster make it solid, carved archways soften the edges and offer a kind of shelter. Like the apartment Maurice Chevalier and Audrey Hepburn share in Love in the Afternoon, Trauner’s design combines with Wilder’s sensibility to create a snug refuge against an ugly world, but in both cases the ugliness seeps in anyway and is not entirely unwelcome. Just as Ariane is thrilled by the sleaze she finds in her father’s filing cabinets, Baxter finds a certain vicarious thrill in what other men do in his bed. He’s put upon, but he likes it. Even the apartment is world-weary.

  And so are the neighbors. In The Apartment, home is where the Jews are. The Dreyfusses live next door, while Mrs. Lieberman, the landlady, runs the house. As a character type, Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) became extinct in the decades following the film’s release; he’s a middle-class physician. More to the point, he is the film’s benevolent paternal figure to counterpose Sheldrake’s malignant one. Dr. Dreyfuss is the man to whom Wilder entrusts the film’s only moral: be a mensch, Dreyfuss advises the less-than-fully-human Baxter, who eventually takes him up on the suggestion. (Be a mensch doesn’t just mean be a real person. It means be a good and decent person.) Wilder doesn’t fully come to public terms with being a Jew in this film, but he nods in that direction. The Poliakoff scene in Some Like It Hot, as funny as it is, is really just a prelude to the surprisingly redemptive Jewishness of The Apartment.

  Billy had scarcely been running away from his heritage, but before the late 1950s he didn’t embrace it on-screen. (Harry Shapiro in Stalag 17 is the big exception.) Then again, he couldn’t. Jews may have controlled Hollywood behind the scenes, but on-screen they were virtually nonexistent, and the Jewish producers and studio bosses wanted to keep it that way. (It was the profoundly goyish Darryl Zanuck who had the nerve to make the ground-breaking anti-Semitism drama Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947.) But now, in middle-age and with the Borscht Belt veteran Diamond as his sidekick, Wilder was relaxed enough about who he was to let some of his Jewishness come out in front of an international audience, and Hollywood conventions no longer stood in his way. Still, one measure of the novelty of Jewish characters in American films in 1959 is the actor UA executives suggested to play the role of Dr. Dreyfuss. If Billy wanted a Jew, UA was ready to give him one—Groucho Marx. Fortunately, Billy had someone less extreme in mind. Confident, unpretentious, professional, and a real mensch, Jack Kruschen’s Dr. Dreyfuss embodies everything that Wilder sees as being right about the world.

  It’s too bad that Wilder’s mellow enjoyment of his own heritage is marred by Naomi Stevens’s hammy performance as Mrs. Dreyfuss (for which Wilder is equally to blame). What with the chicken soup and the apron and the napkins and the fussing, Wilder gives Stevens maybe one nu too many. “Mit the drinking, mit the cha-cha!” she clucks at Baxter, and although it’s rather funny, one wishes Wilder could have exercised a little more control over the actress’s delivery. Frances Lax’s Mrs. Lieberman is more appealing, less of a caricature. Her offhand remark about “that mishegoss at Cape Canaveral” sounds like something somebody’s Aunt Dora might actually say. Mrs. Dreyfuss does have one of the better lines, though: appalled at Baxter’s apparently raging promiscuity, she turns
on him and, with a withering stare, accuses him of being “Max the knife.”

  With its grim, black-and-white-and-gray cinematography, its low-key lighting, and its moodiness and morally compromised tone, The Apartment echoes 1940s film noir. Watching Baxter huddle in the shadows of his brownstone, clutching his unprotective overcoat around him and shivering while some other guy usurps his apartment, is as oppressive and bitter as the scene in Laura (1944) in which Clifton Webb lurks, freezing and snow-battered, outside the apartment of the woman he loves while she makes love to another man. Wilder chose Joseph LaShelle to shoot The Apartment, LaShelle having had some experience with film noir—he shot Laura.

  LaShelle and Wilder went on to make a number of other films together, despite Billy’s having threatened to scuttle LaShelle’s career during a run-in during filming. Wilder had his heart set on a very low-angle shot, and LaShelle said no. “He kind of peered at me over his glasses like an owl,” LaShelle recalled. “‘What did you say?’ So I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And he said, ‘Joseph, you must be a very wealthy man.’ I said, ‘I have some savings.’ And he said, ‘But you do have to work, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t have to work—not all the time.’ And he said, ‘But Joseph, you’re never going to work…. Nobody ever says no to me. So what do you think about my low setup?’ And I said, very loud, ‘No.’”

  This was bold. But Billy wasn’t angry at his defiance. He was impressed. Grinning broadly, Wilder relented: “Oh, shit, then do it the way you want.” LaShelle never specified which shot he and Billy argued about. Maybe it was the one in which Baxter and Dr. Dreyfuss drag Fran back and forth across the apartment trying to return her to consciousness after her suicide attempt—a very low-angle shot taken almost from the floor.

  LaShelle, like other pros, was amazed at Wilder’s shooting style. Billy didn’t shoot what are called protection shots—the extra close-ups and master shots that can be inserted during editing if the original intention isn’t achieved, or, just as likely, if the producer simply decides there should be more close-ups and master shots. On other people’s films, LaShelle noted, “the director only had the right of first cut. Zanuck was like that. Cohn was like that. Jack Warner. All of them. With Billy they couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give them these protection shots. There was nothing left on the cutting room floor when he was finished.” Wilder was one of a handful of Hollywood directors who shot in this manner.