But one day the unthinkable will come to pass once again: people will walk through the streets shivering, a winter breeze will rock back and forth a forgotten Iced Coffee sign at a shop door, and they will burrow their hands deeper into their pockets at the very sight of this sign.
B. Z. [Berliner Zeitung], July 18, 1928
Here We Are at Film Studio 1929
As is well known, the theater impresario Dr. Moriz Seeler has set up a film studio. At the beginning there was widespread enthusiasm, then disapproval came from the other side. Over on Friedrichstrasse, home of the banks and the moneymen, they were dying of laughter and placing their fingers on their carotid arteries while declaring: “If we find a sponsor for their project, we will stick an umbrella right in here!” Well, we have started, have happily received the money, and have been filming our crazy thing for ten days.
We get to work at a feverish pace. With a wobbly cart borrowed from a baker in Nikolassee, we drag the equipment across the sandy beach. Spend fourteen hours at the camera and tackle everything nicely. We hold the reflectors ourselves, kneel in the lake the whole day, and when we’re on the verge of sunstroke, we just stick our heads in the water. I don’t think the Chang or Pamir expeditions required more willpower and more deprivations. My God, we have such primitive resources on hand. A few miles down the road, on the premises of Neubabelsberg, they may at this very moment be tearing apart the monumental sets for Nina Petrovna’s “wonderful lies” [i.e., Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrovna (The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna, 1929)] while we are busy shooting a few truths we consider important, for a laughably small sum of money.
* * *
In seeking the title, we spent a long time wavering between Summer of ’29 and Young People Like Us. To resolve this dilemma, we opted for That’s Exactly How Things Are, because the title clearly states that what we’re aiming for is less contrived and less busy, with less drama and less paper! The basis for the script is a reportage. In the course of one Saturday and one Sunday we followed five randomly selected young people and had a look at how they spent their weekend. The result was this film. A very, very simple story, quiet yet abounding in melodies that our ears pick up on every day. No stunts, no clever punch lines, even running the risk of having “not the foggiest notion of the laws of drama.” The five people in this film, that’s you and me. May God punish us, but our waiter is a good boy who lives in Neukölln and gambles away his 10 percent in cards; he is not like that former tsarist lieutenant, Smirnoff by name, who was impoverished by the course of events and also saved Anastasia’s life. May God punish us, but our heroine types on a typewriter and does not have a pink divan on which she can coax the Przemisl fortification plans from the generals, deceptively masked spy that she actually is. Oh, yes, we lack a strong storyline, a tangible conflict, and God knows what else. Let’s hope so. We skirted all the beaten paths for miles, on a narrow and utterly unused, terribly isolated route; the sign indicating the direction said “LIFE.”
Rochus Gliese, who worked with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau for many years, directed the film. Moriz Seeler, the eternal seeker and experimenter, kept all the pieces together. Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer, two new names in Berlin, oversaw the camera work with Schüfftan, the cameraman; thank God they come neither from industry nor from literature. The five actors aren’t actors either. For this documentary, we put together a cast of people from the same class, the same profession. Indeed, one character even plays himself. Plays? You have to have seen how the five young people move, how they look into the lens, how they blow their noses, and how they laugh: we wouldn’t trade them for a dream cast …
Another four weeks. Without a studio or the funds available to the big studios, but with an idea that we deem worthwhile. At the end of the film we have a very short scene that may highlight everything most clearly: our fellows are standing in front of a movie theater in the suburbs after the Saturday and after the Sunday screenings by pure chance and without seeing it. Behind them, a poster shouts out: Weekend Magic. And that is the remoteness we want to show, between the weekend film inside and the Sunday that our five people have actually experienced.
Well, let’s cross our fingers. For the sake of a good thing.
Tempo, July 23, 1929
FIGURE 12. Ticket to the world premiere of Menschen am Sonntag on February 4, 1930.
How We Shot Our Studio Film
Billie Wilder wrote the screenplay for a film, People on Sunday, which is being shown at the Ufa Theater on Kurfürstendamm. Here he reports how this film was created—without money, without a studio, without “experts,” without any real organization. And how this film became a success anyway.
We’re sitting here and pinching ourselves. Eight times seven is fifty-six. Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark. No, we’re not sleeping. So it’s true. People are telling us: success. People are even telling us: great success. We are very happy.
We worked on our film for nine months. It was a rotten time. It was a lovely time.
“It’s just going to work!”
A short fellow jumps up like a man possessed and pounds on the marble top. His glasses and the soda glasses quiver. Moriz Seeler.
We are five.
A Mr. Eugen Schüfftan, inventor of some sort of world-famous film trick that I fail to understand to this day, stares at him agape: “Without money?”
“Without money!”
The third man, Robert Siodmak, from Dresden (first newspaper, then theater, then film distribution) finds it hard not to burst out laughing: “Without a studio?”
“Without a studio!”
“Just like that?” Posing this question is Edgar Ulmer, twenty-three years old, emigrated from Hollywood half a year ago. Served as a set designer for Murnau’s Sunrise.
“Just like that!”
I, Billie Wilder, am the fifth. “Then we’re good to go?”
“Yes, indeed! Good to go. Just like that. Without a studio. Without money.”
And that’s how the film studio begins. At a coffeehouse table. In June 1929.
We do have a camera. That’s all for now.
What do we want to shoot with it? A hundred ideas, a hundred suggestions. We get to the first slapstick scenes. We feel that we understand one another. And all of a sudden, the thing is right there: it has to be a very simple documentary film. A film about Berlin, about its people, about the everyday things we know so well. Our thoughts first turn to young actors. But the people have to be authentic. We look around. In front of a bar on Kurfürstendamm, Seeler comes across a chauffeur, taxi IA 10 068, Erwin Splettstösser. He signs on instantly. But Fräulein Borchert thinks we have something totally different in mind. She sells gramophone records. It takes a lot of effort to persuade her. Her family figures we’re sex traffickers. In the end, though, she does agree to a screen test, at Thielplatz. Christl Ehlers comes, too; she already has experience, she once worked as an extra with E. A. Dupont and gives us her word of honor that she is on friendly footing with the recording manager of Lapa Pick. We bump into a von Waltershausen; he is exactly what we need.
Meanwhile, the screenplay is sketched out. Seven typed pages. We discover the trick: to concentrate Berlin into one Sunday.
But money, money! We have no film stock.
After a few weeks we get hold of a moneyman on Friedrichstrasse. We trick him with numbers. Three percent of his motivation was his belief in our abilities; 97 percent came from his interest in getting his hands on an incredibly cheap film. We draw up an insanely low cost estimate. Tell him about waltzes and a driver who is dying to get out. Eventually we land the deal; the contract is signed. The first thousand yards of film are issued to us. Things start up.
And boy, do they ever start up!
The five people we’ve chosen take vacation time. They get a flat rate from us, ten marks a day, and we compensate them for their loss of wages. Months, months. In the water, in the city. Every day someone else gives up, doesn’t hold out. Insults turn to
enthusiasm when we see the shots in the screening.
We are in the studio for a single day.
The weather gives us a hard time. We spend weeks waiting for a nice day. We’re depressed. Will anything ever come of this? The “actors” grow impatient. The moneyman grows impatient and thinks his dough is down the drain.
Somehow or other we manage to finish.
No one still believes in it. On Friedrichstrasse they’ve heard something about it, now they’re laughing at us. We sit there quietly and cut. We’ve used up ten thousand yards of film. God only knows where the money came from.
On December 11 the film is complete. We screen it for the men at one of the major film companies. We are not taken seriously. The head of the company tells us that after thirty years in the business he’d be willing to give up his job if this film ever somehow makes it as far as a showing, not to mention a success. The “press officer” finds there is a lack of “psychological depth.” We get this exact same reaction from three other companies.
FIGURE 13. Poster for Menschen am Sonntag.
A new financial backer has turned up. He may want to finance the nighttime performance for us. We screen the film at Ufa. Brodnitz, the director of the theater division, gets to see it. And takes it—for the regular evening program at U. T. Kurfürstendamm.
We are flabbergasted. The premiere is here.
When we take a bow at 9:00, we don’t know what is going on. Are we being taken seriously, or are we being laughed at? In any case, between 9:00 and 9:13, with heart palpitations at their peak, we’ve thought of a topic for a new film.
Der Montag Morgen, February 10, 1930
Getting Books to Readers
A close acquaintance recently shot himself to death. He was a traveling book salesman. His collection, which he carried in a little cardboard suitcase, consisted of “thdee departbets,” as he, condemned to a lifetime of sniffling, would say to his customers through his stuffed nose. These three departments were: on the left, “cribidal dovels,” in the middle, “polidics,” and on the right, “cdassics.” Except for a battered volume of Peter Altenberg, missing pages 8 to 26, which he was never able to get rid of, his collection changed its look every few weeks. His business was going well. Suddenly we learn that he has shot himself to death—and that he did so out of desperation.
I cannot believe it. Recently I happen to have been spending a good deal of time in bookstores because I was interested in seeing people buy and sell books, but mainly to find out whether books are being bought at all. I watched carefully and sounded out the gentlemen there. Business is good. Of course, it has dropped a bit since Christmas. The important thing, however, is this: in Berlin, and, I may generalize, in Germany, many books are being bought at this very time. There is good reason for satisfaction.
So if my acquaintance has shot himself, it is unlikely that the cause was that no one is buying books. It is quite certain that hunger was not the reason he shot himself. But rather … we did all warn him about Amélie; we can’t be held responsible.
* * *
One afternoon, in one of those splendid bookstores in the western part of Berlin that smells better than Coty and Chanel and features a charming disharmony of colorful book covers almost as pleasant to look at as women with ingeniously applied makeup, one lady is there who is interested in American literature. She has a younger brother in Kansas, a pastor, and wants to go see him. The salesman has to listen to this, has to lend his ear to detailed family stories before finally pawning off a paperback edition of Egon Erwin Kisch’s Paradise America. A young married couple decides on a book by Siegfried von Vegesack, Love Non-Stop. The two volumes of The Battle for Rome, by the revered Felix Dahn, are being dusted off; a papa takes them. A hopeful boy is likely to be celebrating his twelfth birthday nearby tomorrow. A man who doesn’t look the least bit professorial still insists on the new Propyläen History of the World, which carries the fresh scent of high-quality art printing.
A conversation starts up with a gentleman who sells books here. What takes off, what doesn’t? What collects mildew on the shelves, and what gets ripped out of your hands like rolls right out of the oven? How do you give advice to a customer, how do you get the customer to add on a second and third book? And so forth.
* * *
Today’s purchasers, particularly the superior ones, have a very fine nose for good books, the gentleman behind the desk says. Customers grow interested in publishing houses, which make them think that the book must be high quality, aha, S. Fischer, that won’t be garbage! They gather advice from the newspaper reviews. Every now and again they also take to heart endorsements by important contemporaries found on the books’ jackets, if these endorsements don’t overtly smack of advertising. They stop ignoring the displays and have nothing against getting catalogs of new publications sent to their homes.
The price of the book isn’t the most important thing at all. In France, people flock to cheap books even if they’re printed on paper so thick and hard that you can use a page from one of them to kill somebody. Or they’re printed on toilet paper. They don’t care. As long as it’s cheap, cheap, cheap. Germans buy a book with the same seriousness used to buy something like a shirt. Durability is key. They have no intention of leaving the book on the train or throwing it into the corner like yesterday’s newspaper. It has to have “lasting value.” A piece of furniture. And a magnificent one at that. In Germany, they make far more tasteful books than, say, shirts. Just compare the display window of a bookstore with that of a shop selling woolens.
Trotsky’s memoirs, Stefan Zweig’s Fouché, Alfred Döblin’s Alexanderplatz are the books of the day.
During my half-hour of observations, three copies of the Trotsky sell, one of Fouché, and a full four of Döblin’s Alexanderplatz. The afternoon mail, which is just drifting in, brings letters with two more orders for Döblin’s Berlin book, one from Munich and one from Riga. Memoirs, biographies are popular. Rudolf Olden’s Stresemann, Hans von Seeck’s Future of the Empire, René Fülöp-Miller’s Jesuits are doing splendidly. Right behind Döblin in the category of novels is the new Leonhard Frank, Brother and Sister. Sarah Levy’s O mon Goye! is also in high demand, surely in large part because of its cheeky title. In the historical documents, Theodor Pilvier’s The Kaiser’s Coolies and Werner Beumelburg’s Barrage around Germany are off to an excellent start. The latest Jack London, The Valley of the Moon, can’t complain, Hans Rudolf Berndorff’s Espionage is approaching forty thousand copies sold.
There is some slight stagnation in crime stories. The success of extravagant mass productions has become quite iffy.
By contrast, illustrated animal books are selling wonderfully since Paul Eipper’s Animals Look at You! Bengt Berg, for example. And the beautiful travel books. Günther Plüschow. Wilhelm Filchner.
That, in short, is the situation that can be surveyed on an afternoon in a Berlin bookstore.
But as far as “saddling” customers with a book, the gentlemen here will have no part of that. We don’t force anything on the customers. Not us. We advise them. We shyly present books that might interest them. We let them leaf through the books as long as they like. We don’t forget to point a customer who has bought some Erich Maria Remarque to Ludwig Renn, and to Georg Glaser. But we don’t saddle them with anything. If the shop looks appealing they’ll take something else with them, even if it’s just a little paperback.
The methods of these gentlemen are clearly quite laudable.
In Texas, let’s say, there may well be bookstores that don’t operate in such a peaceful manner. As soon as a customer enters the shop, the door is locked from the inside, the seller puts the key into his pants pocket with a smile, and now the purchase begins. The poor man who has entered the shop to buy a timetable and was careless enough to leave his machine gun at home hardly stands a chance of getting back to the street alive without having purchased fifty books that he doesn’t care a fig about or find interesting.
Try to ima
gine that on our end. That you’re not let out of a bookstore until you buy a couple of books by Rudolph Stratz and a complete set of Rudolf Herzog. Thank you.
Der Querschnitt, issue 2, March 1930
How I Pumped Zaharoff for Money
I actually wanted to go to Heligoland, wanted to sit on the beach and play with shells. I ended up in Monte Carlo, sat in the casino, and played roulette. I had a burning desire to break the bank of Monte Carlo with my exceedingly surefire system.
Well—it didn’t succeed in the slightest.
After ten days I was left high and dry. But what was even worse, when I wanted to go to bed one night, Hotel Savoy, room 37, I was not even allowed into the building. At the Riviera they have incredibly reliable X-ray vision, enabling them to see straight through the wallets of the unlucky gamblers. They hold off with the bill for three days, then they rattle off a few charming courtesies to guests and unceremoniously kick them out onto the street.
So that night I stood there, sleepy and freezing, my last ten francs in my tuxedo trousers.
I sat down on a bench at the promenade downstairs, counting all the palm trees; there were 127, I know the exact number. Then I spat into the Mediterranean another three times, which brought the number up to 130. Finally I prayed softly to the dear Lord that he would never, never again make the sun rise. After all, my tuxedo still made some sort of sense at night. But going around in a tuxedo during the day—that just isn’t done. Distraught as I was, I ran up to Monaco, to the so-called suicide cliff, where so many longtime gamblers had put an end to their messed-up lives by taking a little leap into the abyss. On the way there it occurred to me that I knew a jazz player in the Café de Paris. I wanted to pump him for money. But he couldn’t give me any. He did lend me an empty violin case, and that was already a big help. All of a sudden my tuxedo gained a reason for existence. For the following two days I ran back and forth like an unemployed violin virtuoso between Monte Carlo and Nice with an empty violin case under my arm and an empty stomach.
Billy Wilder on Assignment Page 8