Billy Wilder Books

Cameron Crowe does a great job of getting Billy Wilder to "open up," for certain. There was many interesting anecdotes and facts I previously did not know, so this book is the page-turner everyone proclaims it to be. Crowe does a good job at kibbitzing an answer out of the somewhat stubborn Wilder. However -- since Crowe consciously based the format of this book on the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews of 1966 -- it is lacking in certain areas.

Firstly, many of the photographs are horribly transferred stills from the movies, which were taken from video, not film. The pixelization is sometimes so horrible as to wipe out almost half of the information. As there are many more photos done by this makeshift method (most of the others are publicity stills or of Wilder, Hollywood movie stars, etc, not from the actual movies), it would seem to me that the publisher (not some dinky independent, but Alfred A. Knopf, major player over here) could have gone the extra mile and made some high-quality stills from the studios' answer prints. Since they didn't, however, this volume appears "rushed to market."

Second, Crowe's organization is horrible: Unlike Hitch/Truffaut, it sort of meanders from movie to movie and then back again. It's organized chronologically (by interview session, not movie), and often goes back over movies already discussed, because Crowe forgot some question or another. Also, Crowe doesn't go much into the bit players and character actors at all. I mean, HOW COULD HE GO AN ENTIRE VOLUME ON BILLY WILDER WITHOUT EVER MENTIONING SIG RUMAN (who was to Wilder as Leo G. Carroll was to Hitch) or Cliff Osmond?

Perhaps, it's because Crowe spends more time dropping the name "Jerry Maguire" every other page or so (as long as he was shamelessly self-plugging, why not "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," a much better movie?). Tom Cruise -- who's never been in a Wilder movie -- is listed in 10 different pages in the index. Also (unlike Truffaut) Crowe goes to great lengths in order to insert himself into the text, including going over a house call by Wilder's doctor, a lunch with Wilder and his wife, phone calls Wilder is taking , etc. (in Hollywood, these are called "gratuitous scenes").

Lastly, the end notes list (with big backdrops of those horrible pictures from VHS) the credits, but they are very incomplete, and don't list most of the technicians or supporting cast.

All-in-all this book is very good, but heavy editing is needed to give it a semblance of chronology, and Crowe's gratuitous and voluminous self-referencing really could do with a ruthless editor's red pen. That, and some quality stills, would have made a good read a classic.

great book great delivery only bad thing is i received a paper back issue always order hard cover

I was very taken with this book. It's the second one of his I've bought. Am still reading the other one.He has a way of keeping your interest to know whats next.All the characters are such interesting people on & Off screen. Have always been entriged with movies & how they were made then.Recommend this book to any one who has same interests.Gloria Swanson was such a consummate actress.

What a wonderful experience reading this book. It's like diving off a cliff and landing right smack on set. Staggs is wrong to suggest anyone is better in the role of Norma Desmond than Betty Buckley. In time, her performance will resonate in the Broadway history books. The interviews here are fantastic, with all the detail and more for the most obsessive fans out there. The information about William Holden and his wife/executioner is fascinating.

I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Staggs other venture in to "All About Eve," All About "All About Eve," so I knew I wouldn't be disappointed with this book. The way he dissects the entire movie without the result being so cut & dry that you feel like you've spent the whole day reading a phone book. I knew that Mae West was once considered for the role of Norma Desmond, but never knew that version was slated to be a comedy, how right on target they were with that thought!

When this author talks about the making of the film and the interviews with people who worked on it this is fascinating. However halfway through the book he sabotages it by writing as if Sunset Boulevard was the greatest thing ever put on film (it's not) or the best piece or literature ever created. (again..not) He actually gives sunset boulevard credit for inspiring ever other film, play or book ever written. Waaaaayyy too carried away.

Yes it's true that the lines of dialogue and Norma Desmond imagary has had a big impact on our popular culture. He could have just explained this but listing quotes or examples for a few pages was excruciatingly boring.

I wanted to stop reading it at that point. Fortunately the part about the musical (and all that drama) was next so it was worth getting through.

This author obviously loves film and certainly "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve" are classics that are unequaled especially for their writing. However someone should have told this author when reverence becomes obsession. Couldn't they convince him to edit this????

I hope his next novel isn't "The Poseidon Adventure: More important than the Bible" or something!

Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder by biographer Charlotte Chandler is the personal and engaging story of one of the great figures of 20th century movie-making -- the legendary Billy Wilder (1906-2002). The great director perhaps best known for classics such as "Some Like It Hot", "The Apartment", "Sunset Boulevard", and many more, Billy Wilder narrates much of "Nobody's Perfect" in his own words, rendering it as close to an autobiography as any story of his life can be. A filmography complements this witty, insightful, life story of a creative visionary.

I read Cameron Crowe's book a couple years ago, and it is head-and-shoulders above this. What Charlotte essentially does in this "personal" biography is string together a long series of celebrity interviews into one barely coherent narrative.

One gets the distinct impression it was far more important for Charlotte to "get to know" these interview subjects than it was for her to write this book. What makes me think that? Perhaps it's the photos of Charlotte and several of her interviewees sprinkled throughout this book.

On the whole, "personal" seems to be shorthand for "lazy."

Billy Wilder made some of the greatest American movies such as Some Like It Hot, Sabrina, and Sunset Boulevard. He was also in charge of filming the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in the 1940's. This interesting and informative book covers his life and career, and behind-the-scenes stories of each major movie he made are in here, too. Whoever said "they don't make movies like that any more" wasn't kidding! I highly recommend this book.

There is no one wilder in Hollywood than Billy - Billy Wilder, that is.  And the new bio of him, "Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder: A Personal Biography," is as close to the "perfect" non-critical, fun history of a man and his movies. Written by Charlotte Chandler (whose previous works include "I, Fellini" and "Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends"), the tome is based on interviews she conducted with Wilder and his friends over a period of years. The result is a wonderful kaleidoscope of movies, politicians, actors, geniuses and louses. From Sigmund Freud to Louis B. Mayer, from Richard Strauss to Joan Fontaine, from Prince Yussupov to Walter Matthau --- Wilder knew them all. He is the man who put Marilyn Monroe over a subway grate, Jack Lemmon in a dress and Gloria Swanson in the most famous close-up of them all. The great beacon shining through the entire book is, of course, the wit and humor of the man.  Wilder is certainly one of the great comic directors of all time, and his legacy is astounding. By structuring the book around the subject's work in a strictly chronological manner, Chandler creates a picture of Wilder that is at once true and wildly engrossing. The early stories about journalism in pre-war Berlin are as fascinating as the later tales of success in glittering Hollywood. That the last 20 years of his life, arguably the most creative time in an artist's life, were spent without a single film project is the underlying tragedy of this book, and Chandler doesn't exactly dwell on it, but the painful reality is certainly there. We like to think of him as this way: Billy Wilder, Somebody's Perfect. (Submitted by staff member Stephen J. Finn)

My love of films came to fruition during a brief period when the "auteur theory" held sway in the 1960s and 1970s. Auteurist critic Andrew Sarris classified Billy Wilder in his "Less Than Meets the Eye Category," primarily because he was "too cynical for the more serious demands of middle-class tragedy (DOUBLE INDEMNITY) and social allegory (ACE IN THE HOLE). A director who can crack jokes about suicide attempts ... and thoughtlessly brutalize charming actresses like Jean Arthur (FOREIGN AFFAIR) and Audrey Hepburn (SABRINA) is hardly likely to make a coherent film on the human condition."

It was only as a result of seeing Wilder's films that I discovered what Sarris was really saying was that the director was both too versatile and too successful -- and it didn't help that his approach to directing films was as a writer rather than as a visual artist.

Reading Charlotte Chandler's oral history of Wilder's career, I was impressed with Billy Wilder's ability to be able to create iconic native masterpieces of film noir (DOUBLE INDEMNITY) and Hollywood Gothic (SUNSET BOULEVARD) without the benefit of growing up in the United States. While his later comedies (such as SOME LIKE IT HOT) owe much to his collaboration with Lubitsch, Hawks, and Mitchell Leisen, Wilder developed his own style of comedy and retained his ability to make good films well into his eighties.

In the chapter on SUNSET BOULEVARD, actress Nancy Olson makes an astute comment: "Billy said, 'Every character in SUNSET BOULEVARD is an opportunist.' It seemed to me that what he is saying is that this picture is not only about opportunism, but about ... the consequences of it."

A little light bulb went on in my mind. Wilder's films are all, in their own way, about opportunism. Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson take advantage of each other for their own nefarious ends in DOUBLE INDEMNITY. In picture after picture, I see a pattern of characters using one another with interesting results, with the ultimate example being Kirk Douglas in ACE IN THE HOLE.

Chandler's interviews are mostly interesting, though the intrusion of plot summaries in the middle of each chapter is intrusive: These should have been relegated to the Filmography in the back of the book. I was disturbed that Chandler did not see fit to add any of her own observations about Wilder except insofar as to provide a segue for the many quotes. Still, it is both a useful and entertaining book and a valuable addition to the literature about this fascinating filmmaker.

The screenplay was published by Studio Vista sometime in the seventies. The screenplays are formatted like a play but these scripts are not verbatim transcripts of the final movie but the actual shooting acripts (or so the introduction claims). Apart from some dialogue changes, the scripts are virtually identical to the final films. Witty and interesting to screenwriters everywhere but could have had some more input from the two writers. Its a pity that more of their work isn't more widely available.