by Ed Sikov
Topicality was originally provided by Barbara Walters, who was written into the script as a newscaster in an early sequence; the role was eventually taken by Arlene Francis. Michael York was to play himself, the movie star with whom Antonia falls tragically in love. The role of the president of the Academy, who travels to Fedora’s secluded villa to bestow a belated prize, was initially to go to Gregory Peck; Henry Fonda ended up playing the part (using Alex Trauner’s own Oscar as his prop).
Shooting began on June 1 on Corfu, with a pack of old and new buddies serving as Billy’s production team. His closest German friend, Willy Egger, was made production supervisor; his pal Harold Nebenzal (the grandson of Menschen am Sonntag’s producer Heinrich Nebenzahl) served as production coordinator. And a young writer, Rex McGee, came aboard as Fedora’s historian and archivist on behalf of the Directors Guild. A grant from Jack Lemmon financed McGee’s project, which was widely announced in the press as the first time an entire Hollywood production would be chronicled from inception to release. A film student who wrote a fan letter to Billy after Avanti! was released, McGee was shocked to get a personal phone call from Wilder, who invited him over to his office. “I can still remember the first time I heard that unique voice over the phone in my tiny dorm room,” McGee recalls. Low-key and smart, the young Texan quickly became one of Wilder’s trusted chums. He was invited to hang around the set of The Front Page and watch Billy work at close range, and the two spent countless hours over tables at Johnny Rockets eating burgers, discussing moviemaking, writing, and politics. Billy even asked him to appear on-screen in Fedora; McGee plays a news photographer. No one was in a better position than Rex McGee to document the production of Fedora. It’s too bad the Directors Guild ultimately lost all of the material he assembled.
After four days of exterior filming in Corfu, the company moved to the islands of Lefkás and Madouri, the latter being the site of Fedora’s villa. As always, Trauner was intrigued by the technical design problems he faced: “To show the isolation in which Fedora lived, we had to provide an immediate physical dimension, so we found a small island on the Greek coast—in that region of personal fortresses where people buy islands to slip away to. A difficult place to approach, where there’s only one house and not even a road.” They found what they were looking for at the village of Nydri on the tiny island of Lefkás, which (purely by chance) is located immediately next to Skorpiós, Onassis’s retreat. Trauner and his production design team softened the crusty old house with some extra trees, a wide terrace, and two headless Greek goddesses, all of which were fine with Billy. But the homey porch swing Trauner added was too much. Billy was appalled. “Take it out!” he insisted. “It looks cheap—like something from Glendale.”
A jumble of reporters, visitors, and photographers stood by on Trauner’s terrace, clicking and chatting as Billy prepared to direct a scene in which Antonia and Fedora learn of the Academy’s award—a scene in which Antonia reminds Fedora of the role she’d played in the (fictitious) film East of Suez in 1956. Charmingly and intimately, the daughter was to do a little impersonation of the mother making her famous entrance in the film. The script describes the scene: “With one tug she has unfurled the turban from her head. She now tosses it around her neck like a feather boa, starts singing ‘C’est Si Bon’ in a low sexy voice—an outré parody of yesterday’s screen sirens. Swiveling her hips, she moves over to Vando.” “Cheer up, Reverend,” Antonia was supposed to purr, quoting her mother’s film performance; “Let’s sin some and gin some. East of Suez there are no Ten Commandments.”(This prompted Billy to make up a plaque for his beach house; it reads “North of Zuma there are no Ten Commandments.” He claimed to have given copies to his neighbors Herbert Ross and Dinah Shore.)
The scene reads simply enough. But Keller simply could not perform it. Over and over Billy rehearsed the shot—to no avail. Knef and Frances Sternhagen (as Fedora’s assistant/nursemaid, Miss Balfour) were edgy as well, with a horde of onlookers standing on the sidelines. The ever-social Billy saw no need to clear the set. Keller grew increasingly clumsy and exasperated as Billy habitually fed her particular line readings, the rhythms just so. “Please don’t tell me any more,” she finally snapped. Her English regressed. Her lines were no longer clear. She was beginning to shift her beturbaned shoulders like a clumsy drag queen, and the crowd of reporters, sensing the mounting tension, grew increasingly rapacious until Keller’s performance completely fell apart. Izzie Diamond, grouchy on the sidelines, grew mystified at the way a very good actress was able to mangle his and Billy’s lines. “I know what it says, and I didn’t understand it,” he muttered.
They reshot the “C’est Si Bon” scene on a Munich soundstage one month later, transposing it from the terrace to a bedroom, but Keller still couldn’t get it right, and the whole business ended up being cut.
Keller was in tears on the plane from Greece to Munich. “I can’t work with a director like that!” she wailed to William Holden. “He treats me just like a puppet!” Holden told her that he commiserated, but he made it a point to note that every time he made a Billy Wilder film he got an Oscar nomination. Keller wasn’t soothed. “He wouldn’t even give me the chance to be wrong, to find out for myself,” she later declared. “I just had to do as he said. I said, ‘Can I try it this way?’ He said, ‘Of course, but I’ll cut it out later.’” She became most distressed: “In the end I went a bit crazy and had to see a doctor.” Reporters were quick to seize on the drama. Wilder responded to their insistent questions by saying that he didn’t have time to engage in a public debate with Marthe Keller. But, he noted, “She’s marvelous in the picture.”
Keller may have been difficult, but Wilder didn’t make things any easier for her when he started ridiculing her current boyfriend, Al Pacino, who visited her while she shot Fedora. The sticking point was Pacino’s taste in food: there he was in Europe, and Pacino kept ordering hamburgers. Billy was his usual merciless self on the subject, and Keller grew even more perturbed. For her part, Keller found Holden a bore and avoided socializing with him. She complained privately that all he did was repeat stories she’d already heard. She got along no better with Hildegard Knef. “Knef and Keller are not exactly at war but they are avoiding each other,” a reporter breathlessly revealed in the Los Angeles Times. This was especially sad, since Keller was said to have suggested Knef for the role in the first place. Knef, meanwhile, was telling receptive interviewers that she was the leading lady in the picture and that her costars were Jose Ferrer and William Holden. Keller’s name wasn’t even mentioned.
Billy gave up on his chewing gum. He started smoking again—three especially pungent French stogies every day.
In late July, after nearly two months of shooting, Billy and Izzie saw an hour’s worth of a rough cut and promptly fired the editor. No replacement was in sight. The production team hobbled from Munich to Paris, where interior shooting continued at the now-fairly-decrepit Studios de Boulogne, on the same soundstages where they had shot Love in the Afternoon. Billy, who once enjoyed shooting in France, was no longer content there. He was used to his baseball games on television, his poker and bridge buddies, his routine. Besides, he said, “It’s not a vacation, believe me. It’s a punishment to film in Paris. Being closed up in the Boulogne Studios and not being able to walk down the street is like being a pianist in a bordello while hearing the people screwing on every floor. It makes you crazy.”
Fedora wrapped on August 31, the budget having soared to over $6,727,000. A few days later, Billy was back in Hollywood with a lot of shaky footage and no editor. Ralph Winters, who had cut both Avanti! and The Front Page, was already booked on another project, but he recommended Fritz Steinkamp, who agreed to take on the task. By the beginning of October, Steinkamp pulled together a little more than half the film. Looking at the footage again and again, Wilder found himself muttering a mantra: “Rózsa, Rózsa, Rózsa.” The composer was summoned, and the two old friends resumed their typically prickly excha
nge. “I’m sorry, Miklós, I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Billy said after hurling a characteristic barb. “It’s not my style. Kill, yes; but hurt, never.” “Then you’ve changed,” Rózsa counterpunched. “Before it was always hurt first, then kill.”
By the end of October, Steinkamp and Wilder produced the first complete rough cut. It was a little over two hours long, but it felt even longer. As Steinkamp observed, the rhythms Wilder achieved within each scene were magnificent—“Other directors would give their left arms to be able to stage scenes like this,” he said, but his transitions from scene to scene had become ungainly. Doane Harrison had been gone for a decade, and nobody else could take his place. Moreover, Billy hamstrung himself with his own exactitude. Had he not precut the film so elegantly with the camera while shooting, any proficient editor might have had more room to maneuver.
A more drastic problem loomed. Marthe Keller’s voice didn’t work on film. There was still another obstacle: neither did Hildegard Knef’s. They simply did not sound enough alike to sustain the myth of Fedora, and without that conceit there was no picture. Both voices—the two central performances in the film—would have to be looped in postproduction.
It was one thing for Marni Nixon to have been hired to sing for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964). It was quite another to bring a German actress named Inga Bunsch into a sound studio to rerecord more than four hundred lines of dialogue that make up the two most important roles in the film. Knef was disgusted: “First he destroys my face, now he takes away my voice. What else is left?” Keller hadn’t heard the news yet, but her agent had, and he wasn’t happy about it. Under some duress, Billy agreed to tell Keller the news personally, which he did. Much to his surprise Keller wasn’t entirely horrified, though she may simply have been resigned to fate. “She sounds a lot like me,” Keller acknowledged. Still, the actress had one inflexible demand: that her own voice be kept for the last four scenes of the film—the ones in which she is no longer masquerading as Fedora. Diamond fretted. “If we use the Keller and Bunsch voices back to back, we’ll lose our credibility,” he said. He and Billy knew they were in a double bind, since the voices of the two Fedoras needed to be looped precisely because of a total lack of credibility. Thus Marthe Keller was brought back in to loop her own performance.
When Keller saw the film for the first time right before New Year’s, she was shocked. She blew into Wilder and Diamond’s office at the Goldwyn Studios in such a state of high energy that both men feared catastrophe. “I was knocked out!” she blurted. “It was beautiful! I loved it!” “God bless you, dear,” Billy said with relief. Keller had but one request: “I want you to use my voice where it is appropriate,” she said with a distinctly threatening edge.
More looping followed. Keller’s voice was sufficiently familiar in France that she looped both Antonia’s and Fedora’s voices for the French release. Hildegard Knef, famous in Germany, then looped her voice in for both characters as well. The tone of already strained credulity on which this cinematic tale stood was now wobblier. Rózsa, meanwhile, ended up with a total of three weeks to score the film. Fedora, which had once been carefully planned, had somehow turned slapdash. Never before had Rózsa composed anything so quickly, and he was not pleased about it. After an orchestra recorded the score in mid-December, he and Billy listened to a playback. “I can’t hear anything,” said Rózsa, disturbed at the low volume. Billy was unmoved: “The mere fact that you didn’t hear anything doesn’t necessarily make you Beethoven.”
The mood was even glummer after Fedora’s sound mixing in January, when it became apparent that Inga Bunsch’s voice worked no better than Keller’s or Knef’s. Lines that sounded fine when she recorded them became deadening when laid onto the image. Rózsa pronounced it “fatal.” Steinkamp was equally blunt. “You’ve lost a whole performance,” he told Billy; “Knef’s is the performance of the picture.” Diamond was forced to admit a crucial fact: “If we use Hilde’s voice we’re asking for a lawsuit. It will look like we lied to Marthe.” “The agents are ready to pounce,” Billy acknowledged. He had no choice but to use Bunsch’s monotonous loops. “Forget Knef’s voice,” he told the others. “You have heard it, and you know the difference, but the audience doesn’t. They will never miss it.” As it happened, they did.
Adding to Fedora’s woes in late February, Allied Artists dropped its deal to distribute the film in the United States. Allied still had the film on February 18, when Fedora was screened in New York at a Myasthenia Gravis Foundation benefit, but a few days later the film was free-floating. The issues under dispute were distribution patterns and advertising and publicity expenditures. Allied wanted a gradual, exclusive run, while the film’s distributor, Lorimar, favored the kind of broad national release they were used to providing. The complexities of postclassical American cinema are grimly illustrated by Variety’s account of the deal’s collapse: “Informed sources say Allied had reached a verbal distribution deal with Lorimar, the U.S. agent for the film’s German production financiers, but contract talks broke down about two weeks ago. Pic has been returned to Lorimar, which has reportedly concluded a network TV sale of Fedora to CBS-TV.” Eventually, United Artists picked up Fedora and released it in only a few select, limited markets, with UA (in Wilder’s words) “releasing it in a perfunctory and insulting way and spending about $625 on an advertising campaign.”
In mid-March, Fedora was shown to Lorimar executives Merv Adelson and Lee Rich at the Burbank Studios in what had once been Jack Warner’s personal screening room. Wilder sat in the back smoking. “I’m watching you, Merv,” he said. “If you want to sleep, sit behind me.” Rex McGee reports the uncomfortable exchange that occurred when the lights came back up:
RICH: How much are you going to take out, Billy?
WILDER: A couple of minutes, maybe three.
ADELSON: It’s strong.
RICH: Very strong.
WILDER: It’s different.
ADELSON: Yes, it is.
RICH: It is different.
Rich went on to observe that the print was really quite good. “You should see some of the stuff we get in here,” he noted.
Paul Kohner saw the film for the first time a few days later, and the agent, a master of discretion and tact, knew precisely how it should be handled. “The beautiful thing about Fedora is that nobody knows about it,” Kohner pointed out. “The film should be treated as a precious jewel. I think it is a masterpiece. It must be treated as an important picture. Otherwise, it gets around that the film is problematic and I think maybe you are sunk.”
Wilder, Diamond, and Steinkamp set about making what were (to Billy, at least) some fairly drastic cuts—twelve minutes’ worth. The film was ready for previews in May. Billy picked Santa Barbara. He’d wanted to preview Fedora with one of two current films then in release—The Turning Point or Julia, either of which would have drawn an appropriate audience. Neither was playing in Santa Barbara at the time. Annie Hall was in release, but the 1,200-seat theater in which it was playing was far too cavernous to sustain an intimate film like Fedora. He ended up at the State Theater, which was showing House Calls (1978), a broad comedy starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson.
Fedora’s first real audience was receptive for the first half. Then they started laughing. This in itself might not have been a problem, but they laughed at places that weren’t supposed to be funny. When they roared with derision at a pivotal scene between Keller and Michael York, Billy and Iz felt slapped by their own failure. Rózsa suggested a few more cuts, but Billy was tired of Fedora and decided to leave it alone. “In this time I could have made three lousy pictures instead of one,” he griped.
Fedora found its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 30, 1978. Keller was so thrilled with its reception and the initial European reviews that she actually hosted a party for Billy in Paris a short time later. The Cannes crowd was primed to receive the film well. A small but important retrospective of Billy’s work was included in
the Festival, and Billy himself was chosen to bestow the prestigious Palme d’Or at ceremonies before his new film’s premiere. As Variety reported, “European critics liked it at the Cannes Fest though Yank appraisers sneered.… Pic can be summed up as a well made but flawed tale.” Variety’s critic, at least, appreciated the effort. He admired Wilder’s “directorial flair” as well as Holden’s and York’s performances. But, he went on to note, “missing are needed hints at Fedora’s true star quality, which are not there from past clips or inherent in Keller’s performance or that of Knef as her ruthless mentor, and which mar pic with disbelief.”
The Hollywood Reporter was nastier. The critic was unable to resist noting the scornful laughter of audiences, who are said to have hooted in disbelief when Antonia doesn’t recognize Dr. Vando on the telephone when she thinks she’s talking to Michael York. Richard Schickel, writing in Time, was simply rude. Under the cute headline “Old Hat,” Schickel found Billy Wilder to be laughably over the hill: “Finally, because this movie invokes director Wilder’s earlier Sunset Boulevard, we are asked to accept a melodramatic manner of storytelling and characterization that is outmoded by at least a quarter of a century. Settings, dialogue, the very looks on the faces of everyone in Fedora’s household teeter on the ludicrous.”
One of the clearest, best reviews of Fedora came from Wilder’s old nemesis, Andrew Sarris. Having penned in the 1960s the damning line “Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe his own cynicism,” Sarris pulled a guilty about-face in the 1970s. Noting the drumbeat of gossip-column chronicles of the film’s poor reception at various prerelease screenings, Sarris was sharply incensed—and all too accurate: “The usual collection of freeloading trend-seekers were reportedly laughing at all the wrong places. There is nothing quite so hideously heartless as the idiot cackle of the in-crowd when it senses that a career may be on the skids.” Sarris added a dry rebuke: “It is not as if high aesthetic standards were being upheld in the process.” (One can see the shadow of Sarris’s guilt here; it was Sarris, after all, who paused in his rave review of Lord Love a Duck (1966), to remark, “One shudders to think of Billy Wilder running amok in this material.”) Acknowledging that Keller and Knef weren’t up to their roles, Sarris was still impressed by the way in which Billy appeared to be speaking directly from his heart through the intermediary of William Holden. “If memory serves me correctly,” Sarris added, “Wilder was even wearing the same jaunty hat in Cannes that Holden sported in Fedora.” Wilder courted disaster with Fedora, and Sarris applauded him for it: “Long before noir was a critical catchword,” he continued, “Wilder’s characters seemed to walk on the dark side of the street out of a natural predilection for peril. Even Wilder’s comedies—The Apartment, Sabrina, Avanti!, most notably—have been shadowed by death and self-destruction. But in Fedora the cinema itself ends up in a coffin of Wilder’s own design. And one can hardly expect 1979 screening audiences to join Wilder at the wake.”