Some Like It Wilder
Page 33
Admittedly, Jerry temporarily forgets himself when he seriously considers Osgood’s proposal of marriage, Wilder explained. “But even when he forgot himself,” he was not consciously toying with the notion of engaging in a homosexual relationship. “It was just the idea of being engaged to a millionaire that was very appealing,” because Osgood offers him “security.” “But when the crunch finally comes, Jerry cannot go through with the marriage.”76 In harmony with the usual theme of Wilder’s films, Jerry will do almost anything for money; he draws the line when it involves marrying another male.
Some Like It Hot was a sensation at the box office as well as a critical triumph. It remains one of the Wilder films that moviegoers recall most fondly. To Barry Norman, Monroe gave “a performance of melting charm” that, in the end, made her tiresome and troublesome behavior during production seem “worth it.”77 Wilder agreed: “Many actresses were more reliable, but no one was as convincing or had better technique.”78 In fact, Monroe won a Golden Globe award from the Foreign Press Association for Some Like It Hot. Monroe was generally thought to have given her two best performances in her two Wilder films, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot.
At the time of its release, the very popularity of Some Like It Hot was reason enough for some critics to write it off as a mere crowd pleaser. But over the years the movie has gained stature, and it is now considered one of Wilder’s major achievements. The AFI presented a special on CBS-TV on June 13, 2000, honoring the top one hundred comedies of the first century of American cinema, as selected by fifteen hundred film professionals and critics. Heading the list was Some Like It Hot. Tomlinson said at the time that “Some Like It Hot combines the slapstick . . . and wit of screwball comedy, to make the funniest American film of the 1950s and one of the greatest of the genre.”79
The recognition accorded the film has continued. In 2005 the editors of Time magazine selected the all-time top one hundred movies and included Some Like It Hot in the roster.80 Premiere magazine conducted a nationwide poll in 2006 to determine the twenty-five greatest screenplays of all time; Some Like It Hot was highlighted on the list. Also in 2006, Premiere’s readership chose the fifty greatest comedies of all time. The citation for this movie read, “Billy Wilder turned the gangster film on its ear and made a timeless comic gender-bender.”81 It seems that 2006 was a banner year for this film; when Premiere in yet another poll selected the one hundred greatest performances of all time, Jack Lemmon was chosen for Some Like It Hot. Also in 2006, in a Skye Movies poll of the British Parliament, the 175 members voting picked Some Like It Hot as one of the top ten movies of all time.82
The film is also significant because it was the first of seven Wilder films in which Jack Lemmon starred; the Wilder-Lemmon collaboration would become one of the most enduring director-actor teams in the history of cinema. In addition, this film solidified the writing partnership of Wilder and Diamond. Their fruitful collaboration lasted for the balance of Wilder’s career. What is more, they became one of Hollywood’s most renowned writing teams, just as Wilder and Brackett had been.
13
Love on the Dole
The Apartment
Chivalry is not only dead, it is decomposed.
—Preston Sturges
“After I had finished Some Like It Hot, I wanted to make another picture with Jack Lemmon,” Wilder said.1 In considering Lemmon for his next project, Wilder began to think of him as his Everyman, says Drew Casper in the documentary Inside “The Apartment.” In the film Lemmon would represent the Average Man, a flawed hero desperately endeavoring to get ahead.2
Wilder still kept a black notebook, which was locked away in a desk drawer, in which he jotted down ideas for film scenarios. He had begun this practice in earnest while he was working for Lubitsch. When he consulted the notebook this time around, he found a reference to David Lean’s 1945 movie Brief Encounter; he remembered the picture vividly. In it Alec, a married man, is having an affair with Laura, a married woman. Alec tells Laura that he has borrowed his friend Stephen’s apartment for a rendezvous, and Laura arranges to join him there. Stephen returns unexpectedly and immediately infers what is going on. He pointedly requests that Alec return his latchkey and not use it again.
What Wilder had scribbled in his trusty notebook was, “What about the friend who owned the flat” where the lovers meet?3 Wilder saw this fellow in his proposed scenario as someone who allows other men to utilize his apartment as a place of assignation with their mistresses. As Wilder put it, “Here is a lonely bachelor who comes home to his apartment and crawls into a bed that is still warm from the lovers who had been there earlier,” while he himself has no lover.4 Wilder got together with I. A. L. Diamond to whip up a detailed proposal that he would present to the Mirisch Company and to UA. For starters, the pair decided to set the story during the Christmas holidays to provide a jarring counterpoint to the decadent atmosphere of the tale.
“We had the character and the situation,” Diamond recalled, “but we didn’t have a plot until we remembered a local scandal here.” In 1952 an agent, Jennings Lang, was having a clandestine affair with one of his clients, actress Joan Bennett, who then was married to Walter Wanger, an independent producer. Wanger finally caught them together; in a jealous rage, he “shot Lang in the balls,” though the wound was not fatal. The element of the sordid scandal that caught the writing team’s attention was that Lang was using the apartment of one of his subordinates at the agency as a love nest. That, concluded Diamond, “gave us our plot.”5
Wilder took a précis of the scenario to the studio and threw a fast pitch to Walter Mirisch and the UA front office. The proposal read in part, “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.” He further described the movie as portraying “infidelity as a way of life” and “the misuse of the American Dream.”6 Mirisch agreed to serve as executive producer on the picture, and UA agreed to distribute it. The production was assigned a budget of $2,825,965. The next item on the agenda was to get Lemmon to commit to the project. After hearing Wilder’s brief sketch of the plot, Lemmon enthusiastically accepted the male lead.
“When I write a screenplay, I have a particular actor in mind for the lead most of the time. Then my cowriter and I create the character with that actor in mind,” Wilder said. “So when we prepared the script for The Apartment, we had to know that the loveable, attractive schlemiel was to be played by Jack Lemmon, who was perfect casting for the part.”7
Wilder and Diamond began working on the screenplay, elaborating Wilder’s original concept into a detailed script. It was Diamond’s idea to depict the suicide attempt by the heroine, Fran Kubelik, whom the hero, Bud Baxter, is smitten with. Paul Diamond explained that another writer had told his father many years earlier about how he had broken up with his girlfriend and then come home soon after to find her lying in his bathtub, dead.8 In the parallel scene in The Apartment, Bud returns to his apartment to find that Fran has attempted suicide there. The development of the scene highlights Wilder’s distinctive care for narrative structure. He explained that he had to invent a physician who lives next door, Dr. Dreyfuss, who can be on hand to save Fran. “No one in the history of the movies,” Neil Sinyard writes, “orchestrated the possibilities of plotting better than Wilder.”9
Asked if it was appropriate to feature a suicide attempt in a comedy like The Apartment, Wilder answered, “I don’t regard The Apartment as a comedy. It’s a slice of life that seems very naturalistic.”10 Wilder had opted to make The Apartment a category-breaking blend of comedy, romance, and drama. As Diamond explained, they wanted to create “a delicate balance between drama and comedy in the picture; and we were afraid if we got a laugh in the wrong place, the whole picture would go out the window.”11 Drew Casper declared that Diamond was a gentle man who brought warmth to Wilder’s “cold, brittle social satire.” He made Wilder “less sour.”12
Although Wilder was adept at writing dialogue, he also had a way of telegraphing a great deal to the audience with little or no dialogue. When Bud asks Fran how many love affairs she has had, she confesses to three but inadvertently raises four fingers. This is an adroit manner in which to suggest that Fran would like to minimize her past indiscretions but admits the truth in spite of herself. Both Bud and Fran are fundamentally decent types, writes Bernard Dick: “babes in the dirty woods of big business.”13
Wilder and Diamond completed the first draft of the screenplay just four days before shooting began. They would continue to revise the script during filming, but these revisions amounted only to fine-tuning, since the first draft was in very good shape. Still, the writing partners did not finish revising the script until late in the shoot. Sometimes they would run into a scene where a passage of dialogue was unclear, Wilder explained, “or we needed an additional line to get someone out of the room.”14
The casting process had continued while Wilder and Diamond labored on the first draft of the script. Wilder had his eye on Shirley MacLaine for the part of Fran and sent her part of the screenplay. MacLaine wanted to work with Wilder and accepted the role. She later said, “There were only thirty pages of script—that’s all we had when we started.”15 MacLaine wrongly assumed that the thirty pages she received were all that Wilder and Diamond had written. As a matter of fact, they had finished most of the screenplay by then. Wilder sent her only the early pages of the script on principal; he did not want a fairly complete copy of the screenplay floating around the studio, particularly when it dealt with the daring subject of adultery in the workplace.
Paul Douglas (Executive Suite) had signed for the role of Sheldrake, but two weeks before shooting started, he succumbed to a heart attack. He was fifty-two. Wilder reasoned that, since Fred MacMurray had been so convincing as a heel in Double Indemnity, he would be pitch-perfect as the heel in The Apartment.
MacMurray’s immediate response was to turn down the part. “At the time, I had a contract with Disney to make family fare like The Shaggy Dog [1959]. Hence, I felt that I could not jeopardize my wholesome screen image by playing a businessman who is having an extramarital affair, in a movie that takes place during the Christmas holidays no less!” But Wilder managed to coax him into taking the role. MacMurray remembered that one of his fans later expressed her dismay that he had appeared in such a “sordid” picture. “This lady accosted me on the street and underlined her anger at me by hitting me with her purse!” When he phoned Wilder about the incident, Wilder told him to console himself with the $175,000 salary he got for the movie.16 By the way, MacMurray’s two costars also received the same fee for the movie. Wilder himself was allotted $200,000 for cowriting and directing the movie, as well as 17 percent of the gross.
Wilder selected Daniel Mandell, who had edited Witness for the Prosecution, as the film editor on The Apartment. Adolph Deutsch, who composed the background music for Some Like It Hot, was also back again, to score The Apartment. Alexander Trauner, the production designer, was working on his third Wilder picture. “Whether he was exploiting the natural locations in New York City” or designing the office interiors for the insurance company in The Apartment, writes Andre Pozner, “Trauner excelled in creating the necessary framework for the director’s narrative to unfold.”17
In a scene near the beginning of the picture, Wilder sought to create accurately the bleak, antiseptic look of the huge office complex in which Bud labors as a member of the accounting department at Consolidated Life. The cavernous office is totally impersonal. Wilder’s inspiration for the vast office set in The Apartment was a similar scene in King Vidor’s silent film The Crowd (1928), about another wage slave swallowed up by a giant organization. Kevin Brownlow spoke with Vidor about Wilder’s copying his scene. Vidor said he used an overhead shot to show the maze of desks and then let the camera come down and focus on “one man, one desk.” Wilder has his camera facing the endless rows of desks at eye level, with Bud at his desk in the foreground. Vidor said that Wilder phoned him and inquired how many desks he had utilized in his scene.18
Wilder recalled, “I wanted a big room full of desks, like the set Vidor had for his picture when filming it at Metro.” But that was a tall order for the Goldwyn Studios, which did not have a single soundstage the size of the one Vidor used at MGM. “So Trauner had to create the illusion of great depth by means of forced perspective.”19 According to Wilder, “We had tall extras seated behind normal desks; then shorter extras behind smaller desks; some dwarfs at miniature desks; and finally some cut-outs at toy desks.”20 Diamond testified that there were children dressed as grownups—not midgets—seated at the desks in the rear of the set.21
Bud spends a good deal of his time at his desk, hunched over his adding machine; as the screenplay notes, Bud’s desk is just one among “several rows of steel-grey desks, steel-grey filing cabinets, and steel-grey faces under indirect lights. It is all very neat, antiseptic, impersonal.”22 Wilder lauded Trauner for his use of forced perspective, lining up the desks in parallel rows, almost to the vanishing point. “Trauner is a magician,” Wilder declared; “he pulls rabbits out of hats.”23 Gerald Mast in turn praises Wilder’s skilled use of the wide screen in this scene: “The geometric rows of desks, the regularity of the ceiling’s fluorescent lighting, the clicking sound of business machines, the visual patterns that reduce people to mechanisms—has become a classic example of compositions for the wide screen.”24
In The Apartment Wilder satirizes the regimented existence of office workers in the course of this same scene: at five o’clock sharp, three hundred clerks rise in unison from their desks and head for the nearest exit. This image is another quote from The Crowd.
Throughout the production period, Wilder went to great pains to give the film a realistic atmosphere. Bud lives in a walk-up apartment in a brownstone off Central Park West; his rooms look seedy and sloppy. Wilder and Trauner looked at various apartments near Central Park to get a fix on what a typical bachelor flat would look like. While dressing the apartment set, Wilder and Trauner went to resale shops in the neighborhood and selected the kinds of books and other articles that bachelors like Bud tend to collect to make their apartments—and their lives—seem less empty. And Wilder loaned the double bed from his own home to the set. It was sturdy, big bed, the kind that Wilder said he would have if he lived in a bachelor apartment. Bud’s bachelor flat, like Phyllis’s seedy house in Double Indemnity, looks lived in, not merely like a studio set that was erected immediately before the cameras turned. “We have a prefabricated loneliness in America,” Wilder reflected. “With this loneliness goes the urge to better oneself and rise from the masses,” which is precisely what Bud longs to do.25
During preproduction Wilder also conferred with the wardrobe department. He said that he did not want MacLaine outfitted in elegant costumes suitable for a movie star. Rather, she was to wear the inexpensive attire that her role as a working girl called for, just as Dietrich wore relatively simple clothes in Witness for the Prosecution, as befitting her character as a war refugee. “Fluffy comedies about New York working girls who earn sixty dollars a week and wear designer clothes will always be popular; but not with me,” Wilder explained. “I want to go beyond the powder puff school, in favor of the starkest realism.”26 Wilder did, however, allow his wife Audrey to lend MacLaine her handsome shaggy coat, which betokened the kind of lifestyle to which Fran Kubelik aspired.
Sometimes Wilder’s pursuit of realism precipitated problems with the studio’s production departments. When
the property department wanted to use “Lucky Chesters” or “Camel Strikes” in a scene, Wilder demanded that they supply a real pack of cigarettes, even if it meant obtaining permission from the tobacco company to use the brand in the movie.27 Wilder also abhorred employing “stage money,” instead of real legal tender, in a scene. When filming the scene in which Sheldrake offers Fran a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, Wilder tossed the phony century note MacMurray was to use into the wastebasket. He then peeled an authentic bill from his own bankroll for use in the scene. Moreover, to impress on MacMurray that Sheldrake was a big wheel in the insurance company, Wilder had office stationery and memo pads with “J. D. Sheldrake” printed on them, even though no one but MacMurray would see them on Sheldrake’s desk.
Similarly, in the scene in which Bud invites Fran to see a Broadway show, Wilder insisted that the title of the show be specified—even though the script merely states that Bud “is standing on the sidewalk outside the theater,” waiting for Fran.28 Wilder chose The Music Man, which was running on Broadway at the time, because the main character was a con man. After all, in The Apartment, it seems at times as if everyone is conning everybody else. Wilder accordingly shot a scene outside the Majestic Theatre, where The Music Man was playing, with Bud waiting in vain for Fran.