On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Janet Maslin got it right in the New York Times: “It is rich, majestic, very close to ridiculous, and also a little bit mad. It seems exactly what Mr. Wilder wants it to be, perfectly self-contained and filled with the echoes of a lifetime.” Thanks in no small measure to Maslin, Sarris, and Vincent Canby (who expanded on Maslin’s appreciation in a Sunday Arts and Leisure essay), Fedora beat all expectations in New York. Its cruelest reviews notwithstanding, the film performed well at the Gotham box office.

  With Fedora, Wilder and Diamond strove to achieve an offbeat, comical-tragic tone—a precarious goal, since the danger of filming a character who descends from gracious, distant self-confidence to delusional paranoia is specifically that she will look funniest when she is at her most vulnerable. Antonia asks who Detweiler has in mind for the part of Vronsky. “Oh, we can get Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen….” “You know Michael York?” she asks enthusiastically. Even in 1978 her devotion to York seemed immoderate. She has met the actor already and fallen in love with him; the two have costarred in a film called The Last Waltz, a Technicolor musical set in Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. In the film (which looks suspiciously like the extravagant musical Wilder wrote and filmed with Brackett), she plays a general’s wife who falls in love with her son-in-law.

  Antonia’s breakdown occurs when she realizes that she is trapped in a false persona—that of her mother, who has herself constructed an enduring public identity to mask the lack of a secure private one. But the seeds of her emotional instability are planted in a flashback of Antonia’s childhood. “We don’t have to go anywhere,” Fedora’s daughter begs her mother during one of her infequent visits. “We can have dinner right here in the room. Nobody has to see us.” “It’s not that, darling,” Fedora responds, “but a friend of mine—you’ve heard of Noel Coward?—he’s leaving tomorrow for Jamaica, and I haven’t seen him in six months.”

  ANTONIA: You haven’t seen me for a year!

  FEDORA: I brought you some presents. Open them.

  ANTONIA: All you ever give me is things. I don’t want things!

  Like Avanti!, Fedora blazes with colorful cascades of flowers, but this time the vital reds, blues, purples, pinks, oranges, and whites aren’t the paradisiacal flora of Ischia but rather funeral bouquets, too-late tributes offered to a corpse. Fedora spends even more time with characters standing around dead bodies, confronting the overwhelming distance that separated them in life, though in Fedora’s case it’s a daughter, not a father, who got too little love. “You’ve been around this business long enough,” the ancient Fedora explains to Detweiler; “You know it’s all special effects, painted backdrops, glycerine tears.” “Magic time,” he says with an ironic smirk.

  Wilder was philosophical about Fedora after its release, at least in public: “Like all my other films, I’d like to remake this one. In fact, one should only remake one’s own films. That said—and contradictorily—I don’t want to touch it again. I want to move ahead to new errors.” Still, he couldn’t help but dwell on his mistakes:

  Now that the film is finished, I wake up at night and I think of each scene in my head and I shoot it differently. For example, the first time that Holden sees the countess, the hearth next to which she’s sitting should be much farther from us, and around her there should be eight electric radiators instead of two; she would look like a Buddha seated in a wheelchair surrounded by lamps and darkness. She should be more paralyzed, and only a side of her face should be visible…. What a chance the playwrights and theater directors have—those who try out their work in Pittsburgh, Boston, Toronto, and finally New York, and who can constantly make changes. We work with a puzzle, and the first time the pieces are joined together is the last. The star’s gone to Yugoslavia and the sets have been destroyed. You have to be sure not to make mistakes.

  31. “NICE WORKING WITH YOU”

  Is it all ashes, or is there still a spark?

  —Victor Clooney (Jack Lemmon) in Buddy Buddy

  On May 12, 1980, after an absence of forty-one years, Billy returned to work at MGM’s studios in Culver City. He hadn’t been employed there since Ninotchka, though he did do some shooting for Some Like It Hot on one of MGM’s soundstages. But now he and Diamond were gearing up to write a new comedy for MGM, and they set up a working suite for themselves on the lot—one floor above Billy’s old Ninotchka office. There they began rewriting a seven-year-old French farce. David Begelman, MGM’s head of production, had an ambitious lineup of thirty-eight films in mind for the next two years. Five were already completed, ten were in active preproduction, and twenty-three more queued in varying stages of development. They included Dennis Potter and Herbert Ross’s extravagant musical, Pennies from Heaven; Francis Ford Coppola’s equally lavish and ambitious One from the Heart; and a musical comedy for Luciano Pavarotti called Yes, Giorgio. Begelman was striving to return a bit of class to Hollywood filmmaking, and, two months later, the greatest writer-director in American film history and his loyal collaborator finished the first draft of their screenplay. It was called Buddy Buddy.

  Wilder and Diamond’s screenplay concerns a hit man bent on assassinating all the witnesses in a Palm Springs land fraud scandal. It’s business as usual in Southern California, a fact the writers both knew very well, since they were making the film for a convicted felon. Begelman, a former talent agent, had launched his own firm, Creative Management Associates, with Freddie Fields in 1960, and together they pioneered the movie “package”—stars, writers, and director, all sharing the same representation, bundled together for speedy sale to a studio. In 1973 Begelman was hired to head production at Columbia Pictures. The studio was nearly bankrupt when Begelman took charge, but a few years later, Columbia roared back with a string of big hits such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Shampoo, and Funny Lady. Some inconvenience arose in 1977 when Begelman forged $40,000 worth of checks and had to be let go, but after insisting on a rehabilitative two-month suspension, Columbia reinstated him. Unluckily for Begelman, though, nobody forgot about his forgery, and he was forced out of Columbia again in February 1978. Three months later he pleaded no contest to charges of felony grand theft. Begelman blamed his crime on drugs (pills and cocaine), and after a period of dignified convalescence he was hired to be head of production at MGM. This was a bit of an inside job, since MGM/UA’s chairman, Frank Rothman, served as Begelman’s lawyer on the check-forging case.

  Wilder found a few changes on the MGM lot. For one thing, the sound-stage on which he shot the Some Like It Hot sequences had been torn down to build a condo. This was not surprising; across town in Hollywood, the Goldwyn stages on which he shot The Apartment and Irma la Douce were demolished in favor of a parking lot. “But you know,” he mused to the critic Stephen Farber, “if you visit the Parthenon today it’s not quite the way it was in the old days. Everything in this world changes, with the one exception of Dolores Del Rio.” Or himself. His remarks about aging stars have a personal ring: “Look at Joan Crawford, dying alone in her apartment. Before her death she actually went down in the elevator; two women saw her. One said to the other, ‘You know, that used to be Joan Crawford.’ That is very difficult to take, especially when you are on your own and were so beautiful…. When the rapture and the ecstasy comes to an end for the big star, they just cannot cope. They become drunks or take pills or live tucked away in the Arizona desert.” Billy Wilder compelled himself to keep working.

  Wilder and Diamond based Buddy Buddy on L’Emmerdeur, a 1973 French film written by Francis Veber and directed by Edouard Molinaro. Veber’s Pardon Mon Affaire (1977) had been an art-house hit; Veber and Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles (1978) was a smash. L’Emmerdeur was far less successful in the States, where it was released as A Pain in the A–, L’Emmerdeur translating neither well nor cleanly, falling somewhere between The Asshole and The Fuckhead. (Even in the sex-laden 1970s there was no chance of using either the a-word nor the f-word in an American title.) In any case, Lino Ventura starred as Ral
ph, a contract killer. Jacques Brel played his nemesis, Pignon, the eponymous jerk, a suicidal shirt salesman whose life Ralph uselessly preserves.

  Alain Bernheim had been Molinaro’s agent at one time, and according to his Buddy Buddy coproducer Jay Weston, “he showed the film to Lemmon on Tuesday, Matthau on Thursday, Wilder on Friday, and had a package on Friday.” Like The Front Page, Buddy Buddy works best on paper; the deal memo must have looked great. Budgeted around $10 million—“less than the average advertising campaign,” Billy knew—Buddy Buddy was to be “something between Stir Crazy and George Bernard Shaw,” by which Wilder seems to have meant that it was a comic social satire about two men. Begelman responded to both the pitch and the package; a William Morris agent put it together for Lemmon and Matthau, and the two stars brought Billy on board to complete the deal. “I didn’t have to audition for the studios and pass through Checkpoint Charlie before they would approve the project,” Billy noted.

  Filming began on February 4, 1981, in Agoura, California. The central location, however, was at the Riverside County courthouse. The film’s location manager had scouted Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and much of Southern California before arriving in Riverside and finding this sun-baked, gingerbready hall of justice. The building was perfect, but there was no hotel across the street, as the script demanded, so production designer Dan Lomino built a whole hotel facade and suspended it on top of the row of stores facing the courthouse. Wilder and company shot in Riverside through February, then moved back to MGM Soundstages 11 and 12, and finally finished up on a secluded Hawaiian beach on April 27.

  That Buddy Buddy is morbid is no surprise. That its morbidity is so lifeless is shocking. The film’s tone goes so far beyond resignation that it achieves a kind of flat despair. “In this Donner Pass expedition known as Hollywood,” Wilder once said, “many people fall by the wayside. People eat people. Very few make it. Lately I’ve been going to more funerals than openings to pictures. Sometimes you have a funeral and an opening on the same day, and you don’t feel very good when you see a comedy after you’ve put somebody to rest or watched the Neptune Society blow his ashes into the Pacific Ocean.” One loss was especially bitter. On Saturday, November 14, a weekend that fell in the middle of Buddy Buddy’s scripting, Billy and Audrey packed some clothes and prepared to set off for Palm Springs to spend the weekend with Bill Holden. Their chum had been inviting the Wilders to visit for some time. They still hadn’t seen his new desert retreat, and finally they found a weekend that worked for all of them. Billy phoned Holden before setting off, but the housekeeper who answered the phone said that Holden wasn’t there, and nobody knew where he was. Billy and Audrey unpacked and spent the weekend at home.

  On Monday, back at work on Buddy Buddy, Billy learned that Holden was dead. He’d fallen, drunk, in the bedroom of his apartment in Santa Monica, hit his head on a table near the bed, and bled to death. There was no funeral. Later Billy and Audrey attended a memorial service at Stefanie Powers’s place in Benedict Canyon. Wilder said he wouldn’t have been surprised had his old friend been gored on an African game preserve or killed in a plane crash in Hong Kong. It would even have made sense if “a crazed, jealous woman had shot him and he drowned in a swimming pool.” But Holden’s death was doubly depressing for Billy: “To be killed by a bottle of vodka and a night table—what a lousy fadeout for a great guy.”

  Buddy Buddy is one of the very few Wilder scripts that takes place in something approaching real time, and it drags. Although it is based on L’Emmerdeur, its earlier antecedent is Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht—a suicidal schlepp, a hit man, bonding, death jokes. Fifty years, millions of dollars, six Oscars, and a very thick scrapbook of international attention later, Billy still couldn’t think of any reason to remain alive other than the pleasure one derives from one’s profession. In both films, killing people serves as an honest day’s work, and the hell of it is simply that some worthless asshole keeps getting in the way.

  There are noteworthy revisions from L’Emmerdeur. As the film historian Richard Parker Hadley Jr. notes, L’Emmerdeur opens ominously with a zoom-in and zoom-out to a car, which explodes seconds later, killing an innocent man. The killer is then summarily shot in the head by the hit man. Wilder and Diamond not only give the pleasure of both murders to their assassin, Trabucco, but they make them both maliciously comical. Buddy Buddy, unlike L’Emmerdeur, is full of disguises. Death comes in various mundane forms—a mailman, a milkman, a Roman Catholic priest. L’Emmerdeur ends with Ralph and Pignon in a prison yard; Buddy Buddy ends with the killers retiring together on a secluded beach in the South Seas.

  Jack Webb was originally considered for the role of Hubris, the chief of police, but the part ultimately went to a less recognizable actor, Dana Elcar. The film’s romantic complication, apart from Clooney-Lemmon’s nagging affection for Trabucco-Matthau, takes the form of Victor’s wife, Celia; Wilder cast the comedienne Paula Prentiss in the part. (For the first shot of Prentiss, Wilder instructed the cinematographer, Harry Stradling Jr., to “make her look very beautiful.” “She’s no Garbo,” Billy added, “but that shouldn’t be too difficult.”) For the repulsive Dr. Zuckerbrot, the head of the sex clinic to which Celia has fled and whom she is deliriously screwing, Wilder chose Klaus Kinski, best known for his portrayal of Nosferatu in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of the Murnau classic. And with a certain loyal honor, Wilder cast Joan Shawlee as the clinic’s mean-spirited receptionist, for whom Celia ultimately ditches Zuckerbrot.

  At the age of seventy-five, Billy claimed to be the object of strange women’s romantic attentions. A plucky Riverside resident was said to have been calling the studio daily, trying to invite Wilder over for a home-cooked meal. Billy graciously refused, saying, “I told her I was a homosexual on a diet.” One day on the set, the talk turned to Wilder’s predilection for evil women and his fondness for pairing two men. Walter Matthau asked Billy in front of the whole cast and crew why it was that Jack Lemmon kept ending up either with a rotten dame or Matthau at the end of their joint films. (Matthau may not have gotten the plots right, but he did pinpoint a certain tendency.) Billy, mildly annoyed, dismissed the remark out of hand, but Matthau couldn’t bear to let the point drop. “Look to your own misogyny,” the actor advised.

  Matthau seems to have enjoyed teasing his old friend. “Why don’t you think that actors are smart?” Matthau asked Billy one day. “Robert Redford directs his first film and he wins an Academy Award.” “Okay,” Billy replied, “Rod Steiger will direct your next picture.”

  When someone asked him what the next setup was, Billy was direct: “None of your fucking business.” Still, he only lost his temper once during the production—when a publicist brought her squalling infant onto the set and ruined a take.

  Directing Lemmon before filming the sequence in which Clooney gets dressed to visit his wife, Wilder told Lemmon, “You are dancing on clouds. You’re going back to your wife, you schmuck.” Sing “Cecilia,” he advised, and snap the towel like a matador. One more thing: “Jackie-poo, a slight smile of anticipation.”

  The three pros had been through a lot together over the years, Lemmon in particular. They enjoyed their private language, over two decades of shared work and play. Matthau and Lemmon, driving toward a rock in rear projection, were directed to be casual but slightly tense. “The attitude is a very simple one,” Billy coached, “nervous expectation.” “Please don’t talk to me,” Lemmon snapped, quoting Marilyn Monroe. “I’ll forget how I’m going to play it.”

  As always, Lemmon was the more accommodating, while Matthau was a needler. During each take of the shot in which he administers last rites to the guy on the courthouse steps, Matthau kept changing the dialogue, but by that point in the production neither Diamond nor Wilder corrected him. “I used to do that, sure,” Diamond confessed to the critic Adrian Turner, “but perhaps I’m getting lazy or older.” Diamond admitted that Matthau was a special case: “With Walter we allow a little flexibility.” They
had to; bitching over little lines had grown tiresome. One day Wilder and Matthau argued for twenty minutes over whether Trabucco should say “What kind of shit is this?” or “What kind of shit is that?” It no longer seemed worth it, especially after Matthau had to be hospitalized in early April after filming the scene in which he and Lemmon slide down a laundry chute. Matthau was supposed to land on a mattress, and he did, only to bounce off and hurt his neck. Everyone feared it was broken, but it turned out to be only bruised, and he returned to work the following week, albeit with a neck brace. One of Billy’s remarks has a poignant ring: “For all the trouble and aggravation he puts me through, I wish I could have him for my next fifty pictures.”