Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Diamond contended that Kiss Me, Stupid was as moral as a preacher’s Sunday sermon: “It is a cautionary tale—a jealous husband goes to such extremes to protect his wife’s virtue that she winds up losing it.” Diamond remembered that he and Wilder were consoled “by the great reviews the movie got in London and Paris.” The British and French reviewers saw the picture as a stinging social satire. As the tale of a city slicker outwitted by a country bumpkin, it was Tom Jones in modern dress. “They understood what we were aiming at,” said Diamond.39

  Since the movie was blasted by American critics and ignored by American audiences, it was released only a short while in the United States and was seldom revived. Not surprisingly, Kiss Me, Stupid failed to recoup its $2 million production cost. “Okay, I made a bad picture,” Wilder conceded; “but why the indignation, why the charges that I had undermined the nation’s morals?” He added, “They were going to tear up my citizenship papers!”40

  Over the years, Wilder did defend himself for making Kiss Me, Stupid whenever it was dismissed as a vulgar film. “This question of bad taste has followed me for years,” he told me. He continued,

  When I made Kiss Me, Stupid the film was severely criticized. Yet I always thought that it had some tenderness in its treatment, at least in the scenes between the café girl and the husband who asks her to masquerade as his wife for an evening. This is the only taste of domesticity that she has ever experienced in her whole life and she is very touched by it. But no one seemed to see this aspect of the story.

  In any event the film caused a big scandal. Today Kiss Me, Stupid would seem like Disney fare, and I wonder what all the screaming was about.

  Wilder was devastated by the hostile reception of his movie in 1964. Fair-weather friends in the film colony avoided him. “When I was lying in the gutter,” he recalled bitterly, “a number of people came along and administered a kick in the groin.”41 In this period of depression and self-doubt, Wilder fled with his wife Audrey to a spa in Badgastein, Austria. This time he stayed several months, taking stock of his career; he subsequently referred to this period as his “year of hibernation.” He had retired to the resort, he confessed later, to lick his wounds and to put thoughts of suicide out of his mind. “I thought of killing myself because I thought I would never make another movie.”42

  There was a beautiful waterfall at Badgastein, which prompted him to recall the Berlin apartment he had lived in when he was trying to break into the movie business in the 1920s. He could hear the water running in the leaky toilet in the restroom next to his tawdry room all night. “I’d imagine it was a beautiful waterfall, just to get my mind off the monotony of it.” When he was taking the cure at Badgastein, “There I was in bed at night, listening to the waterfall; and all I could think of was that goddamned toilet! And that, like the man says, is the story of my life.”43

  At all events, Wilder’s fears that he would never make another picture for the Mirisch Company or anyone else proved groundless. Five months after the disastrous opening of Kiss Me, Stupid, Harold Mirisch renewed Wilder’s contract.

  After all, Kiss Me, Stupid was viewed in Europe not as a prurient movie but as a film aimed at thoughtful adults. When one sees Kiss Me, Stupid today, now that the controversy has died down, one can see that it is a knockabout farce; that is all that it ever was. Wilder’s films in the early 1960s, taken together, were landmark movies that set a trend toward more adult subject matter on the screen.

  When Wilder returned from his extended stay at Badgastein, he began meeting daily with Iz Diamond in their cluttered office on the Goldwyn lot. But their discussions did not yield any viable ideas for a screenplay. Sometimes they would just sit in sullen silence for long periods of time; the phone did not even ring. But Wilder’s sense of humor gradually returned. He joked that, for the first time in living memory, he received no phone calls requesting him to be a pallbearer. “In Hollywood you only want people with hit pictures to haul your coffin,” he explained with mock solemnity.44

  One afternoon Ernest Lehman, with whom Wilder had cowritten Sabrina, wandered into the office. He observed that Wilder was losing weight and smoking too much. He inquired how Wilder and Diamond were getting on with a new project. Wilder replied that they felt like parents who had produced a defective child. “Now we keep asking ourselves, ‘Do we dare screw again?’ ”45

  After three months of spinning his wheels, the ideas started flowing again. Wilder told a journalist that he realized that he had spent too much time analyzing and rethinking his failure. “All that self-torture is a waste of time; I’m already preparing another failure!”46 He got the inspiration for a new movie while watching a football game on TV. When a husky fullback ran out of bounds with the ball, he wound up falling on a spectator on the sidelines. “That’s a movie,” Wilder muttered to himself, “and the guy underneath is Lemmon.”47 From this incident he and Diamond developed a scenario called The Fortune Cookie, about Harry Hinkle, a TV cameraman accidentally knocked cold by a football player, Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson, during a game. Harry allows his brother-in-law, “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, a crooked lawyer, to lure him into filing a fraudulent insurance claim to acquire the fortune he needs to win back his greedy ex-wife. Walter Mirisch had faith in Wilder and green-lighted the new project with a budget of $3.7 million.

  The Fortune Cookie (1966)

  The Fortune Cookie is the first of three Wilder films that are linked by an exploration of male friendship. The other two are The Front Page and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. In the first of the three films, Wilder applied a tongue-in-cheek approach to a subject that he had already examined with deadly seriousness in Double Indemnity: the gentle art of cheating an insurance company. The Apartment also involves an insurance company. In fact, the company that employs Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) in The Apartment is the very same insurance company that Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon again) hopes to swindle in The Fortune Cookie.

  The crucial piece of casting for the present film was the role of Willie Gingrich, the shyster lawyer. Walter Matthau immediately came to Wilder’s mind. While Wilder was preparing The Fortune Cookie, Matthau scored a major stage triumph as a sloppy, dyspeptic individual sharing a bachelor flat with another man in The Odd Couple, which made him a Broadway star and got him national press attention. Like James Cagney, Matthau was a product of New York’s Lower East Side and could play a tough customer with a gruff voice like Willie Gingrich convincingly. Wilder saw Matthau as an up-and-comer and thought the part of Willie would jump-start his movie career. In fact, Wilder would write the part with Matthau in mind, just as he had written the role of Sir Wilfrid in Witness for the Prosecution specifically for Charles Laughton.

  “Before we put a word on paper,” Diamond remembered, “we went to New York to see Mr. Matthau.”48 After Wilder recounted the plot of The Fortune Cookie for Matthau, the actor said he would like to see the script. Wilder answered that there was no script as yet. Matthau, who wanted very much to work with Wilder, responded, “Okay, who needs a script? I’ll do it!”49

  Matthau was sometimes asked whether he modeled his portrayal of Willie Gingrich, a glib, cynical type, on Wilder. His reply: “I always play Wilder in a Wilder picture; Wilder sees me as Wilder! That is, Billy sees me as a loveable rogue, a scalawag like himself.”50 Indeed, Willie is described in the screenplay as having “a brain full of razor blades,” a phrase coined by William Holden about Wilder.51

  In The Fortune Cookie, Wilder paired Matthau with Lemmon for the first time. The comic duo would appear in two more Wilder pictures and in films made by other directors as well, such as the screen version of The Odd Couple (1968). Jack Lemmon’s son Chris writes that “Pop and Walter developed an immediate friendship on The Fortune Cookie.”52

  After Matthau and Lemmon were cast, Wilder and Diamond set to work on the script. The Fortune Cookie is their most structured screenplay. It is divided into sixteen segments, each introduced on screen with a catchy title: “The Caper,”
“The Taste of Money,” and so on. The titles are reminiscent of a TV miniseries in which the plot unfolds in individual episodes, each with a clever title.

  The script’s first episode is titled “The Accident.” When grid star Boom Boom Jackson runs out of bounds with the football, he accidentally flattens TV cameraman Harry Hinkle, who is standing on the sidelines. Wilder, we know, was a stickler for authenticity in his films. With his customary thirst for realism, he staged the accident during a real professional football game between the Cleveland Browns, Boom Boom’s team, and the Minnesota Vikings. Harry is employed by CBS-TV, and the game is played at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. No fictitious names for Wilder.

  The screenplay displays flashes of the sharp wit that indicated that Wilder and Diamond were back on track. In the episode titled “The Brother-in-Law,” for example, Willie shows up at St. Mark’s Hospital looking very much like a shady grifter in his seedy tweed coat and battered fedora. Willie donates a dime to the collection box for unmarried mothers, a charitable cause of the nuns who operate the hospital. “Unwed mothers? I’m for that!” he says with a leer. Shortly after, Willie needs a dime to phone the Cleveland Plain Dealer with his hot tip that he is suing CBS-TV, the Browns, and the stadium for $1 million. An inveterate chiseler, Willie sneaks back to the collection box and retrieves the dime to make the phone call. Morris sees this irreverent gag as one example of how Wilder’s wit in The Fortune Cookie at times seems as corrosive as that in Ace in the Hole. Morris writes that throughout the movie Wilder goes for the jugular as he launches “an unrelieved attack on human rapacity and corruption, as epitomized in Willie Gingrich.”53 Kevin Lally takes Willie less seriously; he sees him as “an engaging scoundrel, . . . always on the lookout for a crooked new angle.”54

  In filling out the supporting cast of the movie during preproduction, Wilder demonstrated once more his sharp eye for good character actors. He picked Ned Glass (the storekeeper in West Side Story) to play Doc Schindler, a veterinarian on parole for doping a racehorse. Willie instructs the doc to inject Harry with a shot of Novocain so that he will be numb when he is examined by the team of physicians representing Consolidated Life. One of the insurance company’s consultants, Professor Winterhalter, is played by none other than Sig Ruman. Winterhalter from Vienna is another of Wilder’s pixilated Freudian psychiatrists. He recalls that, “in the old days, when a man claimed paralysis, we threw him in the snake pit; if he climbed out, we knew he was lying.” When one of the doctors asks Winterhalter for his learned opinion about Harry’s claims, he replies succinctly, “Fake!” But he is outnumbered by the physicians who have been taken in by Harry’s phony injuries.

  A number of artists behind the camera had, like Sig Ruman, been associated with other Wilder pictures: supervising editor Doane Harrison, film editor Daniel Mandell, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, and composer André Previn. As things turned out, all of them were collaborating with Wilder for the last time.

  The Fortune Cookie was LaShelle’s fourth film for Wilder; three of them, The Apartment, Kiss Me, Stupid, and the present film, were photographed in black and white. In each of these pictures, LaShelle masterfully filmed the drab living quarters of the hero in unsparing detail. Wilder admired LaShelle as an experienced cameraman, “but he was on the verge of retirement” and did in fact retire two years later.55 By coincidence, LaShelle left Wilder’s production team after shooting Wilder’s last black-and-white film. In the age of color television, a feature film had to be made in color to be broadcast in prime time. So not even Wilder could hold out any longer.

  Principal photography for The Fortune Cookie commenced on October 31, 1965, with location filming in Cleveland. For the opening sequence, shot during the Browns-Vikings game, the script called for “a gloomy, bonechilling day.”56 The weather during the game was made to order; it was a cold, gray Sunday. Wilder had three cameras strategically stationed around the stadium to cover the action on the field. In the course of the game, a Browns halfback executed a spectacular run down the field. Wilder arranged with the Browns’ owner, Art Modell, to have halfback Ernie Green repeat the run the following day so that he could film the sequence in which Boom Boom is knocked out of bounds and plows into Harry.

  Accordingly, on Monday, some of the Browns—some wearing their own uniforms, others dressed as Vikings—took to the field, where Green made a mad dash with the ball. Wilder hollered “Cut!” and substituted one stunt man for Green and another for Jack Lemmon at the point where Boom Boom was to crash into Harry. Lemmon’s stunt man reeled backward and landed on his back on a pile of mattresses covered with fake grass. While the scene was being filmed, Wilder stood next to the camera, puffing on a cigarette and barking commands like a top sergeant at the players and the camera crew.

  Finally, on Tuesday, ten thousand extras showed up to fill the stands, lured by the raffling off of a sports car and a trip to Hollywood. Wilder needed them to stand up and cheer wildly for Boom Boom as he ran down the field. A press conference was held at which a studio press agent announced that the call for extras was the largest in Hollywood history. Wilder told the reporters present, “After my last picture I know how Modell feels” about the Browns’ losing Sunday’s game. “But he shouldn’t worry. There’ll be further disasters.”57

  After finishing location work in Cleveland, the film unit returned to Hollywood to shoot interiors at the Goldwyn Studios. Matthau developed a good working relationship with Wilder from the outset. On Matthau’s first day on the set, Wilder gave Matthau, in his heavy German accent, a complicated set of directions for playing a scene. Matthau respectfully listened in silence and then inquired, “You speak kind of funny; you from out of town?” Matthau asked Lemmon, “Why are you doing this film? I have the best part.” Lemmon replied, “Don’t you think it’s about time?”58 Lemmon’s point was that he was already a movie star by the time he made The Fortune Cookie, whereas Matthau was only now getting a role in pictures that would afford him his big break.

  Matthau obviously had the stronger role; it was difficult for Lemmon to be funny when he spent the majority of the movie in a wheelchair. Nevertheless, Lemmon took center stage whenever the script offered him the opportunity. When Harry eagerly anticipates the return of his estranged wife, Sandi, he puts on a phonograph record of Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” and spins around the room in a kind of wheelchair ballet. Wilder utilized the wide-screen format skillfully by holding the camera stationary and allowing Lemmon to careen around the room. Lemmon roamed from one side of the screen to the other, sometimes even disappearing momentarily from the frame. This lack of perfect pictorial composition made the scene more dynamic and spontaneous. Surprisingly, Lemmon’s virtuoso ballet was accomplished in a single take.

  Still, Wilder was concerned that Lemmon’s performance was going to be overshadowed by Matthau’s showier role. During the production period, Wilder did all he could to bolster Lemmon’s part, including highlighting the wheelchair ballet. He also wrote some additional dialogue for Lemmon to give him more screen time.

  Wilder’s facetious prediction at the Cleveland press conference came to pass when, after nearly two months of filming on the Goldwyn lot, Walter Matthau suffered a heart attack. But there was no question of Wilder’s replacing Matthau, as had happened with Peter Sellers on Kiss Me, Stupid. There were only ten days left in the shooting schedule of The Fortune Cookie, so of course Wilder opted to wait for Matthau to recover before completing principal photography. Walter Mirisch writes that the “cast insurance policy” paid the costs of holding on to the cast members “until production could be resumed.” Wilder had to shut down production for two months, so shooting did not wrap until February 1966.59

  The last shot of Matthau that Wilder filmed before suspending production showed Willie rushing up the stairs to Harry’s apartment with a settlement check from Consolidated Life. The first shot of Matthau that Wilder made when filming resumed showed Willie entering Harry’s apartment with the
check. But Matthau had lost weight during his convalescence. “You see me going upstairs weighing 198 pounds,” he recalled. “I walk in the apartment and I’m 160 pounds.” But the audience never noticed this discrepancy. “Billy told me to act heavier,” Matthau explained.60 In fact, Matthau was wearing an overcoat when he went into the apartment; the coat helped to conceal that Matthau had gotten thinner.

  When Wilder screened the final cut of The Fortune Cookie for UA, the studio brass had one complaint: they judged the movie’s title to be weak. Ever since Paramount temporarily altered the title of Ace in the Hole to The Big Carnival without Wilder’s consent, however, he had it stipulated in his contract that the titles of the U.S. release prints of his movies could not be changed without his approval. UA was free, however, to retitle the picture for the British market, and it did so, calling it Meet Whiplash Willie.

  Wilder set up a sneak preview of the movie in Westwood, his favorite neighborhood for a sneak, in June 1966. Diamond and Lemmon were on hand. Wilder told them that, before the picture started, he was going to wipe his brow “and say a few prayers.” He watched the movie with the audience intermittently, when he was not pacing nervously in the theater lobby. “Do they care, the audience in there? Are they interested?”61 Wilder said that he always asked himself those questions during previews of his pictures. He explained, “For me there are only two types of movies, interesting movies and boring movies. It’s as simple as that. Does a film rivet my attention, so that I drop my box of popcorn and become part of what is happening on the screen, or doesn’t it? If a film engages my interest only sporadically, the picture just hasn’t got it.”