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Billy Wilder
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Billy Wilder is ninety-one years old. A few years ago he began to be visited in his Beverly Hills office by Cameron Crowe, one of the newer breed of Hollywood directors, best known for Jerry Maguire, a likable, Oscar-winning comedy starring Tom Cruise. It soon emerges, in the book resulting from these meetings, that Wilder and the young director are united by a sense of the wonder of the movies, and by and by they come to isolate a definition of good style. Along the way Wilder is a happy king, a man of achievements and disappointments, a gruff potentate, a Lear, a guru of light touches and Hollywood anecdotes. Crowe meanwhile is a plausible rookie, a hungry mind, a Fool, a lapdog with a laptop, and the Next Big Thing. The two men slightly—and not in any sense unfunnily—fall in love with each other.
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Billy Wilder was born Samuel Wilder in Sucha, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Poland), on June 22, 1906. His mother, Eugenia, had spent several years in the United States. Hollywood legend says that she nicknamed her son after Buffalo Bill. His father, Max, who operated cafes and hotels, often drifted from job to job and had financial problems. Young Billy spent much of his time playing billiards and observing the hotel and cafe patrons. He became very interested in the films of Ernst Lubitsch.
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Even, as he approaches the age of ninety, Billy Wilder has trouble sitting still. Wherever he is, he's already preparing to be somewhere else--a gallery showing, dinner at Spago, another grudging interview about Sunset Boulevard, another black-tie ceremony in his honor. His restlessness, no doubt, stems from a bright and brittle mind and a long standing place in the most rarefied circles of the Hollywood social scene. But it's more deeply engrained than that, too--traceable to a childhood spent on the move, in a Europe on the verge of seismic change.
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One of Hollywood's most consistent and enduring filmmakers, Billy Wilder was ... among its most daring. In feature after feature, in a wide variety of styles and genres, he explored the taboo subjects of the day with insight, wit, and trenchant cynicism; adultery, alcoholism, prostitution -- no topic was too controversial or too racy for Wilder's films. Unlike the majority of Hollywood's other historically provocative voices, however, he was a major commercial success as well as a critical favorite, with two of his features garnering Best Picture Oscars and numerous others honored with various Academy nominations. Sophisticated and acerbic, his intricate narratives, sparkling dialogue, and painterly visuals combined to illuminate the darker impulses of modern American society with rare brilliance. He was born Samuel Wilder in Sucha, Austria. After first studying law, he began a career as a journalist with a Vienna newspaper, later relocating to Berlin as a reporter for the city's largest tabloid.
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Because Billy Wilder is justly remembered as one of the keenest observers and funniest satirists of 20th-century American mores, it is possible to lose sight of the fact that he began his life and his career in Europe. Particularly in the latter phases of his career, Wilder often set films in Europe. His hero was Lubitsch, although as Wilder himself reminded Cameron Crowe, Lubitsch came to the States because he was courted by Hollywood; Wilder came "because I didn’t want to be in an oven." This program continues the Archive's commitment to highlighting Wilder's work by presenting a number of the master's films made or set in Europe and featuring such European actors as Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Laughton.
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Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in what is now Poland. He came to America in 1934 to work on a screenplay for a film that would never be made. Not surprising, since Billy barely spoke English. Forced to leave the country since he didn’t have a job, he went to the border town of Mexicali, where after sweet talking a consular official, he was readmitted to the United States as a resident alien. He went on to write and direct some of the most intelligent and funny films ever made in Hollywood. A short list of highlights:
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Billy Wilder