Still, Wilder valued Brackett’s presence. “It’s such an exhausting thing, facing that empty page in the morning,” he explained. “One of the best things about a collaborator is that he stops you from committing suicide. You have to have specific talent to be a collaborator. It’s like a marriage.”18 Wilder acknowledged that Brackett “didn’t think like I did at all, didn’t even approve of me. But, by God! When we started mapping out dialogue, there were sparks!”19
A Brackett-Wilder screenplay was not committed to paper until every line of dialogue had been discussed thoroughly. To offset the possibility of their finished screenplay being passed on to another writer to fiddle around with, as happened with Midnight, they adopted the practice of doling out their scripts a few scenes at a time, just before each one was to be shot. Producers accepted their tight security over their scripts because Brackett and Wilder were by now the most renowned writing team in town. Nevertheless, when Leisen was shooting a scene, he was still prone to modifying the screenplay. That was precisely what happened on Hold Back the Dawn, their last screenplay for him.
The film is principally set in a small town on the Mexican border, where Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer), a European refugee, desperately waits to obtain an American visa. Wilder drew on his own experience in obtaining an immigration visa to enter the United States in 1934.
The movie has a clever narrative frame: Georges sneaks onto the Paramount lot, where he encounters Mr. Saxon, a film director played by Leisen, who is shooting I Wanted Wings (1941), the war picture that Leisen was actually shooting at the time. Georges proceeds to tell his story to Saxon with the hope that the director will want to film it. His story plays out in an extended flashback.
Georges is a down-at-the-heels roué from Romania. He admits to having been a “dancer for hire” and a “ladies’ escort” back in Romania—precisely what Wilder had been in Berlin in 1926. Georges romances a visiting tourist, an American schoolteacher named Emmy Brown, as his one-way ticket to the United States. Georges and the innocent, gullible Emmy become engaged. He plans to obtain a quick divorce once he has his American visa and is settled in the United States, but he gradually realizes that he really loves Emmy. In an unexpected crisis of conscience, Georges offers to let her off the hook, but Emmy forgives him his deception and still agrees to marry him.
Shooting commenced on February 18, 1941. For one scene Brackett and Wilder devised a monologue for Georges to deliver to a cockroach crawling up the wall of his room in the wretched Hotel Esperanza, a hostel that does not promise the hope of its Spanish name. In this scene an unshaven Georges dramatizes his plight as if he were a border official delaying the cockroach’s passage across the wall. On March 15, the day that the scene was to be filmed, Boyer complained to Leisen that it was idiotic for him to address an insect that could not respond to him. Leisen deemed the lines superfluous and canceled the monologue without notifying Brackett and Wilder.
Wilder was having lunch at Lucy’s, a bistro near Paramount, when he came across Boyer, who made the mistake of casually informing him that he had gotten Leisen to cut the cockroach speech. When Wilder objected, Boyer added defensively that the scene was running too long. Wilder told Brackett after lunch that Leisen apparently did not appreciate how the cockroach monologue encapsulated the wretched Georges’ own situation. Georges, the lonesome alien, is so desperate for communication that he converses with this bug.
The irony and dark humor in the speech could have permeated the rest of the movie. “It is not necessary for a director to know how to write,” said Wilder sarcastically; “it helps, however, if he knows how to read.” Wilder pounded his fist on the desk and threatened to beat Boyer’s brains out. But then he reflected that actors did not have any brains and abandoned the notion. Later in the day, Brackett entered their office suite and found Wilder “wildly scratching out lines in the script.” When Brackett inquired what his partner was doing, Wilder answered with maniacal glee, “Cutting Boyer’s lines; if the son-of-a-bitch won’t talk to a cockroach, then he’s not going to talk to anybody!”20 Brackett and Wilder were still revising the last third of the screenplay, so they proceeded to favor Olivia de Havilland by giving her the best lines of dialogue. Boyer’s part dwindled appreciably in the last segment of the movie, and de Havilland ended up with an Oscar nomination for her performance. Brackett and Wilder were also nominated for best screenplay.
But Wilder was not yet finished getting even with Boyer. A year later, while directing his first Hollywood feature, The Major and the Minor, he included a bit in which a little girl asks her mother to buy her a movie magazine at a newsstand in a train station. The lurid cover story is titled “Why I Hate Women,” by Charles Boyer. Even years later, the Hold Back the Dawn episode still rankled. When Wilder filmed The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), he had James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh address a fly buzzing around the cockpit of his plane. Wilder defied anyone to suggest that he cut the fly monologue.
The shooting of Hold Back the Dawn was finished on May 5, 1941; Doane Harrison completed the edit in time for release in September. Like Midnight, it collected a sheaf of favorable notices. It was described as a first-rate soap opera that would please “the washboard weepers,” yet the movie never becomes maudlin. It was also called a touching romantic melodrama with mass appeal.21
Wilder had become increasingly disgruntled about Leisen’s meddling with the screenplays he and Brackett had written for him. He began to consider more seriously than ever the possibility of directing his own screenplays, to keep directors like Leisen from interfering with the scripts he wrote. But before he could pursue this ambition, he had to fulfill one more commitment. Independent producer Samuel Goldwyn had asked Brackett and Wilder to script a film for a major Hollywood director, Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday). The resulting film would be Ball of Fire, a daffy screwball romp along the lines of Midnight.
Collaborating with Howard Hawks:
Ball of Fire (1941)
Goldwyn was renowned for assembling top-notch collaborators to work on his productions. In addition to Hawks, Ball of Fire boasted the services of the distinguished cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) and the ace editor Daniel Mandell (Wuthering Heights). Mandell would subsequently edit no fewer than six of Wilder’s own films. The stars of Ball of Fire, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would likewise both appear in Wilder movies. There was no doubt that Brackett and Wilder were in good company on this picture.
Wilder dug out of his trunk an unused fourteen-page scenario titled “From A to Z,” which he had composed in his threadbare days in Berlin. He handed it to Thomas Monroe, a junior writer at Paramount, for a quick polish. In a story conference with Goldwyn and Hawks, he summarized the plot for them: Bertram Potts, a professor of linguistics, is coauthoring an encyclopedia with seven other scholars. He recruits sassy nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea to aid him in writing the entry on slang after hearing her warble “Drum Boogie” at the club. The song is filled with picturesque slang phrases like “The hepcat’s a killer diller.” Wilder, we recall, was a jazz enthusiast from his youth in Vienna. Hence he loved having Sugarpuss O’Shea belt out the jazzy “Drum Boogie” as the lead singer for Gene Krupa and his band, who would appear in the picture. Sugarpuss invades the fuddy-duddy professors’ mausoleum for a few days to help Bertram with his research on slang. Hawks liked the scenario very much. He commented at the story conference, “It’s just Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”: the brassy showgirl is Snow White, and the eccentric professors are the seven dwarfs. Hawks concluded that Wilder brightened and said, “We’ll have it for you in a few weeks.”22
Production began on August 6, 1941, with a forty-eight-day shooting schedule. Wilder obtained permission to be on the set during filming to observe the top director at work. Hawks did not mind Wilder’s presence on the set “as a fly on the wall.”23 When Wilder had observed Lubitsch at work, he had not been thinking of moving up to directing. Now he spent more time on the soundstage. “I wan
ted to see a picture from beginning to end, before I started directing myself,” he said. One of the things that Wilder admired in Hawks, according to Andrew Sarris, was that he “never betrayed the script for the sake of a personal flourish of visual virtuosity.”24 Wilder noted that, like Lubitsch, Hawks avoided a display of fancy visual style for its own sake; his objective was to tell the story as efficiently as possible.
Hawks had developed the custom of changing any dialogue in the screenplay that no longer fit the flow of the shooting as it had been progressing. “I was not really improvising,” he emphasized; “I was simply modifying the dialogue to better fit the action of the scene.” Since Wilder was usually on the set during shooting, Hawks would sometimes have a give-and-take session with him on the soundstage, along with the actors, just before the cameras rolled, to revise passages of dialogue.25
The picture was released on December 2, 1941, just days before the outbreak of World War II, and it was a huge success. The critics lauded the hilariously mismatched couple—the bashful academic and the snazzy nightclub siren—who provided the makings of a madcap screwball comedy. Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy writes that Ball of Fire remains utterly charming for the brash cleverness of the dialogue, the heartwarming geniality of the professors, and the expert comic playing of Cooper and Stanwyck.26
But Wilder was still smarting from his unpleasant experiences with Mitchell Leisen, particularly on Hold Back the Dawn. When Wilder decided to establish himself as a writer-director, he implicitly asserted that a filmmaker should be in control of his projects from the script stage onward. “I got very incensed with directors, good directors, but people who did not have the proper respect for the script. I was just very incensed,” Wilder remembered. “You know, once you finished the script, they grab it and rewrite it. If they’re behind schedule, they tear out eight pages, and they’re on schedule again. It made me so furious, I decided to go on and become a director.”27
Wilder always considered himself a writer first and foremost, even after he started directing. There were two screenwriters who had made the transition to directing shortly before Wilder made his bid in 1941 to do the same: Preston Sturges and John Huston. Sturges (The Miracle of Morgan Creek), a contemporary of Wilder’s at Paramount, recalled that it was not uncommon for a platoon of screenwriters to work on the same script. “Writers worked in teams, like piano movers,” he recalled.28
Wilder persuaded the studio to give him a shot at directing. According to Wilder, Paramount figured he would do something artsy-smartsy: “What? Crazy Wilder? We’re going to give him one picture; he’s going to fall on his face. Then he’s going to come back and be a writer again,” having gotten it out of his system.29 The front office was expecting him to reach back to his Berlin days and do a warmed-over version of a film he had written then, such as Menschen am Sonntag. He had other plans. “I set out to make a commercial picture I wouldn’t be ashamed of, so my first picture as a director would not be my last.”30
One thing that was in the budding director’s favor was his versatility. His Hollywood scripts had ranged from musicals like Music in the Air to comedies like Ninotchka and melodramas like Hold Back the Dawn. “I can’t understand how anybody can always work in the same genre,” Wilder said. “I get bored and jump around to make different types of films.” In fact, writes John Russell Taylor, Wilder “stands as one of the most famous and successful of a whole group of émigrés who from the start could and did turn their hands to almost anything” with equal success.31 The first picture Wilder was slated to direct was The Major and the Minor. If the people in the front office thought he would fall on his face, they were in for a surprise.
3
New Directions
The Major and the Minor and Five Graves to Cairo
The American moviegoing public has the mind of a twelve-year-old. They must have life as it isn’t.
—Ernst Lubitsch
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, and a bastard.
—Billy Wilder
In the fall of 1941, Joseph Sistrom, a junior executive at Paramount, volunteered to search through the stockpile of unproduced scenarios in the story department’s files to find a property that Wilder could dust off and spruce up for filming. He unearthed a reader’s report on a Broadway play, Connie Goes Home by Edward Childs Carpenter, adapted from a Saturday Evening Post short story by Fannie Kilbourne, published in 1921 and titled “Sunny Goes Home.” The reader’s memo was unfavorable, pointing out that the action of the stage play goes steadily downhill and that the play closed after a mere twenty performances. The reader accordingly recommended that Paramount not acquire the play for filming.
Still, Sistrom thought the scenario was promising, and Wilder agreed that the plot had comic possibilities that had not been exploited in the original short story or the stage play. The tale concerns a young woman who fails to establish a career in New York and decides to return to her home in Iowa. Short of funds, she has to disguise herself as a child to buy a half-fare ticket. A man her own age becomes interested in her during the train trip, but he, of course, fears that he will be robbing the cradle if he gets involved with her.
In December 1941, Paramount purchased the screen rights to both the short story and the stage play. In the years ahead, Wilder would become known for his ability to revamp old narrative formulas for the screen. The two sources of The Major and the Minor are but the first of many forgotten stories that Wilder revitalized for film.
The Major and the Minor (1942)
Arthur Hornblow Jr., who had produced two popular films from Brackett-Wilder screenplays, Midnight and Hold Back the Dawn, agreed to act as producer on Wilder’s maiden voyage as a director. By mid-January 1942, Brackett and Wilder had nearly completed the first draft of the screenplay, now titled The Major and the Minor. But the plot, which had seemed innocuous enough in outline, now made some of the Paramount executives doubt its acceptability to the industry censor, Joseph Ignatius Breen.
The heroine is called Susan Applegate in the screenplay; in the course of her train journey back to Iowa, she masquerades as twelve-year-old “Sue-Sue.” She is befriended en route by Major Philip Kirby. When he becomes subconsciously attracted to Sue-Sue, the script seems to be dallying with pedophilia. The studio was aware that, only a few years earlier, film critic–novelist Graham Greene had suggested that John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie (1937), which featured child star Shirley Temple, flirted with pedophilia. Though Twentieth Century–Fox had won its libel suit against Greene, Paramount wanted to avoid a similar scandal erupting over The Major and the Minor.
The “safety curtain” that the story and dialogue of The Major and the Minor provided was that the audience is aware that Susan Applegate is a grown woman pretending to be a child. This takes the edge off the shocking implications that the film might otherwise have. Wilder defended the script of The Major and the Minor to Breen, explaining that Philip takes a fatherly stance toward Sue-Sue and is not conscious that he may be physically attracted to her. Consequently, Wilder contended, Philip is convinced that he merely finds Sue-Sue a charming little girl, as when he jokingly observes, “It’s not often that a boy my age gets a smile from someone whizzing by in a kiddy car.” When she finally reveals herself to him as a grown woman at film’s end, Philip is so delighted that he fails to realize that his affection for Sue-Sue may not have been as paternal as he assumed. “The major is sexually aroused by her; he couldn’t help himself,” Wilder explained. “We had here the first American movie about pedophilia,” featuring a pre-Lolita pseudonymphet. “I worried that the audience would be shocked by the story, but it seems that they were not.”1 It may have been clear to the cognoscenti who were on the right wavelength that Philip was attracted to a supposedly underage girl, but most moviegoers apparently did not pick up on the fact that this picture was about “a man who gets a hard-on every time he looks at this woman he thinks is a twelve-year-old.”2
Wilder retained in h
is Hollywood screenplays the wry, brittle humor he had perfected as a scriptwriter in Berlin. Indeed, it was the Wilder wit that prompted Leslie Halliwell to deem him “Hollywood’s most mischievous immigrant.” Another film historian, who found Wilder’s sardonic humor less to his taste, described his wit as “curdled Lubitsch.”3
A salient example of Wilder’s mordant humor occurs early in the screenplay of The Major and the Minor, which contains a smattering of piquant sexual references. Albert Osborne, a lecherous middle-aged businessman, attempts to seduce Susan Applegate, who has come to his apartment to give him a scalp massage. Osborne leers at Susan, who has just come in out of the rain, and says suggestively, “Why don’t you slip out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?” This line of dialogue is usually attributed to humorist Robert Benchley, who played Osborne. But Benchley did not ad-lib the line; Charles Brackett overheard comedian Charlie Butterworth make this sally of wit at a Manhattan cocktail party.4
When it came to casting, Wilder hoped to get thirty-one-year-old Ginger Rogers to play Susan. Rogers had won an Academy Award for Kitty Foyle (1940), in which she played a working girl whose infant dies, and the actress was a big box office draw at the time. It so happened that Wilder and Rogers shared an agent, Leland Hayward. Of course, Hayward cottoned to the notion of two of his clients working together, and he encouraged Rogers to take the part of Susan in The Major and the Minor. Wilder, who never missed a chance to spice up an anecdote, commented that Rogers agreed to do the film “in the middle of a screw” since Rogers and Hayward were lovers.5
When Rogers was asked why she was willing to play a woman who pretends to be a child, she replied that she had played a youngster in pigtails in a flashback of Kitty Foyle that portrays the heroine’s early life. Furthermore, Brackett and Wilder had written “one hell of a part” for her.6 Rogers, in the course of the film, played not only twelve-year-old Sue-Sue but also Susan Applegate as a mature woman, as well as Susan’s mother, Mrs. Applegate, whom Susan impersonates late in the movie. (Mrs. Applegate also appears in the film, played by Lela Rogers, Ginger’s own mother.)
Some Like It Wilder Page 5