Who is the best screenwriter of all time? That's the question vulture.com posed to more than 40 working
screenwriters as the basis for this list.
Familiar names like Quentin
Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola and Joel and Ethan Coen
all made the top five but number one went to a name you might not have heard: Billy Wilder.
So, who is Billy Wilder and why is he so respected? Well, in a career spanning over 50 years,
Wilder made more than 60 films. He's most well-known for these four: Double Indemnity,
Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. What's instantly apparent about them is how different they all are. Ranging from
hard-boiled film noir to slapstick comedy, dramedies and classic tragedy.
Versatility was Billy Wilder's greatest strength. Although, I'll also point out that he often worked with co-writers, usually Charles Brackett
or I.A.L. Diamond. He made some of the funniest comedies and some of the darkest dramas
you'll ever see. "When I do a cynical one they say, 'When are you going to do a funny one again?'
When I do a funny one they say, 'What about those wonderful cynical things you did?'"
"And what kind of story do you prefer? Cynical or funny?"
"A good one." But to talk about Billy Wilder's
storytelling style and to figure out what makes him so versatile, I think it's useful to talk about the artist he most admired.
That's this man: Ernst Lubitsch. Famous for his comedies,
Ernst had what Wilder and many others would come to call The Lubitsch Touch. "I wonder if you could explain what The Lubitsch Touch is?"
"The Lubitsch Touch,
yes, well that's if I could explain it. You know this is like,
you know, if I knew the formula, you know, I would patent it.
But now if you have a class of students,
writers or directors and you say, 'I would like you to dramatize
the following situation: there is a king and there's a queen and
there is a
lieutenant. The king is played by George Barbier,
very opulent, fat actor. Now, dramatize the situation that the queen has an affair with the lieutenant and
the king finds out.
Now, do it your way, do it anyway you want to. And those 100 students
who are very good at comedy, very good, very imaginative, they go out, and they come back a week later
and they will all have
good solutions.
Amusing, maybe long, maybe
they're a little too explicit,
maybe too censurable, but nobody, nobody in the world could have come up with a better solution than
Mr. Lubitch does. Here's his solution: You open up in the bedroom of the king and the queen and
as he leaves the the bedroom, we see that at the door
with a sword standing there and clicking his heels is
Maurice Chevalier.
And he's now watching the king and the king is going down some steps. Now, he cuts back to Mr. Chevalier
and he sees that the king is leaving, and he now enters the bedroom of the queen.
The doors close. You don't cut into the bedroom. Now, as the king is descending,
he suddenly sees that he forgot the belt and the sword.
He turns around and
he goes up the steps, back into the bedroom. Now, we have a situation going on! The door closes, you're still outside, never inside.
Now the king comes out, and he's got the belt and his sword, and he is smiling.
Suddenly, he tries to put it on, and it's not his belt, it's much too small for him.
Now, there are a lot of conflicting definitions for The Lubitsch Touch, but what's important
here is how Wilder viewed it. Wilder has elsewhere described The Lubitsch Touch as the joke within the joke and
many others have tried to define it over the years.
But what I think appeals to Wilder about Lubitsch's films is the
attempt to wring as much as possible out of every moment and to do so in subtle creative and surprising ways.
I think you can find the influence of The Lubitsch Touch across Wilder's films.
Not just in his comedy scenes, but his dramatic ones, too. Like this one from The Apartment. The premise of this movie
is that the protagonist,
Mr. Baxter, is loaning out his apartment to his bosses as a place for their extramarital affairs in order to curry favor with them and move
up the corporate ladder. In this part of the movie, it works out for him. He gets a promotion, but there's a problem. Now,
let's imagine this like an assignment the same way Wilder broke down the Lubitsch scene. The assignment is to write a scene where one character
learns the woman he loves is dating his boss. How do we do it? Well,
he could have just run into them at the apartment or someone could have just told him. That would have worked but
Wilder could do better. Here's his solution:
Mr. Baxter will find something left behind in his apartment, a broken pocket mirror, which he correctly assumes to be one of his boss's mistresses.
So he returns it to his boss. Later, when talking about his promotion with Miss Kubelik, this happens: "I want people to come
don't want people to think I'm an entertainer..."
"What's the matter?"
The script could have had Mr. Baxter recognize the mirror when he found it, but by putting it here
everything is heightened. It happens at the moment of his victory, so we go from the highest high to the lowest low. And it happens
because
of his victory. She hands him the mirror so that he can see how he looks in his new hat, a hat
he buys to celebrate the promotion. It happens in her presence making the scene much more
emotional because he can't say what he feels. And here's the kicker, the real Lubitsch Touch moment,
they're interrupted by a phone call from Baxter's boss who wants the apartment again that night to meet with Miss Kubelik. And
Baxter is forced to make the arrangements that will perpetuate the affair
he just found out about and which has dashed his chances at love.
It was funny enough that the king finds out about his wife's affair, the belt makes it even funnier.
It's tragic enough that Baxter learns that Kubelik is his boss's mistress, the phone call makes it even more humiliating.
It's like a Russian nesting doll of sadness!
The idea of The Lubitsch Touch and Wilder's work in general is a reminder not to stop at good
but to invent unique ways of portraying common
situations and to build scenes that accomplish more than one thing at a time.
And that's all without mentioning this brilliant character-revealing line, "The mirror is broken." "Yes, I know.
I like it that way. It makes me look the way I feel."
Yeah, Wilder is really good at dialogue. I mean, poor Miss Kubelik.
I don't think I've ever encountered a character where I laugh every time I feel sorrier for her.
"How can I be so stupid?
You think I would've learned by now.
When you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara!"
In fact that's really Wilder's speciality,
using comedy to deepen moments of drama and vice-versa. Sure, we could cut a line through his filmography
and say that each film is one or the other, but they're all hybrids to some degree. They're often both in the same moment.
"I wouldn't want to share this night with other people. This is for you and me."
"Oh?"
"Hold me tighter." "Okay."
Sunset Boulevard is a dark and tragic tale
but it's also a biting satire of the movie industry even though the characters don't know they're being funny.
"I'd always heard that you had some talent" "That was last year. This year
I'm trying to earn a living!" The main character, Gillis, a hack writer who leeches off of a deluded former film star, Norma Desmond, is
constantly commenting on the absurdity of his situation.
"How could she breathe in that house so crowded with Norma Desmonds!" He's honest about how depressing
Hollywood and life after fame is and that's precisely why it's funny. "Last one I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl.
You'd never know because when it reached the screen the whole thing played on a torpedo boat."
"This is to be a very important picture. I've written it myself. Took me years!"
"Looks like enough for six important pictures. Sometimes
it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be." "Do you think this is all very funny?"
"A little."
Double Indemnity is regarded as one of the first film noirs made before that term even existed.
It's a dark film about greed and betrayal, but even it will crack you up.
"I've been trying to contact your husband for the past two weeks, but he's never in his office." "Is there anything I can do?"
"The insurance ran out on the 15th. I'd hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you're not...
fully covered."
Now, everything we've talked about so far has been about Wilder's tonal mastery and his ability to craft
effective scenes. And there is certainly much more to be said about this
but that doesn't really strike at the heart of what makes Billy Wilder such a great filmmaker and screenwriter.
It doesn't talk about the beating heart of humanity in his films. To do so, I think we have to start with this moment from
Some Like It Hot.
"Osgood, I'm got to level with you. We can't get get married at all!" "Why not?"
"Well,
in the first place, I'm not a natural blonde!"
"Doesn't matter."
"I smoke, I smoke all the time!" "I don't care."
"I can never have children!"
"We can adopt some."
"But you don't understand, Osgood!
I'm a man!" "Well, nobody's perfect!"
Wilder originally wrote that line as a placeholder until something better came along
but then he realized it was the perfect punch line and not just because it's funny
but because it sums up his body of work.
"I think it speaks to Wilder's humanity and
some things that he was thinking beyond just the silly comedy and that is that Joey Brown is
someone who loves no matter what, literally. It doesn't matter all these things. It doesn't even matter you're a man
I love you!
So, here Wilder is essentially saying the most transgressive thing of all is an unconditional love.
It's so outrageous that we laugh." Wilder chose to write about some pretty despicable people especially for his time.
He made most of his films during the Hays Code era in Hollywood which censored how topics like murder and adultery could be portrayed on
screen. So, as murderers and adulterers, the characters of Double Indemnity have to be punished for their crimes.
But even here, Wilder finds compassion. The original ending of the film was going to be a scene where Walter Neff is
executed for his crimes
but Wilder thought this was too dour a note to end on and decided to end the film here with Neff
collapsing from his wounds. Now, Neff was an insurance salesman who conspired with
Mrs. Dietrichson
to have her husband killed so that they could collect the insurance money. Things went wrong when Neff's boss and friend, Keyes, get suspicious.
But the film isn't as punitive towards Neff as it would have otherwise been with the original ending. Instead,
there is a moment of forgiveness between them. "You know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes?
I'll tell you.
because the guy who were looking for was too close.
Right across the desk from you."
"Closer than that, Walter."
"I love you, too."
Wilder would later say that it ends almost like a love story
and he's right. It ends exactly like one of his love stories.
Here's the final shot from The Apartment and the final shot from Some Like It Hot. The framing is
identical: two characters facing the camera, a renewed love between them. Walter Neff did horrible things, but you know what?
"Nobody's perfect!"
And the film embraces those flaws because despite them, Neff is still human still capable of love and of being loved.
There's a similar conflict of emotions at the end of Sunset Boulevard where Norma is being carted away to jail
but her husband, who has stood by her no matter
what, let's her have one more delusional moment in the spotlight because, well, he loves her unconditionally.
Wilder's characters are usually people who have been chewed up by life, people caught in the jaws of institutions.
Mr. Baxter is a lowly cog in the machine at an insurance company; Gillis can't catch a break in Hollywood;
Joe and Jerry are
penniless musicians on the run from the mob. All of them try to cut corners in life to get ahead
but in each of these films, love is presented as the way out, a reason to atone and do the right thing.
Wilder has a reputation for creating cynical movies. Movies that seem to show all the flaws and monstrous sides of people,
but when I walk away from his films
I don't leave with the message that people are terrible, but that nobody's perfect and that's okay.
So, why is Billy Wilder the greatest screenwriter ever? Because he could do comedy, he could do drama,
he could do romance, he could do all of them at once in a single scene. His dialogue was always sharp,
revealing and working double duty. His films are surprising, provocative and essential viewing. But most of all, they've got big
emotions that feel as fresh today as they did 50 or 60 years ago.
Nobody's perfect, not even Wilder. He had plenty of flops in his day, but these four...
perfection.
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